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The person who left what are now just rotten red apples and rock-hard hot dog buns probably meant well but apparently hadn't imagined how quickly autumn would come.

But the prairie dogs near Fire Station 8, so much more aware of such earthly matters, knew it weeks ago.

Already, they have gone underground to winter in their cozy (we assume) burrows beneath the small dirt lot at Indian School Road and Tramway Boulevard Northeast — never mind that we are still in short sleeves.

Nature, apparently, marches on in spite of us.

And so does this quirky, sometimes tenuous relationship between the humans of Monte Largo Hills and the Fire Station Dogs, as they are known in this symbiotic neighborhood.

"They were here first," says Irene Brown, past president of the Monte Largo Hills Neighborhood Association and a regular contributor of table scraps to the colony. "They're kind of cute."

In warmer times, passers-by sit across the street in the Walgreens parking lot on Indian View Place to watch the dogs prance and stand sentinel over this wild land urban interface kingdom.

Firefighters at Station 8 say it's not unusual to see folks dropping off treats and filling water bowls for the chubby critters.

So the apples and hot dog buns come to this little patch of nature.

Not all the prairie dogs scattered in colonies across Albuquerque have fared as well as the Fire Station Dogs, of course. Three months ago, an entire colony near Tramway and Menaul boulevards Northeast was poisoned at the landowner's request.

Other prairie dogs are squashed by cars, shot at by idiots, isolated from their larger families and natural sustaining habitats by the ever-encroaching us.

"They're living in fragments. They're harassed. It's a dreadful existence," says Yvonne Boudreaux of Prairie Dog Pals, an Albuquerque nonprofit that rescues the rodents and provides information on the misunderstood animals.

This year, Boudreaux's band of volunteers has relocated 1,944 of the critters, most to spacious habitat on the West Mesa. They've done so, she says, with the blessing of Mayor Martin Chavez and city Parks and Recreation Director Jay Hart, whom Boudreaux calls rodent heroes.

She means that in the nicest way.

The Fire Station Dogs have it luckier than most, she says, because of the neighborhood support.

That prairie dogged devotion was evident last spring when Boudreaux's phone rang off the hook with neighbors frantic over news that the long-vacant lot next to Fire Station 8 had been sold.

"I would say that 96 percent of those calls were from neighbors wanting to help the prairie dogs," she says. "They were worried that the new landowners would want to get rid of the colony."

The owners, it turns out, had no interest in vacating the varmints — at least for now.

"The new owners are a couple who are the most wonderful people," she says. "They told me, `Yes, of course, we know about the prairie dogs, and they can stay as long as they like.' They have no immediate plans to develop the parcel."

For the prairie dogs' part, it's likely they were never aware of the drama unfolding over them.

Brown acknowledges, though, that a few neighbors are not so neighborly about the colony.

"My neighbor, I know, is afraid that they're going to go into her yard or spread disease or something like that," she says. "But my understanding is, as long as they are happy where they are, they have no reason to go elsewhere."

You can't, apparently, teach an old dog new prairie dog information.

"Either you like them, or you hate them," she says.

Boudreaux says prairie dogs aren't known to carry plague, hantavirus or rabies.

"You are actually in more danger of dogs running loose than of prairie dogs," she says.

Prairie dogs, she says, are more at risk of us than we are of them.

Dozens of colonies are squeezed into unlikely pockets across the city from the Phil Chacon soccer fields to a dusty La Luz de Amistad Park at the mouth of Tijeras Canyon.

And the empty lot next to Fire Station 8.

Eventually, Boudreaux suspects they will have to move this colony out to the West Mesa.

For now, though, the dogs are adapting, sleeping, with a little help from their neighbors.