35 endangered ferrets let loose in Wyoming

Species returns to area of its ’80s salvation

Scott Talbott (center, left), with the WyomingGame and Fish Department, and Dan Ashe (center, right), with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, talk recently at the Pitchfork Ranch near Meeteetse, Wyo., about the release of 35 black-footed ferrets.
Scott Talbott (center, left), with the WyomingGame and Fish Department, and Dan Ashe (center, right), with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, talk recently at the Pitchfork Ranch near Meeteetse, Wyo., about the release of 35 black-footed ferrets.

MEETEETSE, Wyo. -- A nocturnal species of weasel that has a marking like a robber's mask across its eyes has returned to the remote ranchlands of western Wyoming where the critter almost went extinct more than 30 years ago.

photo

AP

The ferrets, bred in captivity, are descendants of those captured in the area years ago to prevent their extinction.

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AP/Wyoming Game and Fish Department

A black-footed ferret peers out of his new new home on Pitchfork Ranch in western Wyoming.

Wildlife officials Tuesday released 35 black-footed ferrets on two ranches near Meeteetse, a tiny cattle ranching community 50 miles east of Yellowstone National Park. Black-footed ferrets, generally solitary animals, were let loose individually over a wide area.

Groups of ferret releasers fanned out over prairie dog colonies covering several thousand acres of the Lazy BV and Pitchfork ranches. Black-footed ferrets prey on prairie dogs and live in prairie dog burrows.

In the weeks leading up to the release, biologists made sure that the ferrets will have plenty of prairie dogs to eat. The biologists treated the local prairie dog population with insecticide and plague vaccine. Plague, which is spread by fleas, can kill off prairie dogs by the thousand.

Scientists recently found that plague had killed some prairie dogs in the area but not nearly enough to interfere with the ferrets release. Indeed, the pattern of prairie dogs killed by the disease suggests that the plague vaccine works, said Zack Walker, a Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist.

More plague control will be needed, as wildlife officials plan more black-footed ferret releases next year and the year after.

"In the early years, it's going to be important to keep it up," Walker said of the releases.

The release completed the circle of a story that began in 1981 when a ranch dog named Shep carried home a dead black-footed ferret in the Meeteetse area. Local ranchers took the carcass to a taxidermist, who alerted them that it was no ordinary weasel but a rare specimen.

Five years later, biologists rounded up the remaining wild ferrets to launch a successful captive-breeding program. Tuesday's release, for the first time, returned to Meeteetse the descendants of the last living Meeteetse ferrets.

"We thank the ranch owners for their commitment to recovery of black-footed ferrets. The decades of hard work from Game and Fish and our numerous partners show in these recovery efforts," Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Scott Talbott said in a news release.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service breeds black-footed ferrets at a facility near Fort Collins, Colo. There, the young ferrets go through a "boot camp" where they learn how to catch prairie dogs.

Ferrets have been released at 24 sites in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, South Dakota, Arizona and Kansas, as well as Canada and Mexico. Recent release sites include the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge near Denver last fall.

This was the first ferret release in Wyoming in almost a decade. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated all of Wyoming as a zone for "experimental, non-essential" populations of black-footed ferrets.

The designation indemnifies ranchers in case they accidentally harm any ferrets released on their property.

Biologists flocked to the Lazy BV and Pitchfork ranches in the 1980s to learn more about the last remaining black-footed ferrets in the wild, recalled Meeteetse Mayor J.W. Yetter, who worked in the local logging industry at the time.

"There was a whole crew of university people and wildlife biologists in training quartered up at the timber creek ranger station. They were the ones charged with tracking, capturing, radio collaring and generally discovering the extent of that colony and getting biologic information about the members of that colony," Yetter said.

SundayMonday on 07/31/2016

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