the Carter Mountains to the north. Regardless, it looked interesting and attractive enough to pay to have preserved, and John took the specimen to Larry LaFranchi, the local taxidermist. Having stuffed more than his fair share of pine martens, Larry immediately recognized the animal as a black-footed ferret and called Wyoming authorities.
A ranch dog had succeeded where so many professional and backyard biologists had failed, offering a humbling and at the same time hopeful sign that the human footprint had not touched everything. Shep’s singular finding hinted that there were places left forgotten, little understood, where even the most sensitive of species could still persist. A second chance to perhaps learn from these animals and make up for our errors of the past, maybe even resurrect the species.
Within days the State of Wyoming held a town meeting in downtown Meeteetse, where rumor of the find had spread. Why had black-footed ferrets persisted here, on the very western boundary of the prairie? A single isolated dot on the western edge of the historic range map Elaine Anderson would develop that was based on all known museum specimens. Species are supposed to decline from the outside in, shrinking down into the middle where a small refuge remains. This small town of Meeteetse, Wyoming, just south of the more famous Cody, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park, was outside the area most thought to survey. But questions of why were secondary to questions of whether there were more, and how many. Wyoming Department of Game and Fish biologists started the meeting by reporting the details of the find and asked the audience if anyone had seen a ferret. Immediately Doug Brown volunteered that he had seen a ferret while working on the Pitchfork Ranch.
In the small ranching community of Meeteetse, stories of where ferrets remained were mixed with fear of what having an Endangered Species on your property could mean. There were rumors that federal restrictions could follow, brought on by enforcement of the Endangered Species Act—the type of legal maneuvering conservation groups still try to use to force the federal government’s hand to pressure private landowners about the use of their land. Despite that the precedent was rare and that most induced management changes occurred on federal land, the fear tactics create a persistent tension between conservation groups and private landowners, with the federal government in the middle. For independent ranchers, relying on the federal government as an effective moderator often wasn’t enough. Policies and administrations changed; ranchers were forced to live with the consequences. Despite the circulating paranoia, with counterculture bravery and vision (traits that, in future years, would be evident in almost every ferret conservation milestone), Jack Turnell, the owner of the Pitchfork Ranch, the Hogg family, and a handful of other ranchers in the vicinity ignored public concerns and allowed researchers onto their land.
Tim Clark and Tom Campbell rented an airplane to map the extent of prairie dogs in the area. They scanned the rolling, open sagebrush steppe grasslands of the Big Horn Basin around Meeteetse that are bounded to the west by the Absaroka mountain range that extend north into Yellowstone National Park. On the ground, federal biologists Hammer and Martin were conducting nightly searches for ferrets on the group of ranches adjoining the Hogg ranch. They walked or drove around the prairie, using spotlights to look for the distinctive green eye shine from the reflective membrane just behind the ferrets’ retinas, hoping that a curious ferret would stick its head out of a burrow. To improve the chances, they also used two search dogs trained to sit when they smelled the scent of a ferret. When one of the dogs smelled the faint aroma of ferret scat or musk and sat down by a burrow, Hammer and Martin, not seeing ferrets themselves but blindly hoping the dogs were on to something, would set live traps at that burrow and surrounding burrows.
On October 29, 1981, more than a month after Shep’s discovery, Hammer and Martin were checking traps in an area where dogs had found scent. Leaving the traps set, they returned to their vehicle and drove off into the night to continue their spotlight search. Looping back around toward their traps, at 6:20 A.M. they saw the flash of something running across the road in front of them and periscoping its head out of a burrow. They had never seen a ferret, but they thought it looked about right; with buff markings, it skimmed quickly across the prairie like a weasel relative. Hammer approached the burrow, and the ferret was still just inside the entrance, peering up from the shadows and chattering at him.
No human could take credit for rediscovering the species—that honor belonged to Shep—but few could have experienced the emotions of Dennie Hammer and Steve Martin. They experienced the career-defining moment of being the first people to see a live black-footed ferret in two years, after the last male died in captivity at Patuxent and the species was widely believed extinct. Perhaps more important, they were the first to hear the chatter of a live ferret in the wild since Mellette County seven years prior. Adrenalin mixed with panic as Dennie put his hat over the burrow while he rushed to get and set a trap. Walking up to the trap eleven hours later and seeing the ferret looking back at him, his thoughts must have been filled with that delicately marked prairie bandit. It was the almost mythical creature for which he had searched hundreds of hours across much of the western United States. This erased the ridicule from other university students who, when he said he wanted to study ferrets for his graduate degree, told Hammer he was trying to study dinosaurs. Then there was the thrill the next day of releasing the ferret that they had nicknamed “620” (after the time it was captured). They watched it scurry down the burrow after it was fitted with a small radio-transmitter collar and hoped it would stay alive so they could monitor its movements. There was so much to learn. Did ferrets here in the shortgrass prairie of Wyoming behave differently than those in Mellette County, South Dakota? Why were they here and nowhere else? And most important, how many were there? Now, finally, ferret research and conservation could begin again in earnest.
• • •
Hammer and Martin, along with telemetry specialist Dean Biggins and a handful of additional federal researchers, intensively monitored the movements of ferret 620 for the next month. They eventually found ten other ferrets in the area. Some of the mysteries of the black-footed ferret had been unlocked in the final days of research in Mellette County, South Dakota. Con Hillman and others had noted that ferrets were typically nocturnal and solitary, mostly visible in early morning or late evening. They found that adult females, on average, produced 3.4 young each year, and that the young typically first venture above ground as early as mid-July. They also learned that ferrets were most readily spotted in early fall when kits dispersed and mothers and their kits played above ground. They learned that ferrets were underground much of the winter, limiting biologists to monitor infrequent movements based on ferret tracks and diggings that could be spotted after a fresh layer of snow had fallen.
But there was still so much to learn. Because only a few ferrets were followed in Mellette County and none was observed to move between prairie dog colonies, it still was not known how and when ferrets moved between colonies. Little was known of their breeding behavior, whether females reared young alone or had help from males, how often they fed their young, or how many prairie dogs were required to sustain them. Were ferrets such efficient predators that they served as a sort of natural control for prairie dog populations, as C. Hart Merriam had predicted in 1902? Given that ferrets vanished from Mellette County, was a particular size and arrangement of prairie dog colonies required to sustain ferrets? There were still the questions of what role prairie dog poisoning had had on ferrets, and how many prairie dogs were required to support a self-sustaining ferret population.
Further, it was possible that ferrets in Meeteetse might behave differently than those in Mellette County because this newly discovered population was on the edge of the ferret’s supposed historical range. The ferrets in Meeteetse persisted on a colony of white-tailed prairie dogs, unlike the ferrets in Mellette County that lived on black-tailed prairie dog colonies. White-tailed prairie dogs were arid-environment specialists, primarily appearing in portions of Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and western Colorado. Lower rainfall meant less vegetation in both summer and winter, resulting in a species that evolved to live in more widely distributed social groups and lower densities. How did ferrets persist on sites having less prey? Did they need to travel farther, were they more competitive, and did they supplement their diet with other rodents or birds?
It
