The Niles Star

Larry Lyons: The amazing return of the black footed ferret

By definition it would seem impossible to bring an animal back from extinction. After all, extinct means gone, “gone like yesterday” as the Montgomery Gentry song puts it.  However, in a way, that unlikely feat has been accomplished with the black footed ferret, one of the world’s rarest animals.

The black footed ferret is native only to North America and once numbered in the hundreds of thousands throughout the Great Plains prairies from Canada to Mexico.

Looking like an overgrown weasel, ferrets are in the family that includes weasels, mink, skunks, badgers and, of course, his more common kin, the European ferret.

The black footed ferret is inexorably entwined with the prairie dog, which the ferrets feed on almost exclusively.  Under the cover of darkness the ferret sneaks from one dog burrow to another until it finds a sleeping victim. Prairie dogs and ferrets are roughly the same size so this surprise attack is much safer than taking on a feisty dog in a fair fight. A crib of newborns is equally relished.  For millennia this essential predator/prey relationship maintained a healthy balance for all.

But as the west was being settled we encountered prairie dog towns stretching for miles and their burrows were a deadly mine field for cattle and horses. Planting crops amongst the plethora of burrows was a futile effort. We declared war. With government backed programs prairie dogs were poisoned and plowed under by the millions.  By the mid 1900s less than 2 percent of their habitat remained and what was left was badly fragmented and isolated.

Ferrets are loners and it takes on average 125 acres of prairie dog town to support one ferret. As the prairie dogs declined so, too, did the ferrets only exponentially. Around 1970 we suddenly awoke to ask, where have all the ferrets gone? They had literally disappeared unnoticed. Only a handful remained in zoos. After much futile searching the black footed ferret was declared extinct in the wild.

But miracles occasionally happen. In 1981 an isolated population of 130 ferrets was discovered near Meeteetse, Wyoming.  Conservationists were ecstatic but the excitement wouldn’t last long. Ferrets are highly susceptible to disease, primarily distemper and a plague similar to bubonic plague. Some of the Meeteetse ferrets were captured for captive breeding but unbeknownst to their captors several were carrying distemper. They infected the other captives and all died.

Then, horror upon horrors, disease began running rampant through the wild ferret population as well. By 1985 there were only 18 survivors. These were captured, inoculated and carefully watched over in captivity.  In combination with the smattering of existing zoo ferrets (whose genes were questionable), there were only 50 black footed ferrets on the planet.

They bred quite well in captivity and in 1991 a program was undertaken to begin releasing them back into the wild. However, the early reintroductions were disappointing.  Their susceptibility to disease was still an issue and the ferrets just couldn’t seem to make the trip back home.

But efforts persevered. The chosen release sites were treated for fleas, the primary carrier of disease in prairie dog habitat. Preconditioning of the young captive ferrets also proved essential. They were raised with minimal human contact in artificial prairie dog towns where they learned to hunt prior to being released.  Little by little restocking successes improved. By 2007 there were approximately 650 ferrets holding their own in the wild.

Today’s program is to hold a base stock of 240 ferrets in captivity for breeding with the offspring being turned loose. There are reasonably stable ferret populations at seven select sites in Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, Utah/Colorado and across neighboring borders in Mexico and Saskatchewan, Canada. The number of black footed ferrets in the wild is estimated at around 1,500 and most are successfully breeding. With the minimal habitat left they will never be prevalent but it appears they won’t go down in history alongside the passenger pigeon any time soon.

Carpe diem.

Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications. He can be reached at larry@lyonsgunworks.com