David Murray

dmurray@greatfallstribune.com

The young female ferret had no plans to go meekly into the new burrow offered to her.

She chattered sharply — a series of staccato clicks sounding something akin to an angry steel ratchet turning quickly over fixed metal cogs.

Held within a short length of black plastic tubing, the wildlife technician pointed the ferret toward the open maw of an abandoned prairie dog den. The ferret charged and struck at the technician's thickly gloved hand, seeking freedom on her own terms, not those of the well-intentioned humans who held her captive.

This was not your pet store variety of ferret. She is a huntress — a wild creature whose survival is dependent on the efficient pursuit and harvest of prairie dogs.

And she is one of the last of her kind.

On Wednesday, a collaboration of biologists and conservationists released 20 black-footed ferrets on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. They represent nearly 3 percent of the entire remaining population of ferrets, a species that once inhabited millions of acres of the American West, and numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today roughly 300 exist in the wild.

"I kind of feel like now they might be ready to survive here and flourish," said Harold "Jigs" Main, director of the Fort Belknap Fish and Wildlife Department. "Hopefully that's what's going to happen. I think it will be better for all of us, both as Indian people and for people in general. It's a good day for conservation."

Main spoke while standing in an open field, a few hundred yards from the base of Snake Butte on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. It has been a spot of great cultural and religious significance to the Gros Ventre people for centuries, and is the current location of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes' 20,000-acre buffalo pasture.

Scattered around Main were dozens of active prairie dog dens. A collection of supporters from the World Wildlife Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and students from the tribe's White Clay Immersion School cheered as the first ferret finally ducked into its hole.

"I feel like — not only me and our department, but our people, our community — everybody's a part of something here," Main said. "These animals were once part of this land. It's like we're connecting some of the missing pieces here."

The last 18 ferrets

This was the second release of ferrets on the reservation since last year. In October 2013, 32 ferrets were released at two sites at Fort Belknap. Of these, only two are known to have survived.

According to Steve Forrest from Defenders of Wildlife, it was a disappointing but not entirely unexpected outcome.

"It's tough out here in the wild," Forrest said. "It's not as easy to catch a prairie dog as one might think. They may look fat and dopey, but they're pretty fierce fighters. Probably the biggest set of mortality comes from not being able to get the job done as a predator."

All of the ferrets released at Fort Belknap have been graduates of a captive breeding program at the Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colo. With a population of close to 500 animals, the colony at Fort Collins is by far the largest concentration of black-footed ferrets in the world.

Animals being prepared to be released into the wild are put in an outdoor caged environment where they are allowed to interact with prairie dogs. To graduate out of the program, they have to kill a prairie dog.

"These ferrets have all proven that they've got the instincts and the tools to survive, but what they don't have is a lot of practice," Forrest said. "Second, they are naive to the greater wild environment. Most of them have never seen a coyote or a badger or an owl, so we expect fairly high mortality in the initial release."

Forrest has been deeply involved in ferret recovery efforts for more than 30 years, going back to shortly after the last surviving population of wild black-footed ferrets was discovered in 1981. It was the final remnant of what had once been an immense population.

Black-footed ferrets carry the distinction of being one of the most unfortunate species of mammal in North America. Unlike the gray wolf, there was never an orchestrated effort to eliminate the species. Nor was there some economic engine focused on harvesting them, as was the case with the American bison. What did the ferrets in is their near total reliance on prairie dogs as a food source.

Prairie dog colonies once occupied vast stretches of the American grasslands. But as the agricultural frontier moved west, prairie dogs were increasingly viewed as pests who competed for valuable land resources.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. government began a systematic effort to eradicate prairie dogs. Millions of acres of prairie dog towns were poisoned each year. By the end of the 1930s, the vast majority of prairie dogs had been eliminated, and along with them most of the black-footed ferrets.

Nearly simultaneously, a previously undocumented disease was introduced to North America. Sylvatic plague was first documented in San Francisco in 1903, probably arriving at the port aboard a ship from Asia.

Spread by fleas, Sylvatic plague spread farther and farther east over the next several decades. Neither prairie dogs nor ferrets had any natural immunity to it. The plague wiped out most of the small population of black-footed ferrets that remained.

"Ferrets were thought to be extinct in the 1950s," Forrest said. "A very small population was rediscovered in South Dakota in the 1960s."

A captive breeding program established at that time was unsuccessful in producing surviving litters of ferrets. The wild population died out in 1974, and the last black-footed ferret in captivity died in 1979. For a second time it appeared that ferrets had gone extinct.

Then in 1981, a ranch dog near Meeteetse, Wyo., came home with a dead ferret in its mouth. The dog's owners contacted a local taxidermist who identified the strange animal as a black-footed ferret. For a second time, this masked hunter of the plains seemed to climb out from the abyss of extinction.

"We learned there were about 125 ferrets in this colony at the peak of that population, with about 30 adults or so," Forrest said.

But just four years after this discovery, the population of ferrets at Meeteetse began to crash. Once again plague, this time coupled with canine distemper, were believed to be the culprits. Between 1984 and 1987, biologists captured 24 of the last remaining ferrets. Six of these died shortly thereafter.

Today, all the black-footed ferrets known to exist are decedents of the last 18 ferrets of the Meeteetse colony.

"It was a very close thing," Forrest said of the near demise of the black-footed ferret. "It took a rather heroic effort on the part of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the state of Wyoming and some other entities that helped secure the last few ferrets."

The road to survival

It's taken more than 20 years to bring the number of black-footed ferrets up to its current population of around 800. The species continues to struggle with outbreaks of Sylvatic plague and canine distemper.

In 1997, wildlife biologists in cooperation with the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes released 167 ferrets at Fort Belknap. It was the sixth ferret release nationally and the first to take place on tribal lands. It ultimately ended in disaster.

"Back in 1997 through 1999, plague started wiping out prairie dog colonies and we had no way of controlling it," said Kristy Bly, senior restoration science specialist with the World Wildlife Fund.

Biologists now routinely inoculate ferrets for both plague and distemper, but keeping the diseases out of prairie dog populations has proven to be more difficult. Scientists are now developing a type of antibiotic pellet that shows promise in reducing outbreaks of the disease among the rodents.

According to Forrest, a primary obstacle to securing ferret populations today is building up large enough prairie dog populations to support a self-sustaining colony of ferrets. According to their best scientific models they've developed, wildlife biologists believe roughly 130 ferrets in a single, contiguous geographic area is required to maintain a self-sustaining population.

"A rule of thumb is that it takes about 100 acres of prairie dogs for each female ferret and her litter," Forrest said. "So, to get up to that 130 number you're talking about 10,000 acres of prairie dogs that are all pretty close together. That's 12 sections worth of prairie dogs."

"Prairie dogs are not beloved by a lot of landowners throughout their region," he added. "Building a prairie dog base up sufficiently large enough so that we could maintain a population that size is politically pretty difficult. It's still a political challenge."

One alternative currently being looked at is locating prairie dog and ferret colonies in oil and gas production fields. It appears this type of resource development has only marginal impact on these animals' ability to survive. If successful, reintroductions could take place in areas not currently being used for agriculture.

Despite the cost and regardless of the many repeated set-backs, Forrest and others like him believe working to guarantee the survival of the black-footed ferret is a worthwhile and ultimately achievable goal.

"We have spent I don't know how many millions of dollars in the past two or three years on just preventing the sage grouse from going on the endangered species list. It's fair if we spend relatively small sums to keep an animal from going extinct.

"It's like art. We understand that it has to be maintained for us to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror every day and say we're trying to do the best we can on this planet — more or less in harmony with the creatures that are already here."

"I don't know how much a ferret is worth," Forrest added. "I just know it certainly would be a poorer place if these guys weren't here anymore on this planet with us."

More online

To see video of Wednesday's ferret release, go to gftrib.com