“Keep your face to the sunshine and you will never see the shadows. It’s what sunflowers do.” ~ Helen Keller
Monday I drove south out of North Dakota into South Dakota. Along the way I stopped in town…a Prairie Dog town! I’d never seen these little critters before. They were shy and would only pop out of their holes when I was a fair distance away, then they would slink back down if I approached too closely. I was standing in the middle of there “town” and they were popping up and down, all around me; it reminded me of the carnival game, Whack-A-Mole, where you hit the mole on the head with a mallet when they pop up. They were very noisy too, making all kinds of sharp shrills, clatterings and chatterings with tiny little barks in between, a sort of language, in this case used to alert the town that a smelly human was in their midst.
I’ve since learned that their burrows can be fifteen to thirty feet long and five to ten feet below the ground and may have up to six entrances. They have specific burrows for nighttime, cold winter months, listening posts, nurseries for their young and air chambers in a case of flooding. The berms of dirt around their holes protect the burrows from flooding. Fascinating critters.
I hope you feel you will succeed tomorrow in whatever you failed at today.
The gam continues…
Beautiful sunflowers, I love them! I think those cows smelled that case of SPAM in your truck!