I've spent a few days offline, camping and hiking at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota and then drove to Laramie, Wyoming on Sunday the 9th, with a side trip to Devil's Tower in ne Wyoming. Along the way saw a lot of neat country and had some good experiences with thunderstorms, bison, prairie dogs, and long trains full of coal. Photos and posts about that will follow later.
Today, I visited with some folks from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wyoming Field Office in Cheyenne. These are the folks who work on Threatened and Endangered species issues for the federal government in Wyoming. Later, we went to the black-footed ferret conservation facility in northern Colorado and got a tour of that. This is the spot where most of the captive breeding of the ferrets happens and they are prepared for release in the wild all over their historic range. Here is a link to fact sheet about the species, the fact sheet has links to other good web sites to learn more about their biology, conservation, and where they can be found now in the wild and in captivity. They also go into detail about some of the disease threats that pose problems for them.
The ferret was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered on private land in Meeteetsee, Wyoming in 1981. The population dropped to 18 individual and subsequent genetic research has documented that the founder population of today's ferrets was only 7 breeding individuals. This is what biologists call a population bottleneck. So, the captive breeding that goes on carefully matches individuals to try to enhance genetic diversity. The BFFs are dependent on prairie dogs and live in prairie dog towns. They do most of their hunting underground in the burrows and eat on average 1 prairie dog every 3 days (the dogs are about as large or even larger than the ferrets). One interesting countermeasure the prairie dogs sometimes will try is to seal ferrets in the burrows when they know one is there, by blocking all the exit holes with dirt, as the ferrets are not as good at digging as the prairie dogs are.
BFFs are still listed as endangered, but active management has expanded the population and their range in the wild tremendously. Later this month I'll be going to the Meeteetsee site to do some surveys for the BFFs and will report on that. Surveys are done at night with spotlights, the BFFs eyes shine red in the light and then biologists will set traps at the burrows to capture the ferrets so they can be handled and evaluated. Apparently they readily go into the cage traps, we'll see. There are also grizzly bears at that site, so it should be an exciting evening.
Because the BFFs are dependent on prairie dogs, one of the threats to the ferret is the plague that is carried by fleas in the prairie dog colonies. Part of the release protocol for BFFs is that the prairie dog colonies are treated with insecticides to kill the fleas before the ferrets are released and for several years afterward. Here are just a few photos from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment