Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Prairie Dog Washington DC 1.jpg

File:Prairie Dog Washington DC.JPG
A black-tailed prairie dog at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., looks out from a system of tunnels (also known as burrows), displaying its characteristic scanning of the horizon. Using its dichromatic color vision, a prairie dog can detect predators from afar and then alert others to the danger with special calls. Some researchers believe prairie dog communication is sophisticated enough to describe specific predators.
 
Edit 1 (remove green fringing + shorter caption) A black-tailed prairie dog at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., looks out from a system of burrows, displaying its characteristic scanning of the horizon. On average, these rodents grow to between 12 and 16 inches (30 and 40 cm) long, including their short tails.
Reason
Used as the main picture in the Prairie dog article, replacing a low quality, small size government photo. There are currently no other pictures of prairie dogs of this quality so this photo fills an important encyclopedic gap. Granted, part of the prairie dog is cut off, but the photo illustrates a very familiar and common pose of prairie dogs: looking out of a tunnel system.
Articles this image appears in
Prairie dog
Creator
Asiir
Nominator
Asiir

Promoted Image:Prairie_Dog_Washington_DC_1.jpg --KFP (talk | contribs) 21:45, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]