Chirp Once for Hawk, Twice for Coyote

You aren’t just being paranoid—prairie dogs really are talking about you. From the first steps you take near one of their colonies, the little chatterboxes will have poked their whiskered faces out of their burrows, sized you up, assessed your threat level, catalogued your appearance, and told the other prairie dogs about you. They’ll even have conveyed what you look like, how fast you’re moving, and whether or not you’re a predator. To humans, all that chatter sounds like squawking or a rapid-fire squeaky toy, but in fact those staccato bursts of chirps have complex and layered meanings well understood by any prairie dog within earshot. And not only within earshot: When recordings are played for prairie dogs that live many miles away, the message still gets across. Prairie dogs actually seem to speak to each other.

The prairie dog language (although there’s a debate about whether it can properly be considered a language) was discovered by a researcher named