day accumulated in the back of my mind: clean nest boxes, weigh kits, disinfect floors, order implant tags, clean hamster colony, order new water bottles, mow preconditioning pens, feed ferrets, defrost tomorrow’s food.
In the evenings, memories of saltwater ocean and love came forward only when I finished my third bottle of beer. My thoughts and emotions of loss were likely not so different from the homesteaders from Europe who arrived in Malta more than one hundred years prior to me. Like them, the promise of the open plains drew me. I had headed west at the first chance for teenage independence to work summers on a Wyoming cattle ranch with my uncle. Spent four years at the University of Montana being trained as a wildlife biologist, and then traveled around the world once again to end up in the plains of central Montana.
Yet upon returning to Montana, the critical satisfaction I had found in its open spaces was gone. I had first met J after four months of living with hunters in the Philippine jungle. While I was digging with a pickaxe to build a hiking trail, she arrived at the wildlife sanctuary, blonde and confident on the back of a British United Nations volunteer’s motorcycle. She left with the British volunteer but came back a week later, tracked me down, enticed me to leave my post on occasion and travel the island, and made me fall in love. We had a tropical island love as only two biologists can, measuring the jungle trees, mapping the extent of coral reefs, surveying fish in the weekend market; reporting on components of natural beauty and living in thatch huts, hers on the coast, mine in the interior jungle. A life of continual motion in a corner of the world, without family so that we grew reliant on each other, yet knew there was an expiration date on our temporary lives when the two-year contract ended, a make-or-break deadline we avoided until the end, when she was first to leave. Yet nothing ended, and when forced to make a decision on the future, we made promises of finding each other back in the United States like high school sweethearts going away to college.
After dinner I went outside to smoke my next-to-last Philippine cigarette, knowing I needed to not be an addict and hoping to leave nicotine and the longings of my past in one symbolic, sweeping gesture of my body and mind. Outside the screen door of my Malta camper, I couldn’t focus on J or the tropics. I couldn’t confuse myself with the persistent question of why I chose to move to Montana, Randy, and black-footed ferrets rather than follow her to the East Coast. The mosquitoes were kept from my nose and mouth by the smoke, but they swarmed my ears, hair, arms, and legs. The mosquitoes of the Hi-Line were worse than those of any tropical forest or swamp. They swarmed on this temperate plain with the spring pulse of water to the point where you inhaled two or three with each breath. They turned the backs of white shirts grey, and then spotted with red where you had slapped one midmeal. I learned to walk fast, from door to door, car to building, home to office, to avoid the growing hemoglobin-seeking cloud from catching up to me as they honed in on my carbon signature. I finished only half the cigarette and retreated into my trailer, spending the next five minutes killing any individuals that followed me inside.
• • •
After the crash of the last wild ferret population in Meeteetse in March 1987, a captive population totaling eighteen ferrets was established at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Sybille Canyon Wildlife Research facility. This included the critical late addition on March 1, 1987, of Scarface from Meeteetse, a particularly virile male who helped breed nine of the eleven females. Of the nine bred females, only two produced litters in the spring of 1987, eventually resulting in seven surviving young. It was a surprising success compared to the experiences at Patuxent a decade earlier.
In 1988, thirteen of the fourteen females produced litters, resulting in thirty-four young. There was high hope for the captive breeding program because minimum production numbers seemed to be met. It was at least a small buffer from extinction. Within a few years, the number of ferrets in captivity increased enough to allow the captive population to be subdivided. Individuals were shipped to the National Zoological Park in Front Royal, Virginia, and Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, dividing the population and limiting the risk that a disease outbreak or other catastrophic event at one site would cause extinction of the species. Eventually, ferrets were also housed and bred at zoos in Phoenix, Toronto, Louisville, and Colorado Springs.
Captive breeding was so successful that by 1991, ferrets were beginning to be released into the wild. Demand by states quickly exceeded supply, so a movement began to start small-scale captive breeding programs at the state level for those states that wanted ferrets. Captive breeding buildings and preconditioning pens were built in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona. By 2002, when Randy brought me back to the Hi-Line, the newly created Montana ferret facility had a couple of years of experience under its belt. Randy had already hand-picked as his captive breeding team leader Valerie Kopsco, a thin, energetic biologist from New Jersey with a soft spot for cowboys. The previous year, she had already tested the specially designed outdoor pens and indoor cages with a few trial ferrets. I was brought on as a second hand ahead of the big push to finally breed ferrets successfully and raise young kits in Montana.
We followed the husbandry protocol developed by the ferret recovery program on the basis of its success with the last eighteen individuals from Meeteetse. A sort of how-to guide for ferret keeping, this protocol had evolved over time with guidance from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Captive Breeding Specialist Group of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), and the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, and with hands-on expertise of many devoted biologists over the years at Sybille Canyon, Wyoming. By 1996, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had assumed responsibility for captive breeding from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and the person to contact about any captive breeding question was Paul Marinari. Paul would be the first to deny the label of “Mr. Ferret,” placing credit with the teams and individuals that preceded him, but he more than any other person oversaw the quick acceleration in ferret-breeding success, and developed a smooth and effective operation that produced an annual flow of 150–200 kits.
When I first met Paul in 2002, he was single and lived alone in Sybille Canyon with the ferrets while the technicians that worked with him commuted the two-hour round trip up from Laramie each day. Upon first shaking his hand, I noticed that he had the sharp personality and watchful eye needed to ensure the conditions and care for such a sensitive animal. Originally from Philadelphia, Paul completed his master of science degree from the University of Wyoming by studying ferret behavior in South Dakota and evaluating the detectability of ferrets via night spotlighting surveys. Like a field biologist, to succeed at his job of overseeing captive breeding of black-footed ferrets, Paul dedicated and set the rhythms of his life to ferrets. He lived in a small home on the captive breeding site because caring for ferrets in captivity was not a 9-to-5 job. It required continuous attention and ability to respond to emergencies at all hours of the day and night. Ferrets had to be monitored and fed, and their cages had to be cleaned daily throughout the year. In springtime, monitoring of females was required to determine when they were in estrus to pair them with mates. Then, forty-five days later, they had to be monitored for births and the status of litters. In the summer, there was a need for monitoring and caretaking of vulnerable kits and their mothers. Then, in late summer and fall, kits were preconditioned and transported for release on reintroduction sites from Mexico to northern Montana. After the kits were shipped out to sites by October or November, planning for next year commenced as pedigrees were assessed and potential mate pairings were mapped out for February and March of the coming year based on a formula that aimed to maintain the greatest possible genetic diversity of the captive population. There was little time for vacation, and even less time for a personal life.
• • •
To rear the rarest mammal in the world required specially designed equipment. In Malta we built plywood nest boxes to Paul’s specifications for female birthing. A nest box was a small, sturdy, two-chambered box with a four-inch entry door from the top that could be locked with a latch. At the bottom of the box, a hole was drilled and four-inch-diameter black corrugated tubing was tightly connected that led to a larger plywood box with a Plexiglas front and screen top to resemble above ground exposure. All boxes were kept sterile and painted bright
