Читать книгу Wild Again - David S. Jachowski - Страница 8

CHAPTER 2

Decline toward Extinction

During summers when I was young boy, I would go with my father to his office. In the early morning, the building was filled with scientists crossing paths as they either headed into the field or started their day of typing on computers. Barely knowing how to type, I volunteered to work in the field with Rob Hinz. Rob was a pastor at a local church on the weekends and trapped meadow voles for scientist James Nichols during the week. Fifty years old, with a round belly and balding hair, Rob always wore three layers of heavy cotton shirts, even on the hottest of days.

“Sweat keeps you cool,” Rob would say. Water kept against skin. I found no reason to doubt him; his logic seemed sound.

We began checking traps at dawn so that we would be done before the heat of the day, working our way up and down a grid of trap lines in the tall, humid fields of Maryland. We checked to see whether the door was shut on each small, shiny, aluminum box trap that was placed under a neatly cut, rectangular square of plywood to keep it from baking in the sun. Each trap location was marked by a four-foot wooden post planted into the ground, painted white on the top so we could find it in the thick grass.

As we walked through the grid, checking and closing traps, Rob would chain-smoke cigarettes. Finishing one, Rob would kill the ember on the top of a white post, pinch off the quarter-inch of tobacco from the filter and neatly leave the white tuft on top of the post. “Something for the deer” he would say as he placed the used filter in his canvas shirt pocket before pulling out another stick. He wheezed as he walked in the heat, fifty feet between traps, pouring sweat from his brow that dripped down into the folds of his neck and was absorbed in his faded cotton layers. Yet when he had an animal in hand, his round plump fingers were dexterous and gentle. He held the small brown vole barehanded, gripping it by the scruff of its neck, knowing the intent of its sharp incisor teeth but avoiding little nips, reading me data to record on the clipboard. Trap 5M, female, VP, medium nipples . . . 230 grams.

Finishing our grids for the day and resetting traps, we drove back to the office, passing ponds and mowed fields that served as study plots for other scientists. Groves of mixed hardwood trees covered with little metal tags and brightly colored flagging, signs of scientists at work. On the forest floor, metal cages and trays lay at set intervals, collecting falling leaf litter. I wondered who had that job, who found something of interest in what I thought was ordinary. Taking the route past ponds filled with cricket frogs and painted turtles, just before the gravel road gave way to pavement, we passed by a dirt road between two ponds that was blocked off with a sawhorse and a sign that said “Restricted Area—Whooping Crane Staff Only.” On quiet days in the surrounding fields, I could hear the sounds of cranes coming from across the motes of ponds. Goose-like calls that were more awkward and guttural. Having seen pictures in my bird field guide, I envisioned the vibrations starting far down the cranes’ long white necks, emerging from their beaks opened slightly ajar and serving like the flare of a trumpet. I could only imagine what existed beyond that sign. Compared to the common field mice and frogs I was used to, the cranes were mysterious, critically endangered dog-sized birds from the Great Plains. They were a first taste of the sentimental and at the same time selfless exhilaration of rarity, knowing something so rare was being carefully hand-raised in Patuxent, Maryland—a protected oasis surrounded by freeways, city parks, and subdivisions.

• • •

In the afternoons I would sit with my father in his office, eating my lunch and watching him eat without stopping work. A field biologist turned administrator, he would awkwardly hunt and peck for keys on a computer while slowly eating Fig Newtons and an apple. It was the same small lunch every day, washed down with four or five cups of coffee. Being otherwise surrounded by field biologists, I couldn’t yet understand how he found contentment in a thirteen-hour-a-day indoor work routine that included trips in on weekends to “catch up.”

It was only that summer that I learned that to a former field biologist, “catching up” meant getting away from the computer and phone he was tied to during the workweek. Because of a recent change in leadership at the research center, the historic Merriam Laboratory was being put through a cleaning frenzy. As with any political regime change, the new director wanted to make a gesture of renewal. Out with the old and in with the new by way of dumping an attic full of old note cards and field notes to make room for the current and next generation of biologists who needed room for their old laptop computers and floppy disks. On Saturdays my father would make the one-hour drive to Patuxent from our home to comb through the old file boxes stacked by the Dumpster, beating the Monday morning trash pickup and squirreling away boxes of unpublished, original reports from Aldo Leopold, letters from C. Hart Merriam, and other irreplaceable historical documents from an era before compact discs and hard drives.

“Last weekend I found a box of ferret pictures you might like to see,” he said, knowing I had been pestering him lately about getting a pet ferret, a European polecat from the local pet store just like my neighbor, Brian Peel, had.

“Wild ferrets?”

“Yes, very rare black-footed ferrets from out West. Much neater than the ones at the pet store.”

My only experience with the West as a child was books and movies and the Zuni fetishes my mother had purchased for me on winter trips to Arizona with her sister. On her latest trip she bought a book for me telling of the ceremonial symbolism of the fetishes. It was a form of religion I could wrap my head around, animals at its center, based upon the land.

At night, I would set up the Zuni fetishes in my attic bedroom—small carved rock animals that I kept packed in a woven pine needle bowl with a tight-fitting lid. I wrapped the smooth, polished, brightly colored stone animals in scraps of leather I found in the basement and bits of sage mailed from my uncle’s ranch in Wyoming. I would gently unwrap the fetishes, remembering the species and stories but also creating my own as I lined them up on a table by the window. Hearing the slowly lapping waves on the Chesapeake Bay through the old oak trees outside my window, I would light candles, turn out the lights, and feel the individual fetishes in my hand as the book said, squeezing tight and letting go, closing my eyes and trying to let go, hoping for a vision.

With no luck, I would repeat the ceremony on another night, arranging the figurines in a different order, leaving some in the bowl. I thought it might be my trappings that blocked the spirits. I tried burning some of the sage to clear the air as I had seen in movies. I took my shirt off to clear a pathway to my heart, where I was told my soul resided. Seconds felt like minutes that felt like hours as I waited, hurriedly blowing out candles and putting my shirt on only as I heard my father coming up the stairs.

The visions never came.

After I finished my sandwich I went up to the attic of Nelson Lab. It was the only room without the bustle of scientists typing on keyboards. My father gave me the padlock combination, and fixing the numbers in place, I released the white-painted door that stuck tight from the humidity and lack of use. Inside, the attic was dark, wooden, stuffy with the smell of old paper and dry, rotted leather. A thirty-foot row of wooden file card cabinets filled the middle of the room and contained five hundred thousand index cards with bird observations dating back more than a hundred years. Metal cabinets filled with measuring tapes, binoculars, and metal tree tags lined the outside walls and made small alcoves. Old cardboard boxes were stacked in corners, filled with field notebooks and research reports from projects finished or abandoned—questions were answered, funding ran out, forests were cut down, researchers moved on, species went extinct.

I walked a lap around the island of wooden bird-card file cabinets and found the stack of cardboard boxes he had set to the side, marked “Do Not Discard.” Inside the first box, I found a stack of papers with original large glossy black-and-white photographs of a black-footed ferret. There were also letters, memos, and reports from Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Saskatchewan, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Utah, and Kansas. The oldest was a typed letter by a South Dakota trapper, Ralph Block, who reported his first ferret sighting in 1947: “The first observance I ever had of one was in northeast Nebraska, Knox County. I trapped this animal with a steel trap and wondered what this strange looking animal was and thought this was a freak mink. I had not entirely concluded this idea, but sent it in with a shipment of furs to a fur house, Sears Roebuck. In a few days my check for the other furs came along with a notation on the grading chart, noting that there was also a pelt of no value.”

• • •

Each day, after a morning of trapping voles, I would return to the attic and stay late into the afternoon while my father worked in the office below. I read through dozens of letters from farmers, ranchers, housewives, and professors. All of them reported to have seen a ferret on their property or crossing a road at some point during the 1950s and ’60s. Most were obviously inaccurate, and all were nearly impossible to verify or highly questionable, like this letter from John Francis:

About 6 years ago in August or September I took a trip up to near Lemmon S Dakota to drive a tractor. I worked this plow and tractor work 3 seasons. On one trip I visited a coffee buddy’s cousin that had migrated to there from Lewis, KS. He had a real type sheep ranch, very well kept with clean water by well and pump and beautiful fields of alfalfa and grass and wheat. I drove my car to his sheep ranch and visited. I had an auto track for about a mile with thick weeds bumper high. I was watching my trail in, when a possible ferret or weasel of kind jumped about ten feet ahead of me and cleared both trails in a 2-second of time and into the thick high grass. I could only see that he looked like a long stove pipe, and was used to a car or pickup, and was out of sight.

The letters by trapper Ralph Block were consistently the most reputable and interesting. I pictured a short, stocky man who would always be found in plaid shirt and cowboy boots, sporting a mustache and driving an old pickup truck covered with a film of dust from prairie dirt roads. In 1949, Ralph was hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for predator and rodent control, stationed out of Isabel, South Dakota. He began to spend extended amounts of time on prairie dog colonies as he carried out his job to exterminate them. He submitted typed stories of his interactions with black-footed ferrets, making repeated trips to see them during his trips to “clean up” remaining prairie dogs after a poisoning event and occasionally on his weekends and free time. A cowboy conservation biologist, he was killing the West while also beautifully recording its biota for posterity. After a week of reading, I concluded that Ralph had come up with more sightings than all of the others whose reports were in the file.

In the spring of 1950 my second observation of a black-footed ferret was at a location about 14 miles southwest of Isabel on what is called Corn Creek in a large prairie dog town, on the Forrest Thompson Ranch, Section 24 T. 15 R.21. This was an adult male which I procured with .22 rifle, froze, and packed in dry ice and now on exhibit in the National Museum at Washington, D.C. This was an adult male estimated (I believe if I am remembering right) 4 years old, was about 22–24 inches long, carrying several wood ticks plus some gopher ticks. I received a very complimentary letter regarding this from the institution as they had never been able to get a single specimen and at the time it consisted of 4 full floors of exhibit.

In the summer of 1950 the service entered into an agreement with the Rosebud Sioux tribal enterprise for control of extensive prairie dog towns on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. This was a project that involved the use of 1080 poisoned oats (Sodium Fluoracetate). This program involved the use of a crew of native Indians who assisted me in treating large holdings of prairie dogs on range lands at the request of landowner, lessee or tenant with possession of the land (with signed agreement-waiver release). I made my headquarters in Rosebud, had a crew of from 5 to 6 men, and during that summer treated well over 34,000 acres. It was during this summer that I saw two ferrets living in two separate prairie dog towns. At this time I started getting interested in them myself. One was living at a place between Norris and Belvidere, South Dakota, on the Baxter Berry Ranch, of the late ex-governor Tom Berry. There was a terrific acreage in this dog town (several sections). In fact, the village of Norris was completely surrounded on all sides by prairie dog town. Grass was almost non-existent and even the grass roots in the sod were eaten by these rodents. Land owners paid for the grain at cost and wages of the crew on a revolving basis.

The next ferret was this same summer in a prairie dog town on a fork of the White River northeast of Blackpipe day school on Indian land operated by Indian ranchers. I believe their name was Blue Dog (I have since lost notes on this).

It was during this summer that I replaced Walt Stammerjohn, MCA from western Nebraska loaned to South Dakota for assistance as our group of hunters numbered only 4 and the agreement stipulated a full season of rodent control on the reservation.

On ferret #4, the last mentioned, the prairie dog town was also treated with 1080. Since there was an early day fort located in the area on the banks of the White River tributary, I visited this area on weekends and every chance while nearby would drive over to the particular area when I first noticed #4. In nearly every instance there he would be, nearly like waiting for me. I would just stop in the area, wait a while and he would emerge from a prairie dog hole. Sometimes just part way out, other times entirely out. I especially want to mention that this town was a 100% kill of prairie dogs.

The following summer [1951] an extensive program was carried out on the Pine Ridge Reservation. . . . I used 3 crews of Indian labor putting out something just over 12 tons of 1080 on 43,137 acres. It was this summer also that 2 different ferrets were seen and both of these “survived” the treatment. One near the village of Kyle and the other in the vicinity of Oglala. John Limehan was owner and operator; also he operated a small country store. At that time there was an Indian agent or farm agent, Willis Adams, who assisted me a lot, arranging for lunches, helping to hunt up owners (mostly Indian operators) for releases, inquiring of finances and the like. He was one that I took along who got a look at the last mentioned ferret (#6). The Superintendent (Sanderson) at that time of Pine Ridge Agency once went along to supposedly also look at it, but, of course, wandered off in a nearby untreated section with his .22 rifle obviously unmoved to anything but the excitement of shooting off a few prairie dogs.

• • •

The first attempt to restore black-footed ferrets was linked to Walt Disney of all people, in his company’s production of the film The Vanishing Prairie. In 1953, federal predator and rodent control agent George Barnes was enlisted to live trap three black-footed ferrets from Fall River and Jackson Counties, South Dakota, and release the ferrets into Wind Cave National Park for the film crew. Of the three he brought to Wind Cave, only one survived until January 1954, but the precedent was set. The survival of at least one suggested restoration was possible, and the park requested six more ferret pairs. To increase the supply of ferrets for relocation, the State of South Dakota mailed a specially designed round aluminum trap to each rodent control specialist working in the western part of the state. With Disney-like visions of heroes and villains, my young mind could not yet wrap itself around the thought of enlisting the prairie dog exterminators to save the declining predator. I couldn’t understand how biologists who were hired to kill, wholesale and without remorse, the singular prey species on which ferrets depend, were at the same time trying to save the predator.

Over the following years, Ralph saw ferrets on multiple prairie dog towns across South Dakota, including one to the north in Haakon County near the Cheyenne River:

Not over a mile or mile and a half from the Bridges Day school on land owned by Chicago Cattle Co. (now known as Western Cattle Co.)—owner Wm. Norton. This one the crew also saw; in fact, it sat or stood immobile all the while we ate lunch nearby—almost like a statue. By the way, they can be caught easily. At that time the area was being extensively tested for oil leases. They used long electric detonator wires of plastic coating wound loosely. They made ideal snares.

In the summer of 1956 I worked a joint program on Standing Rock Reservation, Sioux County, North Dakota, Carson County, South Dakota. While working I stayed at Fort Yates, North Dakota. It was then that one more ferret was observed in a prairie dog town in just about the exact site of old Fort Manuel Lisa, just above the mouth of Hunkpapa Creek, Careen County, South Dakota. This fort was built in 1812 as a depot from which to hold the loyal Missouri River Indians loyal to the American cause. It was in reality a military post built under the guise of a fur post and destroyed in 1813 by allied Indian tribes. Also Fort Manuel is the purported grave of Sacagawea (Bird Woman) guide for Lewis and Clark in 1804. There is a lot of controversy regarding whether or not Sacagawea was buried there; some historians claim she is buried in Oregon. This ferret was located on a prairie dog town which could be about 10 miles below the North Dakota line and by the way this prairie dog town also yielded many relics from an ancient Arikan village which sat on the identical site. I should state prairie dogs seem to like an area that has had a farmstead for habitat. They like ridges where old fence lines were located.

The last one I saw was in 1958 in a dog town at a point just about almost straight south of the city dump of Mobridge, South Dakota or 2–2½ miles east of the Sitting Bull monument west of Mobridge on land at that time owned by Ted Sogge, who has since moved due to inundation by Oahe reservoir.

Ralph tallied a total of thirteen individual ferrets from 1949 to 1964, a period when he also “treated” 145,000 acres of prairie dogs with Compound 1080 and strychnine across South Dakota, North Dakota, and adjoining lands in Nebraska. After reading pieces of Ralph’s life for the previous few weeks, I was crushed when I read in Ralph’s last letter that he believed that “these little animals do not succumb to eating treated prairie dogs” but rather survive and just shift their diet to other things. I thought he knew his work over the past fifteen years was killing off the species he was growing to love. He had observed too much, come to know them so well, yet denied his actions had consequences like a guilty war veteran trying to justify the actions of his youth: “Walt Stammerjohn worked Rosebud and saw quite a few. Also, he worked in Carson County when I did and saw quite a few. Harvey Gibson, mentioned [he saw] six. I think he lived in He Dog village when he worked at Rosebud. I forgot to ask William Pullin how many he has seen. I’m sure Geo Baines at Custer could add on. For now they are still with us and I don’t feel they are in the whooping crane, key deer or dodo bird class.”

• • •

In 1964, biologists under Stuart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, began putting together a list of rare and endangered animals, a precursor to the Endangered Species Act. That same year, Secretary Udall appointed an advisory board to investigate the federal government’s role in killing wildlife, including prairie dogs, wolves, bobcats, grizzly bears, and a host of other species. Called the Leopold Board after chairman Dr. A. Starker Leopold (oldest son of the famous wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold), the group put forward what became known as the “Leopold Report” in March 1964. They acknowledged that the black-footed ferret was “near extinction, and the primary cause is almost certainly poisoning campaigns among the prairie dogs,” asserting that “far more animals are being killed than would be required for effective protection of livestock, agricultural crops, wildlife resources, and human health.”

By 1964, the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (predecessor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) was still poisoning more than a quarter-million acres of prairie dogs per year, but South Dakota still had some remnant prairie dog colonies. As eloquently described by Faith McNulty in the book Must They Die?, bureau employees in South Dakota like Bill Pullins were pulled in two directions. While still mandated to assist in the extirpation of prairie dogs, bureau employees also were increasingly thinking about conserving the black-footed ferret, wondering why there were so few ferrets and what could be done to increase their numbers.

Even with this newfound interest in studying ferrets, there were very few known populations left to study. The first official study of ferrets was done on Earl Adrian’s ranch a few miles south of White River, South Dakota, where they had been spotted in 1964. South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks biologist Bob Henderson had a passion to study the rare mammal, but his boss allowed him to take up the hobby only if it did not interfere with his other duties. Henderson promised to keep his ferret studies under the radar, but even so, Earl Adrian didn’t want a government employee on his land. Instead, he forced Henderson and his colleague, Dr. Paul Springer at the South Dakota Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, to hire his son, Dick Adrian, to conduct the study.

Bob Henderson and Dick Adrian set up camp on a southern prairie dog colony on the family ranch and observed ferrets day and night from August 1964 to August 1965. They were the first researchers to use spotlights at night to find the reclusive animal, watch its behavior, and learn about its ecology. True to the original 1929 description by Ernest Thompson Seton, a ferret is “like a mouse in cheese, for the hapless prairie dogs are its favorite food.” Ferrets never left the prairie dog colonies, only coming out of the labyrinth of underground prairie dog burrows for a few hours during the night, hiding behaviors from the researchers who could only guess how they killed prairie dogs and reared their young. On occasion, the researchers saw a female ferret move her litter across the prairie dog town single file like a “toy train.” In the end, like so many wildlife studies, they raised more questions than answers, still wondering how often ferrets dispersed between colonies, and asking a question that still puzzles ecologists: How many prairie dogs does a ferret require?

At the same time, the critical question was how many other ferret populations existed. Black-footed ferret sightings became increasingly rare. Hundreds of letters came in with word-of-mouth stories of ferret-like creatures that almost always sounded more like confusion with the common long-tailed weasel. Sightings were reported in Kansas, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and Manitoba. In the official record, the majority of ferret sightings occurred in South Dakota. Yet even in South Dakota, confirmed ferret sightings were rare. Never more than twelve in a year, and of all confirmed sightings between 1950 and 1972, more than 58 percent were from Mellette County, where Bob Henderson and the growing ferret research team focused their attention.

The following summer, Dick Adrian quit the ferret project and was replaced by Con Hillman, an ambitious North Dakota farm boy with a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management from Utah State University. Con was keen to make the study of ferrets in South Dakota part of his master’s degree research, and in July 1966 he found a female with a litter of five on a ranch owned by Jim Carr. Over the next sixteen months he would find sixteen more, following a total of three litters around in the night and making careful notes of their behaviors: where they moved, what they ate, and patiently waiting by their burrows to see how long they stayed underground. He reported his research as a master’s thesis defended at South Dakota State University in 1968, and that same year summarized his findings for the public in the short, pioneering paper hidden on the 433rd page of the Transactions from the 33rd Annual North American Wildlife Congress unassumingly titled “Field Observation of Black-Footed Ferrets in South Dakota.”

As I moved forward through the attic file boxes into 1968, 1969, and 1970, reports from South Dakota became more frequently typed and official sounding. A series of scientific publications and symposium proceedings were produced by Con Hillman, Bob Henderson, and a variety of other biologists who collaborated in Mellette County ferret research. I pulled out details from scientific papers showing that scat analyses proved that ferrets almost exclusively fed on prairie dogs. Monitoring reports showed that ferrets rarely left prairie dogs colonies and that they required sizeable prairie dog colonies of at least twenty-five acres in size, and more likely close to a hundred acres in size. All told, during the eleven years of studying ferrets in Mellette County, ninety ferrets were located, and at least thirty-eight young were produced. Yet rather than acting as a single, large, healthy population, the ninety confirmed ferrets were highly dispersed across Mellette and the surrounding eight counties—evidence that this wasn’t the last stronghold but rather just the last fragments of a species on the decline.

Although the meat of the scientific reports on ferrets in Mellette County was focused on methodology and reporting results, the final concluding paragraphs began to consistently end with increased calls for ferret and prairie dog conservation. Poisoning continued throughout much of South Dakota as federal agencies contradicted each other and state and local farm bureaus continued to lobby for prairie dog control. State governors, congressmen, and even biologists continued to believe that prairie dogs were pests to be eradicated. Concessions were sometimes made to at least look for ferrets prior to poisoning—to “clear” the area and confirm that ferrets did not exist where poisoning was to occur. Unfortunately, the surveys were often done during the day and by untrained personnel with prairie dog vendettas. Even if done correctly by those who had actually seen a ferret in the wild, it would have been difficult to find a reclusive ferret during a quick prairie dog “clearance” survey. Thus by claiming to not see a ferret, biologists were able to justify their poisoning of prairie dogs on thousands of acres of ferret habitat on private and public lands. By 1968, a frustrated Robert Henderson left South Dakota. Dr. Springer was reassigned to North Dakota.

• • •

While Con and others were undertaking that first detailed study of ferrets, in October 1966, the Endangered Species Preservation Act was passed by Congress, extending full protection to thirty-six birds, six reptiles and amphibians, twenty-two fish, and fourteen mammals, including the black-footed ferret. That year, funds were appropriated for Dr. Ray Erickson, Assistant Director of Endangered Wildlife Research for the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, to start a captive population of black-footed ferrets at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center on the far side of the country. More than two decades before my father started work there, Patuxent was world renowned because of its history of innovative, successful captive breeding programs for critically endangered whooping cranes, bald eagles, and California condors.

Ray Erickson didn’t get his first batch of wild black-footed ferrets until 1971, when six ferrets were captured from Mellette County and taken to Patuxent. Between 1968 and 1971, Patuxent staff had been practicing by raising European polecats, a stubby-bodied Eurasian ferret species that is the black-footed ferret’s closest living relative. Over three years, they had remarkable success, producing more than 150 offspring and testing breeding and weaning procedures, canine distemper vaccines, and designs for nest boxes and holding pens.

Of the six ferrets transported from South Dakota, four died from a modified live-virus canine distemper vaccine before even arriving at Patuxent. It was a vaccine that worked well on European polecats to prevent a disease now known to be 100 percent fatal to black-footed ferrets. But black-footed ferrets were sensitive to the live-virus treatment, and only males FM-71–1 and FM-71–2 survived.

On September 15, 1972, Con Hillman captured female ferret FF-72–1, injected her with a killed canine distemper virus vaccine this time, and drove her to a secure National Guard compound in Rapid City, South Dakota, for a three-week quarantine. After surviving her period of isolation, on October 4, the female ferret was transported by Con to Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., where she underwent an additional month of quarantine at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center prior to being placed in a cage adjoining FM-71–1 and FM-71–2 on November 6.

The records I found in the Patuxent attic on ferret husbandry for the three individuals were exhaustive and repetitive. They were being fed a daily diet of 50 grams of dry mink feed, 100 grams of dried dog food, and 20 cc of corn oil—a far cry from killing a prey item that outweighs you by a quarter of your body weight. Prairie dogs bite with sharp incisors, mob you with family members if you venture out during the day, and bury you underground when you are sensed in one of their burrows. Wild lions hunting wildebeest on the Kalahari have nothing on the black-footed ferret hunting prairie dogs on the Great Plains.

But now this relationship was being lost, prairie dog without predator, predator without prey. The ferret population in Mellette County was in a mysterious and precipitous decline. Between 1973 and 1974, three more Mellette County ferrets were trapped and brought to Patuxent. After 1974, no ferrets were seen in Mellette County or in any of the adjacent counties where they had been observed in the past. Ferret searches intensified as the newly established Black-footed Ferret Recovery Team developed a recovery plan in the event that captive breeding might take off or another population might be uncovered. Hundreds of reports came in of ferrets spotted in Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nebraska, Canada, and South Dakota. Most of these reports were of little use, unable to be confirmed or far away from prairie dog colonies where ferrets were likely confused with long-tailed weasels. Other reports were more credible, like one dated August 6, 1974, from eminent big cat expert Dr. Maurice Hornocker, who reported seeing a ferret running across Interstate 80 twenty miles west of Laramie, Wyoming, at 9:30 in the morning. All of the reports were scribbled on or stapled to a piece of paper on which it was written that they were unable to be verified or not worth following up before they were filed away only for official records. At the same time, black-footed ferrets were officially considered extirpated in Canada, as well as Texas and Oklahoma, with other states to follow soon afterward.

At Patuxent, captive breeding had stalled. The black-footed ferrets were not breeding successfully like their European polecat surrogates with which the biologists had been practicing for years. Husbandry and feeding regimes were altered and tested with almost no success. In 1976 and 1977, one of the two surviving females produced a litter each year, but all ten kits were either stillborn or died within days of birth.

At the bottom of the last box of files, the final report was dated 1979. By then all captive female ferrets had died, and only a single male remained. He perished later that year, and I thought that there could be few things as delicate as a black-footed ferret. The last individual of an entire species was housed in a building just down the road in suburban Maryland, minutes from the Baltimore–Washington Parkway, and less than an hour from the White House. The leading experts in the world on captive breeding and species conservation had failed. I looked for other file boxes with ferret records. I believed there must be more boxes, more letters, more reports. Something to continue the story, let me believe there were still hidden corners of the western U.S. where the species might persist.

I went down to my father’s office. He was on the phone so I waited just outside the door, trying to listen for the end of his conversation. I was confused, distraught, I wanted to know there were still ferrets out there. I wanted him to tell me they had been rediscovered. As he hung up the phone I walked in and sat in the wooden chair opposite his oak desk.

“Has anyone seen a ferret since Patuxent?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe there are ferret biologists working in Wyoming.”