The Black-footed Ferret Comes Back to Conata Basin

Just east of the Badlands, in a broad shallow depression of native prairie called Conata Basin, one of the most ambitious wildlife recovery efforts in American history has been quietly unfolding for thirty years. The black-footed ferret is a small fierce predator, closely related to weasels, that evolved alongside the prairie dog colonies it depends on for food and shelter. By the nineteen seventies it was widely believed to be extinct.

The conversion of grasslands to farms had destroyed most of the prairie dog towns that ferrets required, and decades of poisoning campaigns against prairie dogs eliminated much of what remained. The ferret was officially declared extinct in nineteen seventy-nine. Then in nineteen eighty-one, a ranch dog near Meeteetse, Wyoming brought home a dead ferret, and a wildlife biologist investigated.

A small surviving population was discovered. Federal agencies captured a group of survivors to begin a captive breeding program at facilities across the country. By the early nineteen nineties, biologists were ready to try reintroduction.

Conata Basin was chosen because it held one of the largest remaining concentrations of black-tailed prairie dogs in North America. The first black-footed ferrets were released there in nineteen ninety-four. The population has survived outbreaks of sylvatic plague, which can devastate both prairie dogs and ferrets, through an ongoing program of dusting prairie dog burrows with insecticide.

Conata Basin today supports one of the largest wild black-footed ferret populations in existence, part of a species that came within a handful of individuals of disappearing from the earth.