Black-footed ferret center bringing species back from the brink

Posted 10/25/18

Black-tailed prairie dog burrows pock-mark a 40-acre parcel of barren plain on this isolated, little-known government compound north of Fort Collins, Colorado. Although they’re welcome here, …

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Black-footed ferret center bringing species back from the brink

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Black-tailed prairie dog burrows pock-mark a 40-acre parcel of barren plain on this isolated, little-known government compound north of Fort Collins, Colorado. Although they’re welcome here, the chubby rodent residents have unwittingly built their homes around breeding facilities of their mortal enemy — the black-footed ferret.

Never straying too far from the edges of their subterranean homes, families of the barking ground squirrels are ever vigilant. The prairie dogs grab a morsel of grass or an occasional grasshopper, rest on their haunches and watch for trouble while enjoying the morsel. It’s a pretty good defense — unless death comes in nightmarish fashion from inside their tunneled homes in the dark of night.

This is how black-tailed prairie dog colonies looked a couple hundred years ago, Pete Gober, director of the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, likes to say. The life cycle of prairie dogs is of utmost importance to the 11 U.S. Fish and Wildlife employees who raise black-footed ferrets at the center: The two species are married in their life and death struggles.

Without prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets would cease to exist. But prairie dogs also carry a parasite — fleas that are infected with a deadly infectious bacterial disease: sylvatic plague. It’s the same bacterium that causes bubonic and pneumonic plague in humans. The disease is ever-present for the team of scientists fighting for the life of every endangered ferret.

A rare sight

The hard-to-find ferret conservation center in northern Colorado is not open to the public. There are no signs pointing to the facility, no buses filled with students on field trips or tourists stopping by for a glimpse. The mission is too precarious and dangers too many. Even here, at the front door of the site where the federal government has sheltered and revived a species previously thought extinct, plague is a factor.

“Just over the hill there is plague,” said Kimberly Fraser, education specialist and spokesperson for the center.

Every attempt is made to keep the dangers of the natural world out of the pristine facility. The few visitors allowed in are sprayed with DEET from the knees down and adorned with covers for their shoes and face. Previously, all coming and going were required to shower on the way in and out of the facility.

Row after row of custom cages fill the spotless breeding center. On most days, more than 350 ferrets are housed here. Typically about 180 breeding adults and 200 kits either call the facility home or are in training for life in the wild, said Robyn Bortner, Fish and Wildlife biologist and captive breeding manager.

Bortner has lived at the remote site since 2012 and is rarely more than a short walk from the center. When weather prevents others from making it to the office, she’s there to support the crucial captive population — used to supplement current wild populations.

Both prairie dogs and wild ferrets have lived in Bortner’s front yard, including a mother with her kits this year.

“We don’t know exactly where the litter was born, but we watched her move her kits to several locations,” Bortner said.

Intimate views like this are extremely rare due to the small number of the nocturnal ferrets in the wild.

Despite being about the same size as their prey, vicious ferrets make quick work of prairie dogs; about 90 percent of the endangered black-footed ferret’s diet consists of the species.

“They’re very charismatic but they will take your face off,” Fraser said of black-footed ferrets. “They have a bad-boy-on-the-block attitude.”

Before they can graduate to a wild existence, ferrets raised by the center have to prove capable of killing. Nasty by nature and armed with the longest canine teeth of any mammal in North America in relation to the size of their skull, these seemingly lightning-fast apex predators clamp their teeth around the necks of their victims, crushing their throats, Fraser said.

“It’s not pretty,” she said.

Raising a predator

Training starts inside. Twice a week, the ferrets get a break from ground meat meals for a chance at a whole rat or prairie dog carcass or a live victim. Hamsters are their first live prey. The process may seem cruel, but ferrets raised in captivity won’t survive in the wild without training. And there are other benefits to the whole carcass meals, said Bortner.

“Feeding them whole carcasses is good for their teeth and we have done studies that show it reduces stress levels,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to be live. Just getting food that’s close to their native prey has a lot of benefits.”

Once old enough to be considered for relocation, release candidates are moved to one of dozens of outdoor training pens. There they are introduced to their natural food source. Kits are placed in a pen with their mother, who trains the offspring on the art of hunting and killing prairie dogs. Those who fail the training are used in education and outreach programs.

Fraser, who has the important job of taking news about the center to the public, travels with the ferrets in education efforts and in attempts to find partners to help support the program. Unlike ferrets used in breeding or scheduled for release, the traveling ferrets have become more accustomed to human contact. While never handled, traveling and display ferrets do respond to Fraser’s voice.

“When I walk in and they hear my voice they’ll pop up,” Fraser said. “People are amazed, but I tell them, ‘Well, I do sleep in hotel rooms with them.’”

Human contact doesn’t imprint on the ferrets, but center officials are very careful to keep contact to a minimum — especially during the final outdoor training prior to release.

When the captive breeding center was operated out of Sybille Canyon by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, ferrets were released without the outdoor training, Fraser said. But scientists at the center have found that giving the ferrets 30 days in outdoor training pens increases their chance of surviving in the wild by 90 percent. While the center partners with five zoos for ferret breeding programs — including one in Canada — all black-footed ferrets destined for release come through the northern Colorado site.

Black-footed ferret recovery efforts are one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation; the species was believed to be extinct before a small population — collectively known as a busyness — was found outside of Meeteetse in 1981.

Serious issues still challenge scientists. One of the largest obstacles is genetic diversity. All of the more than 9,000 offspring raised at the center come from seven breeding adults captured in the 1980s. One in particular, Scarface, is overrepresented in current genetics and preserved semen from the feisty male is still used in recovery efforts.

However, center director Gober recently said that, “it’s clear the species is on the road to recovery thanks to decades of work by the center and their partners.”

Over the past three summers, dozens of black-footed ferrets raised at the Colorado conservation center were released and reintroduced to the Meeteetse area. Wildlife managers hope the population becomes self-sustaining and new, wild-born kits have been spotted the past two summers.

Those involved in the overall ferret recovery effort “are optimistic that the species could be fully recovered in another decade,” Gober said, “something that was unimaginable just 30 years ago.”

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