Richardson's ground squirrel

Richardson's ground squirrel (Urocitellus richardsonii), also called the dakrat or flickertail, is a North American ground squirrel native to the prairie grasslands of the northern Great Plains, from southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba in Canada to Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota in the United States. Adults are about 30 centimetres long, dark brown above and tan beneath, with a short, constantly trembling tail and ears so short they look like holes in the head. The squirrels live in colonies of closely grouped burrows organised around female kinship, give a whistle for ground predators and a chirp for aerial ones, and spend most of the year in hibernation. They eat seeds, nuts, grains, grasses and insects. Because they readily eat crops they are sometimes treated as agricultural pests, and Saskatchewan declared them pests in 2010. North Dakota is nicknamed the Flickertail State after the animal.