Wild Again. David S. Jachowski
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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.”
CHAPTER 3
Rediscovery
By the early 1980s, 412 preserved black-footed ferret specimens were known to exist in museums, and Elaine Anderson tried to hunt down each one. She eventually created a map of dots showing the collection points of specimens that dated back to the 1880s. The map she came up with roughly tracked the extent of the known range of three prairie dog species (the Gunnison’s, white-tailed, and black-tailed), bounded by Texas and Northern Mexico to the south and by Montana and southern Saskatchewan to the north. The black-footed ferret was a uniquely North American species.
Even prior to the loss of what was known as the last wild ferret population, in Mellette County, South Dakota, in 1974, because of the large potential range map and knowledge of how secretive the species was, some people still harbored hope that another ferret population would be discovered. Tim Clark was one of them. In 1976, after completing his dissertation on prairie dog ecology, with Tom Campbell he created the Biota Research and Consulting firm—a generic title for a small and highly specialized group that focused their efforts on the goal of being the ones to rediscover black-footed ferrets.
Rediscovery of a black-footed ferret population was the kind of event that would make you a celebrity overnight. For a young scientist, it could kick-start a research program and form a funding platform that would last for years if not decades. A hunt that, because of the black-footed ferret’s endangered status, had to begin with a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mr. Ron Nowak
Office of Rare and Endangered Wildlife
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Department of the Interior
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. Nowak:
I am currently making plans for the 1976 black-footed ferret search in Wyoming. As you know my work over the last two years was an extensive search and yielded several localities where reports of ferret sightings are concentrated. What I plan to do this year is conduct an intensive search in one or more areas. The first two areas I would like to thoroughly examine are prairie dog concentrations 1) along Powder River and its principal drainages in NE Wyoming, and 2) Big Sandy BLM area of SW Wyoming.
In a detailed report which I sent your office in late 1974 I discussed the limitations of employing the techniques used in South Dakota [spotlighting] in the sagebrush areas of Wyoming. As a result of this presentation, I would like to as part of this years search to make application to try to live trap ferrets in these two areas. I would use #202 Tomahawk live traps. These are the same design I’ve used over the last year on my pine marten study in Grand Teton National Park.
If a ferret were captured I would follow these procedures: 1) Wyoming Game and Fish biologists and wardens from the area, along with U.S. Fish and Wildlife personnel and BLM biologists would be notified of the find, 2) they would be invited to come to the capture site to observe the ferret, and 3) the ferret would be released in their presence as soon as possible at the capture site. This procedure would conclusively demonstrate the presence of a ferret!
Sincerely,
Tim W. Clark, Ph.D.
Over the following years, Clark and Campbell’s personal mission extended beyond just Wyoming. The search for a remnant ferret population eventually led them to visit a total of eleven states, spending long nights on the prairie searching for tracks, trenches (where ferrets have excavated a prairie dog burrow by kicking dirt out a four-foot stripe of loose dirt), any kind of ferret sign. They surveyed local biologists and took to the air to search for potential large prairie dog colonies, working on the bottom-up hypothesis that if they could find a large prairie dog colony, they might just be able to find a place where ferrets were able to sustain themselves—corners of the prairie where maps were blank and others might have forgotten to check. After exhausting their hunches and with no individual success, they eventually cast their net wider by offering a $250 reward to anyone with information leading to a confirmed ferret sighting.
At the same time, federal biologists were also looking, but with the opposite intent of Clark and Campbell. Under a requirement of the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was charged with confirming the extirpation of ferrets—a political maneuver to ensure that should an area be developed, industries, landowners, and state and local governments could go about their pursuits without concern of lawsuits brought about by affecting the endangered black-footed ferret. Thus, prior to any type of land development, federal biologists like Max Schroeder, Dennie Hammer, and Steve Martin were charged with surveying and declaring the absence of ferrets. They were issued pickup trucks and dispatched to federal lands across the Great Plains to survey and confirm that nothing of legally protected status was going to be plowed over and away. They often tried to cover thousands of acres at a time ahead of the exponentially increasing demand for surface mining, the destructive beast of energy and commerce that scraped away the life of the land to get at the carbon underneath, forsaking one source of carbon for another, more densely packed and able to be burned. After what must have seemed like endless nights searching for ferrets with spotlights, effort reports were filed, sections of the map were marked off. Hope for the existence of black-footed ferrets was decreasing by one large swath of prairie at a time.
• • •
Around the same time, Michael Soulé and Brian Wilcox convened the First International Congress on Conservation Biology in 1978 in San Diego. Although the concept of conserving species had been around for decades in the United States, and for centuries in Germany and India, never before had ecologists taken such a proactive stance toward the protection of the natural world. They took a step away from hard lines of experimental science and reasoning toward a field that blurred the lines between advocacy and the more traditional scientific objectivism. As Soulé and Wilcox would later define the field, “Conservation biology is a mission-oriented discipline comprising both pure and applied science.” It blended traditional biological and ecological sciences with economics, sociology, and education, all in an effort to preserve species in the face of human persecution that was happening at local and global scales.
The urgency of the field was unique, controversially setting a framework within which scientists could enter into the realm of management for the sake of protecting what they study. As tropical ecologist Daniel Janzen would later advocate, “If biologists want a tropics in which to biologize, they are going to have to buy it with care, energy, effort, strategy, tactics, time and cash. . . . If our generation does not do it, it won’t be there for the next. Feel uneasy? You had better. There are no bad guys in the next village. They is us.” Scientists could no longer take the high road and claim that extinction is a natural process, part of Darwinian evolution, and move on to studying the next biological phenomenon.
For a discipline that emphasizes the conservation of biological diversity (the term biodiversity would not be adopted until 1988), extinction was the dirtiest of words. Many of those attending the San Diego meeting had worked on island systems or were still focusing their thoughts on the theory of island biogeography that had been developed by Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson a decade earlier. The influential theory was that the risk of extinction for a species on an island is a function of the size of the island and its isolation from other suitable islands. There was a corresponding belief that on the mainland, habitat fragmentation (in which humans removed habitat and further divided the landscape) similarly affected species. If we isolate a species on one of these virtual islands, such as a patch of forest surrounded by corn fields, the probability of that species going extinct increases. The smaller the patch, the worse off a species would be.
To avoid losing these “island” populations and risking extinction, ecologists began trying