In response to a vitriolic letter posted on the soccer club's Web site, the activists are threatening to sue for libel.
"We haven't killed a single prairie dog," said Barb Roper, co-founder of Boulder Nova Soccer Club, which is building new fields off 28th Street. "I don't know what they want, to save the prairie dogs or to come out here and get publicity."
"She thinks there aren't dead prairie dogs under there?" asked Yemaya Thayer of the Prairie Dog Coalition. "Yesterday, I actually saw prairie dogs dig themselves out of the dirt."
Thayer said Roper did not return repeated calls from her group, which volunteered to relocate prairie dogs for free.
"She said they had a parcel of land they set aside for prairie dogs," Thayer said. "We would have moved them."
But Roper said soccer volunteers did the relocation work themselves, moving about 24 prairie dogs to a 2-acre parcel of the property several hundred yards away.
Leanne Shepherd, a soccer volunteer, said activists called the club recently, asking for $500 apiece to move prairie dogs.
"All these threats..." she said. "It's all about money."
Thayer and Dave Crawford of Rocky Mountain Animal Defense said they had no idea who would have called to make such an offer. Their groups would have done the work for free, they said.
And while they may know how to build a soccer field, the volunteers knew nothing about relocating prairie dogs, Crawford said.
"They didn't dig trenches, they didn't do anything, they just dumped them," he said.
Janaka Ford, the contractor who scraped the field Wednesday for free, said he did not see any prairie dogs scurry away during the job.
He stopped the work briefly Thursday, after Boulder County land use officials visited the site, investigating an allegation that Ford moved dirt without a permit.
That allegation was not valid, said the county's Gerry George. Ford moved about 5 or 6 cubic yards of dirt, far less than the 50 cubic yards that would have required a permit, George said.
Roper posted a furious letter against the Rocky Mountain Animal Defense on the Boulder Nova Web site, accusing the group of trespass and harassment.
Crawford said he is speaking with a lawyer about a possible libel suit.
"I don't want to sue; I want them to take down the letter," he said. "And I want them to take us up on our offer to save the remaining prairie dogs."
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