traffic cones are heavier than they look

I ran into the refuge today, as I've been doing for the last week; today was the first day it actually was getting close to being easy, which makes me happy, knowing I'm running at almost 2 miles up. The start of my day was somewhat slow, although it has been getting louder around my tower. The annual migration of some 3000 birds has started, so there's never really a quiet moment from any of the ponds that surround my tower. Aside from the honking, screeching and splashing, there's the near constant high pitched chattering of the territorial gs, which also lend humor to the day. To put it simply, the day started out busily, which is how I like it.
By early afternoon, I had yet to see a prairie dog, until one popped out of XA. Popping is something gs specialize in, so at first I couldn't believe it was a pd. He was on hyper-drive...you could almost see him going: where are they? where are they? where are the girls??? He was running back and forth between several burrows, shooting down them, and then coming right back up. While he was hysterical to watch, even as he chased gs aggressively, we had to put an end to his fun, finally getting him down a hole, XL, and putting a surround up. The fun part came when I started plugging up all his escape routes with traffic cones...the area he decided to hole up in is completely connected, with approximately 25 back exits...which was 20 more cones than I had left from dealing with the surround/ blocking from the previous day with unmarked and 30. I never knew that 10 cones could be so heavy; as I moved them from the barn to my area, while dodging burrows.
After he was ensconced in his little surround, he didn't come up the rest of the day, which is about par. However, I was amused with black billed magpies attempting to land on the icy part of the lake, and instead doing face plants. I spent the rest of the day divided between watching their antics, and looking for dogs from either X8, ZR or XL.