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magazine / dec09
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December 2009 issue |
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FEATURE: BLACK-FOOTED FERRET
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| A reintroduction team hikes to a release site in Grasslands National Park. |
| Photo: Troy Fleece/WWF-US |
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There’s a lull in the conversation, and Roberts suddenly leaps from her chair. “There, can you hear them?” she asks
as a commotion of muffled thumps emanates from the adjoining room. “They’re up. Even though they’re mostly
nocturnal, they often get up to play.”
She leads me to an observation window where, like a doting parent gazing into a hospital nursery, I find myself
peering into the ferrets’ maternity suite. The well-lit space is furnished with rows of elegant wooden cages, each with
upper and lower decks that are linked, in lieu of a stairway, by flexible plastic tunnels. “Like prairie dog burrows,” points
out Roberts.
| Come next spring, if all goes well, wild black-footed ferrets will produce kits in Canada for the first time in 70 years. This scruffy, dried-out,
dug-up, gnawed-over piece of prairie is about to witness a rebirth. |
Of the 280 ferrets held in captivity for breeding, 18 are housed in this room, 8 males and 10 females. (As a precaution
against disease and other disasters, ferrets are also bred at zoos in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky and Washington, D.C.,
with the majority at a USFWS facility north of Denver.) In 2009, the Toronto population produced 17 young, enough
to make up about half of the Grasslands reintroduction.
“It’ll be nice to have some Canadian-born animals living in Canada,” says Franke with a happy laugh. “True
Canadian citizens.”
On the other side of the window, four of those Canadian citizens are having a wild rumpus, wrestling with one
another, whipping up and down their tube and scrapping genially over the carcass of a white rat. I think of all the work
that has gone into producing this litter, recalling the elaborate protocol that Franke and Roberts had described to me a few minutes earlier: the vaginal smears to check females
for breeding condition; the testicular palpations and electroejaculations to test the males for sperm; the round-the-clock
video monitoring of young litters. Plus the mundane routine of feeding and cleaning. “It’s poop up to here right
now because it’s birthing season,” says Roberts.
All of this to save a single species. Could we conceivably multiply this effort almost 600-fold in Canada, or 17,000-
fold in the world, to save all the species that are currently known to be threatened or endangered?
Before I can voice this discomfiting question, one of the kits in the nursery notices an unexpected shape at the
window, stretches up on its hind legs and fixes me with a round-eyed stare. It’s a face to melt away reservations, a face
that has launched a thousand captive-bred animals out into the wild world. These little guys are not just cute —
they are exquisite.
If the pioneers of the black-footed ferret program thought their troubles were over when the captive ferrets
produced their first litters, they were sadly mistaken. Getting those hand-reared youngsters re-established in the hardscrabble
world has proven to be an even more difficult challenge. Within nine months of the first reintroduction in
Wyoming in 1991, for example, more than 90 percent of new releases had succumbed to predators, principally
coyotes and badgers. The coddled, cage-reared ferrets didn’t know what to fear.
Through the early 1990s, researchers tried everything they could think of — even hazing with a robotic badger —
but nothing seemed to help. In the end, the solution turned out to be remarkably simple. If the ferrets are “preconditioned”
in outdoor pens, with real burrows for shelter and real prairie dogs to hunt, they quickly develop most of their
natural wariness. With this approach, the population’s survival rate jumped 10-fold, and more ferrets managed to
breed in the wild.
Which explains why, in early July, the 17 kits from Toronto, together with a few adults that had been selected for release,
were packed into pet crates, provided with bedding and a length of plastic tunnel to keep them comfortable and put
on board flight AC1037, heading for “boot camp” in Colorado. At journey’s end lay a handsome, low-slung
structure on a secluded stretch of prairie between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, almost due south of the ferrets’
ultimate destination in Saskatchewan.
The USFWS National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center offers what manager Paul Marinari
jokingly calls “the ultimate ferret experience.” Inside the quarantined facility, captive
breeding occurs on an impressive scale, with four large wards filled with cages
and a near-record production of 269 kits in 2009 alone. Outside, on the grounds east of the building, animals
intended for reintroduction are housed in a long, barrackslike rank of roofed-in runs, the kind you might find at a
particularly well-appointed boarding kennel. Here, provisioned with food as needed and kept under a watchful eye,
the new recruits have a chance to see how it feels to go wild.
When I visit on a sultry afternoon in August, the Toronto ferrets are already a month into this apprenticeship. Under
a sky towering with thunderheads, Marinari and I crunch along the gravel lane that services the pens, pausing at each
enclosure, peering through the mesh, scanning the ground for movement. Nothing — nobody stirring. And then, at the
third stop down the line, a small, round-eared head pokes out of a hole, and I find myself, for a second time, caught
by a dark-eyed stare. A split second later, down periscope, and the ferret is gone.
“That’s Barb,” says Marinari, “one of the Toronto adults.” As a 23-year veteran of the recovery effort, he not only is on
a first-name basis with the breeding stock in the program but, given half a chance, will also reel off their pedigrees for
generations back. Still, he knows full well that some of the animals in boot camp will not pass the test. “It’s sad when
an animal dies,” he says. “But if they can’t make it here, where there are no predators and all they have to do is kill prairie
dogs for themselves, they are probably not going to make it in the wild.”
A few weeks hence, with this arduous trial behind them, individuals that have qualified for the Canadian reintroduction will receive a full
course of vaccinations and two microchips (the same kind that are used for pets) before being packed back into their travel
crates and driven across the border. “Historically, ferrets occurred in three countries, the United States, Mexico and Canada,” says Marinari. “Our
partners in Toronto have been breeding ferrets for a long time, sending animals south to us, so it’s time to put that final
piece back into the puzzle.”
| Comments on this article | Leave a comment | I live in the Okanagan valley, but I grew up in Saskatchewan. I have long waited for the day I would hear that my favourite endangered critter was being returned to its Canadian home. I shed a tear as I read that article.
Thanks everyone who donated time and money, land and hope to that day. Candace Savage — you may have your doubts about what we can and are doing to save our endangered species, but you gave me hope today.
A comment to Rashell Sinclar’s wonderfully supportive note. Not that I doubt you know better, but your note is a bit misleading. Domestic ferrets are NOT the same species as black-footed ferrets and people who have domestic ferrets as pets should not try to “help” the cause by releasing them to the wild. PLEASE, anyone who has read Ms. Sinclar’s thoughtful note, with the understanding that black-footed ferrets and pet ferrets are one and the same, do not set domestic ferrets “free.” They are not wild animals, they have been domestic for over 2,000 years and would either die, or worse, become a pest that upsets the balance of an entire ecosystem, much like rabbits, cats and cane toads in Australia, raccoons and foxes on the Queen Charlotte Islands, domestic cats on New Zealand and so on. One of the reasons black-footed ferrets are struggling is because they are not naturally immune to diseases introduced by the invasion of non-native animals.
Further more, I am not aware that black-footed ferrets are native to Canada’s East Kootenay region and would be careful of anyone attempting any spice introduction that may be catastrophic to the ecosystem. About 100 years ago the Europeans thought that it would be a great idea to put deer on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the west cost of Canada to feed the native people there. Those native people lived off of marine animals and fish. They had never seen a deer and so they didn’t think eating it was a good idea. And now the islands have a pretty funky deer problem.
There are over 600 endangered animal species in Canada that need help. Locate your local organizations and volunteer or donate money. This is a great way to learn about your local wildlife and you will feel good doing it.
We have had ferrets as pets. They are wonderfull animals. I was very happy to read this story and to know that they are not going be extinct. We live in Grasemere, B.C., and and would love to see them back in this area and would love to help with this matter.
As an outdoor education teacher, I have had the opportunity to take students on educational excursions to Peggy's Cove in the East to Churchill in the North and to the Queen Charlottes in the West. Yet, one of the memorable events my class has ever attended was the black-footed ferret reintroduction in Grasslands National Park on October 2. I took a group of 20 Grade 12s and, regardless of whether or not they were outdoors enthusiasts, you could see that they realized the significance of the day. I am glad that you chose to do an article on this historic event and I appreciate the coverage that Candace Savage and Jo-Anne McArthur gave the ferrets on their long journey back to the Canadian prairie.
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Photo Club: Field Report 
