Nature Conservancy Magazine - Hope on the Prairie: The Black-Footed Ferret Returns to Colorado (Celebrating the return of black-footed ferrets and heroes like Gary and Georgia Walker who are making it all possible!)

Hope on the Prairie: The Black-Footed Ferret Returns to Colorado

Once believed extinct, black-footed ferrets are now 
returning to native habitat in Colorado and other states. 

Photo: Chris Pague/TNC

By  Matt Moorhead, The Nature Conservancy’s Southeast Colorado Project Director 

In many respects, hope defines our work at The Nature Conservancy.  In turn, our work fuels that hope.

Take, for instance, my recent experience helping reintroduce black-footed ferrets to their historic home on eastern Colorado’s prairie.

It’s likely that ferrets have been absent from eastern Colorado for more than 100 years.

Entirely dependent on prairie dogs for survival, ferrets were largely the unintended victim of widespread prairie dog extermination campaigns and introduced diseases.

By 1980, the species was believed to be extinct, lost before it had ever really been understood or appreciated.

But, in 1981, the first glimmer of hope faintly appeared in Meeteetse, Wyoming when a single remnant population was discovered by a rancher who reported it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

http://blog.nature.org/science/2013/11/12/black-footed-ferret-reintroduction/