the birth of conservation biology as a major scientific discipline, its participants formed a society in 1985 and soon thereafter launched an academic journal. The very first issue of the journal, Conservation Biology, published in 1987, opened with a four-page “progress report” by Tim Clark on the conservation of the black-footed ferret. He stated authoritatively on the first line that “black-footed ferrets are the most endangered mammal in North America.”
The remainder of the article painted a similarly grim picture. For what Soulé termed a “crisis discipline,” the black-footed ferret story of Meeteetse served as an ideal case study of conservation biology in practice. The series of events following rediscovery provided the classic example given in textbooks for the next several decades about how conservation biology requires skill sets from many walks of life to restore critically endangered species from the brink of extinction. And examples of ferret recovery efforts also demonstrated how failure to gain broad support and consensus on overall management direction can result in near-catastrophe.
In 1982, the year after rediscovery of ferrets at Meeteetse, researchers counted sixty-one individuals. That number increased in 1983 to eighty-eight and then again to 129 in 1984. The population was thought to be productive enough to exceed requirements of a minimum viable population. This meant that some ferrets could be captured and used as seed stock for captive breeding at the National Zoo, and once again at Patuxent. Yet because of political infighting between the State of Wyoming and a host of researchers and federal agencies, Wyoming decided that ferrets should not leave the state. Because no adequate facility existed in Wyoming to keep ferrets, let alone breed them in captivity, and because Wyoming insisted that any new breeding facility should be paid for by federal and private sources, capturing ferrets for captive breeding was put on hold.
Unfortunately, surveys by Meeteetse researchers found that by August 1985 there were only fifty-eight ferrets. Biologists feared the worst as the population continued to dwindle to thirty-one by September and to sixteen by October. There was great confusion over the cause of such a precipitous decline. Earlier that year plague was reported in the area, but studies of European polecats suggested that ferrets were likely immune to plague (an assumption that later turned out to be wrong; black-footed ferrets are actually highly susceptible to plague, as discussed in later chapters). Regardless, such a precipitous decline made the ongoing debates among state and federal biologists moot. The race was on to save the last few individuals in a last-ditch effort at captive breeding.
In October 1985, six of Meeteetse’s remaining ferrets were captured and transferred to a Wyoming wildlife research facility located in Sybille Canyon in the southern part of the state. Upon arrival, one ferret died of canine distemper virus. Then another died. Finally, because all six were housed in the same room at Sybille, the remaining four eventually contracted distemper and died.
A capture team was immediately sent to collect all remaining ferrets from the Pitchfork Ranch. Six more ferrets were brought to Sybille the following week. These animals did not die of distemper, but six individuals was hardly enough to start a captive breeding program. Certainly, such a number gave the captive breeders and ferrets only a small margin for error. But researchers knew that there was only a small chance that any more ferrets could have evaded capture and survived the canine distemper outbreak that was known to have spread through Meeteetse that year.
However, surveys in 1986 revealed that four individual ferrets survived in the core of the Pitchfork Ranch. There were two males and two females, which were monitored through the summer and found to produce litters of five kits each. Despite this glimmer of hope, by March of the following year it was decided that all known ferrets should be captured and moved to Sybille. In all, eighteen surviving ferrets were captured and taken into captivity. Some stragglers might have avoided this final capture effort, but they likely succumbed to disease or natural mortality in the coming winter or spring. A few might have lived as long as a year or two, but they would have been too few in number to persist and find each other to reproduce. All we know is that no more ferrets were seen in Meeteetse after March 1987.
With the last wild black-footed ferret at Meeteetse captured, something else was lost. Tim Clark paid the Hogg family the $250 reward he had promised for a confirmed ferret sighting, and there was still hope that rare ferret family groups remained hidden in remote pockets of the American West. During the thirty years since the Meeteetse rediscovery, the reward was increased to $5,000 and then to $10,000, but no remnant wild ferret populations were discovered. We now know that Shep found the last black-footed ferret population, and the species would likely have truly gone extinct, unnoticed without his help. Decades of searching has told us with near certainty what biologists already feared as they removed the last individual from Meeteetse: there were no other black-footed ferrets on the Great Plains. The fate of the species rested in a small number of captive individuals.
CHAPTER 4
Captive Breeding
US Route 191 crisscrosses the Rockies in a nearly straight line, heading north from the Mexico border at Douglas, Arizona. It is a 1,905-mile span of asphalt that passes through Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming before stopping at the south entrance of Yellowstone National Park, then starting up again at the west entrance of Yellowstone in Montana and finishing at the Montana–Canadian border. The last town of consequence before the border is Malta, located where north–south Route 191 intersects east–west US Route 2 just below the 48th parallel. An intersection of consequence because the similarly impressive Route 2 traces the Canadian border for 2,192 miles from Houlton, Maine, on the Atlantic coast to Everett, Washington, on the Pacific coast. Along its path, where Route 2 passes through the open plains of eastern Montana, it is called the Hi-Line, a flat, sparsely populated 402-mile east–west stretch of the globe named by the Great Northern Railway, which started bringing in immigrant families and exporting grain and livestock in 1887.
The Homestead Act of 1862 provided settlers with title to 160 acres of Montana land provided they built a house, planted a crop, and maintained five years of residence. Brushing aside Native American claims to large swaths of the Great Plains, this federal law pulled in homesteaders from the eastern United States as well as Europe. Towns with names like Glasgow, Havre, and Malta were named by the Great Northern Railway to entice residents from Scotland, Sweden, Norway, and other countries farther east to the promise of fertile land and pleasant climates. Other names were likely more utilitarian or locally accurate: Cut Bank, Shelby, Wolf Point, Poplar, Bainville.
Formerly just known as Rail Siding Number 54, Malta was named by a Great Northern official in 1890 when a post office was established. The land around Malta and south to the Missouri River (currently known as Phillips County) was settled later than other parts of the Hi-Line, even those farther west toward the mountains, because it was not suitable for farming wheat as had been promised by the government and railroad pamphlets. In addition to the poor soils, short growing seasons, and brutal winters, families soon found that 160 acres was not enough even for raising livestock. In response, Congress began increasing homestead allotments to 320 and then 640 acres. By 1916 came inevitable drought that pushed many homesteaders to leave or sell off their titles to other families.
Driving any direction out from Malta you see the bones of old homesteads: dirt-floored, crumpled-over log cabins on otherwise open patches of prairie. They are signs of a more active and populated past on the Hi-Line compared to the current sparse matrix of much larger ranches or federal lands. For the fortunate or determined neighbors who were able to consolidate their land holdings, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 boosted cattle ranching by opening federal lands to grazing by privately owned cattle. The land had reached a somewhat stable equilibrium with man—forcing livestock raising instead of wheat farming on the people. Families had to rethink the hundred-acre farms from their homelands and live at thousand-acre scales. For survival, acceptance of this isolation by distance had to be resolute and passed down bloodlines, because individuals might come and go, but families, property lines, and federal grazing leases had to stay intact. This way of life has persisted with few changes over the past eighty years.
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