



Click here to learn about efforts to save the black-footed ferret.

Nov. 17, 2014 - Habitat loss and disease in the American prairie pushed the black-footed ferret to the edge of extinction. Now these underground-dwelling mammals are making a comeback, through a captive-breeding program run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There, baby ferrets—called kits—are raised and released into the wild.

KIMBERLY FRASER, EDUCATION SPECIALIST, USFWS NATIONAL BLACK-FOOTED FERRET CONSERVATION CENTER:

So in 1979, the black-footed ferret was declared extinct. And then in 1981 it was re-discovered outside of Meeteetse, Wyoming. And that really turned the conservation world upside-down.



So a captive-breeding program was in about 1985 because what they found was that small population of wild ferrets started to die off. They made the decision to capture as many as they could. That was a group of eighteen individuals. And they started the current captive breeding program—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—that’s very successful today.



The National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center is the only captive-breeding center like it in the world. We house ¾ of the world’s population and every year we produce about 250 newborn ferrets—we call them kits. And the majority of those kits are released into the wild.





PETER GOBER, RECOVERY COORDINATOR, USFWS NATIONAL BLACK-FOOTED FERRET CONSERVATION CENTER:

If you’re a black-footed ferret and you wanted to pick a way to survive, you would hitch your wagon to prairie dogs. They’re an obligate predator on prairie dogs, and prairie dogs are a very, very resilient species.



But all that changed when we settle the country because we started off farming the country which reduced the habitat available for prairie dogs. Later on, we decided that we needed to increase agricultural production from the standpoint of domestic livestock and so we poisoned the prairie dogs in order to have more forage for cattle and other livestock. And finally we introduced inadvertently an exotic disease, Sylvatic plague, from the Old World to the New World. And prairie dogs and ferrets had not adapted to that disease, had not evolved in the presence of it, so they were very susceptible to it.





ROBYN BORTNER, FISH AND WILDLIFE SPECIALIST, USFWS NATIONAL BLACK-FOOTED FERRET CONSERVATION CENTER:

First thing in the morning when I get to work, we do a morning walkthrough to make sure that all of our ferrets have eaten from the night before and just do a general check on the health of the colonly.





BORTNER SOT: So we just do a very brief visual inspection. We check their eyes, make sure they don’t have an infection or are swollen. We check to make sure that they’ve been nursing. You can see the little milk corners at the corners of their mouths. Um, and just a quick overall body inspection. And sometimes we double-check the sex. Um, so this is a nice fat healthy male.



We find that the ferrets have a high susceptibility to a lot of diseases probably stemming from their inbreeding as a result of our very small founding population of the captive ferret population right now.



[Adult ferret vocalizing]



So today we are going to treat these kits and their dam because they have a coccidial overgrowth, and that’s very common disease we see breakout in ferrets a lot.





BORTNER SOT: Whole carcass prey is a very nutritious food for the ferrets. So the kits start getting then at day 35.





I get asked a lot of times, “Why do we spend so much effort saving one species, the black-footed ferret, when it appears the ecosystem seems to be fine?” And I always say you have to look at it as not just that one animal, um, but the impact that it has had on the entire ecosystem where the animals lives.





KIMBERLY FRASER, EDUCATION SPECIALIST, USFWS NATIONAL BLACK-FOOTED FERRET CONSERVATION CENTER:

What the staff here does every day I think is probably some of the most important work in the conservation world. Today, every day, we see hundreds of species disappear on this planet and it’s an honor to work in a program where we have an opportunity to really bring back a species. And the ferret is a perfect conservation vehicle for the short-grass prairie. We know that where its habitat, where it lives, there’s other species like the swift fox and the burrowing owl and the prairie rattlesnake. So all these other species are brought a long with the ferret in saving its habitat.













