The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, then found alive on a Wyoming ranch
In 1979 the black-footed ferret was written off as extinct. Two years later a small surviving population turned up near Meeteetse, Wyoming. Captive breeding from those few animals has since returned the masked hunter to eight western states, Canada and Mexico, and in 2021 scientists even unveiled a cloned ferret named Elizabeth Ann.
Roughly the size of a mink, the ferret wears a sooty black mask across a pale buff face, with dark feet and a black tail tip. It hunts alone at night, and up to 90 per cent of what it eats is prairie dogs, which it often catches asleep in their own burrows. It then moves into those burrows to live. Tracking in snow near Meeteetse showed ferrets poking into 68 prairie dog holes for every mile they covered in a night.
Its fate has been tied to its prey. As prairie dog numbers fell through the twentieth century and sylvatic plague spread, the ferret declined toward oblivion. After the Wyoming rediscovery in 1981, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service began breeding them in captivity and releasing them from 1991 to 2009. By 2015 more than 200 mature adults lived in the wild across 18 populations, four of them self-sustaining. The IUCN had listed it as extinct in the wild in 1996 but moved it back to endangered in 2008. Captive-bred animals ran smaller than wild ones, though released ferrets quickly regained historical sizes.
The species has deep roots. It probably split from a European ancestor, alongside the Asian steppe polecat, somewhere between 500,000 and two million years ago, perhaps on the land bridge of Beringia. The steppe polecat is so similar that the two were once considered the same species; the ferret differs mainly in shorter, coarser fur and larger ears. Fossils from a Nevada cave are at least 750,000 years old, and prairie dog remains show up at several of the same sites, evidence of a very long partnership. Other fossils suggest large ground squirrel colonies could also sustain ferrets.
Family life follows the prairie calendar. Females give birth to one to five kits in May and June underground, and the young first peek above ground in July at about six weeks. They leave home between late summer and autumn and can breed at one year old.
Source: Black-footed ferret
