August 2018
It’s disappointing when the sun comes up after 12 hours of searching and you still haven’t captured a Black Footed Ferret. Not a lot of people can share that experience, so you might just have to trust me on that.
First, some background– just about 30 years ago, Black Footed Ferrets were in sharp decline due to shrinking prairie dog populations (their primary prey), disease, and habitat loss. In fact, they were declared “Extinct in the Wild” in 1987. The future did not look bright for these little guys until a captive breeding program helped to increase the population, and today we classify them as endangered rather than extinct. This is good news, and hopefully as these animals continue to breed in the wild, we will not have to worry about them at all. However, for now, we must keep track of these reintroduced populations, which has some peculiar challenges.
Many animals are nocturnal– owls, raccoons, foxes, bats, scorpions, the list is actually pretty long. Nocturnal behavior can be adaptive– either for hunting purposes, or for escaping hunters. Humans, however, did not develop this adaptation. Our brains have an intricate process for chemically maintaining circadian rhythms, so that we sleep at night and are awake during the day. Black Footed Ferrets, interestingly enough, are one of those nocturnal animals, though. They hunt prairie dogs at night, and sleep in burrows during the day. Our sleep schedules are incompatible to say the least. We can’t expect the ferrets to change their sleep schedule for us, so any humans who are interested in surveying their populations is going to have to go temporarily nocturnal.
Wyoming Fish and Game, being the agency responsible for these surveys, asked the BLM for volunteers to work from sunset to sunrise for 3 days. Unsurprisingly, us four plucky CLM interns working in the Rawlins Field Office jumped on the opportunity. We had no idea what we are in for, but after a fun week of Wyoming Toad surveys with the state Fish and Wildlife agency, we were excited for any opportunity to meet with other government agencies and learn more about how we can help endangered species. We showed up to Shirley Basin at 4pm, bright eyed and bushy tailed, to get trained for the night ahead. At sunset, we headed out to begin the search for our new BFF (Black Footed Ferret).
SOOOOOOOOOOOO Cuuuuuuuute!!!!! Black Footed Ferret
With spotlights in hand and traps in backpack, we searched and became familiar with the nighttime wildlife. Badgers are angry creatures, especially when we would follow them into their burrows, mistaking them for a ferret (it’s dark, okay?!). Foxes run away at first sight. Cows are just always awake, it seems. Pronghorn Antelopes look strangely like ferrets when their heads are low to the ground as they graze, but they often run in groups, so that’s a pretty useful diagnostic. We didn’t see any coyotes, but we definitely heard them as they announced their successful hunts throughout the night. Birds of prey look much larger when they are standing on the ground (and, as a dinosaur enthusiast, I was always happy to see them). Falling into a prairie dog burrow is embarrassing, and I was glad nobody could see me in the dark when it happened. Black Footed Ferret sightings were relatively rare in comparison to other animals, and they were often very hesitant to walk into the traps when found.
After 2 and a half nights of wandering around our assigned plot and capturing not a single ferret, my search partner and I were beginning to think it was all a prank. Maybe the ferrets in our plot were uncapturable. At around 3 in the morning on Thursday, we found out it wasn’t a prank at all. We captured our first ferret and I was so deliriously happy that I could barely talk into the radio to let the processing trailer know we were coming. The three year old female we found was very well behaved as the non-game biologist took her measurements. She had already received her vaccinations against plague and canine distemper when she had been captured in a previous year, but any other captured ferrets would have received those. We released her back to her burrow and set out to continue searching for more ferrets. While I had only caught the one, the overall project was pretty successful in capturing and releasing ferrets.
Anesthesia helps with allowing measurements to be taken
After returning to Rawlins at 9am on Thursday, I immediately fell asleep. The nocturnal lifestyle is probably not for me. Today, I very much enjoyed getting up in the morning for work and I look forward to going to sleep tonight knowing there are some cool BFFs hunting for prairie dogs.