Wild Again. David S. Jachowski
Читать онлайн книгу.
were discovered. We now know that Shep found the last black-footed ferret population, and the species would likely have truly gone extinct, unnoticed without his help. Decades of searching has told us with near certainty what biologists already feared as they removed the last individual from Meeteetse: there were no other black-footed ferrets on the Great Plains. The fate of the species rested in a small number of captive individuals.
CHAPTER 4
Captive Breeding
US Route 191 crisscrosses the Rockies in a nearly straight line, heading north from the Mexico border at Douglas, Arizona. It is a 1,905-mile span of asphalt that passes through Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming before stopping at the south entrance of Yellowstone National Park, then starting up again at the west entrance of Yellowstone in Montana and finishing at the Montana–Canadian border. The last town of consequence before the border is Malta, located where north–south Route 191 intersects east–west US Route 2 just below the 48th parallel. An intersection of consequence because the similarly impressive Route 2 traces the Canadian border for 2,192 miles from Houlton, Maine, on the Atlantic coast to Everett, Washington, on the Pacific coast. Along its path, where Route 2 passes through the open plains of eastern Montana, it is called the Hi-Line, a flat, sparsely populated 402-mile east–west stretch of the globe named by the Great Northern Railway, which started bringing in immigrant families and exporting grain and livestock in 1887.
The Homestead Act of 1862 provided settlers with title to 160 acres of Montana land provided they built a house, planted a crop, and maintained five years of residence. Brushing aside Native American claims to large swaths of the Great Plains, this federal law pulled in homesteaders from the eastern United States as well as Europe. Towns with names like Glasgow, Havre, and Malta were named by the Great Northern Railway to entice residents from Scotland, Sweden, Norway, and other countries farther east to the promise of fertile land and pleasant climates. Other names were likely more utilitarian or locally accurate: Cut Bank, Shelby, Wolf Point, Poplar, Bainville.
Formerly just known as Rail Siding Number 54, Malta was named by a Great Northern official in 1890 when a post office was established. The land around Malta and south to the Missouri River (currently known as Phillips County) was settled later than other parts of the Hi-Line, even those farther west toward the mountains, because it was not suitable for farming wheat as had been promised by the government and railroad pamphlets. In addition to the poor soils, short growing seasons, and brutal winters, families soon found that 160 acres was not enough even for raising livestock. In response, Congress began increasing homestead allotments to 320 and then 640 acres. By 1916 came inevitable drought that pushed many homesteaders to leave or sell off their titles to other families.
Driving any direction out from Malta you see the bones of old homesteads: dirt-floored, crumpled-over log cabins on otherwise open patches of prairie. They are signs of a more active and populated past on the Hi-Line compared to the current sparse matrix of much larger ranches or federal lands. For the fortunate or determined neighbors who were able to consolidate their land holdings, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 boosted cattle ranching by opening federal lands to grazing by privately owned cattle. The land had reached a somewhat stable equilibrium with man—forcing livestock raising instead of wheat farming on the people. Families had to rethink the hundred-acre farms from their homelands and live at thousand-acre scales. For survival, acceptance of this isolation by distance had to be resolute and passed down bloodlines, because individuals might come and go, but families, property lines, and federal grazing leases had to stay intact. This way of life has persisted with few changes over the past eighty years.
• • •
The first time you meet Randy Matchett is likely to be on a dirt road or prairie field camp in remote central Montana just south of the Hi-Line. He is easy to spot in his white oversized pickup truck packed full of tools like a Swiss Army knife. He always carries with him chains and fence posts to tug himself or others out of the mud, a full mechanic’s chest of tools to fix any type of engine (from airplane to generator) on the fly, enough medical gear to serve as a veterinary lab, a rifle to sample coyotes for canine distemper virus, and a sleeping bag and pillow in the back seat to serve as his mobile home. These are tools of the trade for the lead wildlife biologist responsible for the million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. When he steps out of his truck, the first things you would notice are his felt cowboy hat and neatly trimmed, horseshoe-shaped dark mustache around a wry smile. He wears a government-issue uniform of brown denim pants and a button-up beige shirt with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service insignia of a flying goose on his shoulder. As he moves his wiry frame you will notice a slight arch in his back and limp that he attributes to a high school “rodeo” accident.
FIGURE 3. Short-horned lizard (Phrynosoma hernandesi) on the mixed-grass prairie of central Montana.
FIGURE 4. Old homestead in southern Phillips County, Montana.
I first met Randy in 1998 at the University of Montana when he gave a guest lecture on black-footed ferrets. He talked to a group of wildlife biology students about how he had spent the past four years trying to restore some of the Sybille captive stock into central Montana. I was enthralled by his story, but like most University of Montana students, I dreamed of studying the larger mammals—wolves, grizzly bears, or moose—in the mountains. I jotted down his email on the corner of a page in my spiral notebook, and did not think about him again until a few months later when I was graduating and without a job. Lost in the pile of applicants who wanted to work in the mountains, Randy put me in touch with a graduate student who paid me to do a summer job of trapping prairie dogs in central Montana. We translocated hundreds of prairie dogs onto Randy’s refuge to restore populations, and when that three-month job ended and Randy saw that I was still interested in the prairies, he offered to keep me on—a sort of on-the-job screening process that led him to offer me free housing and wages of $16 a day to help monitor his small population of captive-reared black-footed ferrets. I left my small car at the end of the pavement where the government truck Randy had left for me waited, and drove the sixty miles on dirt roads to a field camp he termed “Ferret Camp” that consisted of a handful of small camper trailers parked on an isolated tip of land along the Missouri River.
I was hired to follow the nightly movements of the small group of ferrets Randy was carefully trying to rear in the wild. He trusted his precious animals to me and a fellow drifter, Pete, an out-of-work high school teacher from Kansas. The goal was to keep track of how many of the handful of new wild-born litters would survive, and try to predict how many ferrets Randy might expect to see the following spring. The survival of a large number of kits meant that the Montana habitat was good. Also, the more ferrets that survived, the better Randy’s chances in getting more ferrets for release from Sybille stock the following spring. Like all field biologists, we shifted our lives to that of our study animals: sleeping days and working nights; eating one large meal a day; learning the feeling of a drop in barometric pressure ahead of a storm; judging the time of night by the height and phase of the moon.
We followed the kits every night into the fall, naming each one and tracking its movements between prairie dog burrows. We were collecting points on a map to create a sketch of each ferret’s life history for Randy. We rationed our food to be able to persist on a trip to town for food every two weeks and kept up our nonstop routine until the first week in November, when freezing water lines and winter started forcing us out of the camper trailers and back to the hardtop life of highways and electricity.
Pete left camp first, ahead of the north winds of the first severe cold front. Days shortened and nights grew so cold that I had to bring my truck battery into the trailer to be sure to have enough spark to start the old Dodge the next night. Like a failed homesteader, I felt the forces of weather and solitude pressuring me to leave Montana, yet I had no job to move on to. I dreaded the sharp cut of work that is field biology, from a life of continuous motion to sudden inaction when the fieldwork ends, money runs out, or the animals move on—a separation that was all the more paralyzing because we were working on such a rare and fragile animal, not knowing whether they would make