There may be good news on the horizon for North America’s black-footed ferret population. Never heard of this species? We can’t blame you: Canada’s only native ferret might be the rarest mammal in North America. But thanks to a court ruling this fall, the little mustelid might have a brighter future.
On October 28, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that the U.S. government’s Forest Service “failed to adequately analyze alternatives or justify its decision to expand lethal control measures against prairie dogs—the essential prey of the endangered black-footed ferret.”
First, some backstory: at one time, the prairie-dwelling black-footed ferret’s territory ranged from Northern Mexico, throughout the American Mid-West, and into southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Now, one of the few remaining populations is restricted to Thunder Basin National Grassland, a 553,000-acre federally protected area in Wyoming. This is only because of somewhat successful reintroduction efforts beginning in 1981; similar reintroduction plans were put in place in Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park, though they were even less successful.
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One main reason why the species declined? The near-eradication of grassland prairie dogs. They’re considered nuisance animals—they damage farmers’ fields—but they’re also a main food source for black-footed ferrets. And when a prey population goes down, its predator population follows. In 2002, the U.S. Forest Service put its Grassland Plan—a legal document banning almost all poisoning of prairie dogs, along with imposing other measures to protect the species—in place.
Except…flash forward to 2020: the Forest Service announced that it was going to amend the plan to instead increase lethal measures (shooting, poisoning) to control prairie dogs, along with halting efforts to manage disease outbreaks which were also decimating the population at the time. Conservation groups were, understandably, outraged.
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“The Forest Service should be ashamed of their plan to use shooting, poisoning, and unmitigated plague outbreaks to crush populations of native wildlife for the benefit of livestock grazing and local ranchers,” said Matt Sandler, the legal director with Rocky Mountain Wild, one of the groups that challenged the proposed 2020 amendments to the original Grassland Plan.
Rocky Mountain Wild, along with other conservation groups, successfully brought the case to the Denver appeals court, and after a slow legal fight, late last month, two judges ruled that the Forest Service, with its proposed amendments, did not adequately assess “the combined effects of reduced acreage, density control, poison, plague and shooting,” which it had previously admitted could lead to “the eradication of prairie dog populations on Thunder Basin.”
The ruling is a major victory for the prairie dog—a keystone species in a grassland environment—and the black-footed ferret. “Prairie dogs are a vital and irreplaceable component of grasslands that many other species, including endangered black-footed ferrets, rely on for their survival,” said Megan Backsen of Western Watersheds Project, a North American non-profit headquartered in Idaho. “We are very pleased that the Court recognized what the Forest Service overlooked.”
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Meanwhile, science is working to more directly bring back the continent’s native ferret population. Slowly. A cloned ferret named Antonia—after mating with her black-footed ferret partner, Urchin—recently gave birth to two viable offspring at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
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