The Black-footed Ferret

By Al Lowe
Contributor

This is another animal which has barely - just barely - escaped disappearing altogether from the North American landscape.
There are only four species of ferret in the world. I would guess that most of you reading this have never come into contact with a ferret of any kind. Well, ferrets are members of the Weasel family, They are quite similar to weasels, but bigger. Long, slim bodies, very sharp teeth, and a strong desire to kill anything that may turn out to be good to eat.
There is one ferret which is fairly well known, and that is the Domestic Ferret. When I was young, I used to keep a ferret as a pet. It also had a very useful characteristic. We kept a lot of chickens at that time, and had four hen houses. Rats used to bother us a lot - killing chickens and so on. So, we would let the ferret go down one of the rat-holes in the floor of the henhouse, and wait outside with big sticks, or baseball bats. The rats were terrified, and would rush out, where we would try to kill them with the sticks. It was a bit of fun, and it often whiled away a Saturday afternoon. They are really quite friendly little animals. I used to carry one around in the pocket of my jacket. He was quite happy in there, and was always happy to see me when he came out.
But this is about the Black-footed Ferret (Mustela inigris). He is about 2 feet long and weighs about a kilogram (2 pounds). He has a sort of furry tail. Most of him is sort of yellowish brown. He has black feet (which you might have guessed). The tip os his tail is also black, and he has a prominent black mask.
This little animal us quite specialized. For one thing, he is almost totally nocturnal. These ferrets do almost all of their travelling, searching and feeding at night. So you don't get to see them often in the daylight. Actually, the famous Au dub on trapped one, one time and nobody would believe him.
The diet of the Black-footed Ferret is quite simple - prairie digs. They will eat other animals like other kind of ground squirrels, mice and voles, but by far, their major source of food is the prairie dog. It is estimated that a ferret will easily consume 100 prairie dogs a year.
As you might also guess, these animals were always found where the prairie dogs were. That covered the great plains of Canada and the United States, the grasslands of North America. They not only ate all the 'dogs' they could catch, but they lived in the burrows as well. Why did they mostly isappcarentirely? Well, when they prairie dog population declined, so did that of the ferrets. You might remember that, years ago, there was a bounty on prairie dogs, in both Canada and the United States. If a boy could bring in a dozen prairie dog tails, he could get a nickel. So a lot of kids in Saskatchewan and Wyoming filled their Saturdays shooting the "little varmits" so they could raise a few cents for a pop of some candy. There was also widespread of poisoning of prairie dogs in both countries.
But the major thing which drove down the population of prairie dogs was the invention in 1837, of the steel plough. This made much more of the land available for cultivation, and in the process, destroyed hundreds of thousands of prairie dog burrows. You can credit John Deere for that.
Now the original population of these little animals, the Black-footed Ferret was estimated to be about half a million in North America. The loss of habitat reduced the population to about 2% of the original. But that is not all. Some diseases, like distemper from dogs, did a lot of them in. And, believe it or not, remnants of the plague from Europe took quite a toll. Several things were acting against the ferrets. The last ferrets were found in Canada in 1937, and the Black-footed Ferret was declared to be extinct in 1979 in all of North America.
Then a very small population was found in Wyoming. Some were captured and a captive breeding program was started, which included the Toronto Zoo. This program has been going on ever since. By 2008, groups of ferrets had been introduced in 18 different places in the States. 34 of these animals were released in Saskatchewan in 2009, and some young ones have been seen.
They have also been released in the Dakotas, and in Mexico as well as in Canada.
By the year 2010, biologists were hoping to have about 10 colonies or more under way, with about 30 adults in each one. I don't know if that plan has been successful or not. If it has, it will mean that the population is gaining ground, and the Black-footed Ferret will now be 'threatened' instead of "endangered".
Why so we care about this little weasel? Well, our history about wildlife in North America is not very good. We have destroyed the whole population of many species, some of whom numbered in the billions. We have done a pretty good job of returning the Buffalo to North America, and have stopped the destruction of many other species. Why not this ferret, which doesn't do anybody any harm, and keeps the population of prairie dogs under control.
We have a lot to do, to make up for the immense destruction we have caused to the environment of this planet.