Caring About Conservation: Partnership for Black-footed Ferrets

When Colorado Parks and Wildlife Terrestrial Biologist Jonathan Reitz spotted a pair of green eyes shining back at him in the darkness of a ranch field during a midnight wildlife survey, his heart rate jumped with excitement, not fear. 

Those green eyes were not something to fear. They were something to celebrate because they belonged to one of the most endangered mammals in North America: a black-footed ferret (BFF). 

Reitz is dedicating much of his CPW career to preserving the charismatic buff-colored carnivore with black legs and feet and a distinctive furry black mask over its eyes.

Spotting a black-footed ferret in the wild in the middle of the night in a prairie dog colony on Colorado’s southeastern plains means the year-round work he is doing on CPW’s ferret recovery program is seeing success. And the years of work with private landowners in a unique CPW partnership is paying off.

Black-footed ferrets are endangered and the work to restore them is hard. CPW’s “Black-footed Ferret Management Plan for Eastern Colorado” (2019) describes how “the black-footed ferret was one of the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Even with these protections the species continued to decline and was believed to have gone extinct in the late 1970s.” Ongoing management is critical to BFF survival.

This summer, after years of preparing the ground for this moment – from distributing sylvatic plague vaccine baits to the all-night surveys in frigid Colorado pastures looking for their eerie green eyes shining back in the darkness – Reitz documented the first successful reproduction of black-footed ferrets on the May Ranch, CPW Commissioner Dallas May’s ranch in southeast Colorado.

The plight of the black-footed ferret resonates deeply with May, a longtime rancher and conservationist.

“I had been looking at the black-footed ferret situation since I was in grade school, and when I learned they had become extinct, it felt like a great failure in our society,” May said. “It was a great victory later, in 1981, when the first one was discovered in Wyoming and we learned they actually weren’t extinct.”

The revelation is described in CPW’s BFF Management Plan: “In 1981, a remnant population of ferrets was discovered near Meeteetse, Wyoming. This population experienced significant declines due to canine distemper and sylvatic plague. In 1986 and 1987, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) captured the remaining 18 wild individuals for a captive breeding and species preservation program. These ferrets became the source for all subsequent captive breeding and recovery efforts.”

CPW joined forces with USFWS, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Bureau of Land Management to restore black-footed ferrets to their native range. The Natural Resource Conservation Service has been a big partner with CPW in ferret conservation as well. Their Environmental Quality Incentives Program compensates landowners for acres of prairie dogs at BFF sites.  

Today, Colorado is one of eight states and over 50 total partner agencies involved with the recovery of the species through reintroduction.

Ferrets were first reintroduced to Colorado in 2001 at Wolf Creek, north of Rangely. After dozens were released over several years, that site succumbed to a plague outbreak and collapsed by 2010.

An Eastern Plains reintroduction strategy began in 2013 with the release of 300 ferrets to six Colorado sites over a period of years.

Black-footed ferret recovery efforts began on the May Ranch in 2021, when CPW and May began the process of mapping the 20,000-acre ranch to see if it had enough acres of prairie dogs to qualify for the program.

Now, three years later, there has been evidence of successful reproduction on the property and CPW and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff will be releasing 15 kits on the ranch in November.

Reitz said partnerships with landowners like May are critical to the success of CPW’s recovery efforts. Black-footed ferrets rely on prairie dogs for survival – they live in prairie dog burrows and depend on them as a primary food source.

“The majority of our black-tailed prairie dog population is found on private lands,” Reitz said. “So that really means if we’re going to do something sustainable for ferrets, we need projects on private lands. To have a landowner like Dallas May and his family recognize black-tailed prairie dogs are and should be a natural part of the ecosystem, that’s a very rare situation.”

May said that, for him, it’s about biodiversity. 

“Our ranch may only be 20,000 acres, but it’s home to many species,” May said. “We wanted to create a permanent habitat for them, including black-footed ferrets.”

He said that even though prairie dogs take up forage that could otherwise be used to graze cattle, his goal isn’t to graze every single acre of his ranch. He envisions his ranch as a place where all native species of wildlife can thrive, with prairie dog populations providing a keystone species presence in the ecosystem that bolsters biodiversity.

And May isn’t the only private landowner integral to black-footed ferret recovery. Gary and Georgia Walker, who own a large ranch outside Pueblo, were the first in Colorado to reintroduce black-footed ferrets on their private land back in 2013.

Gary Walker also believes in restoring balance to the landscape. His relationship with prairie dogs is ambivalent; a fall from a horse after stepping in a prairie dog hole left him significantly injured. Despite this, Walker sees the benefit of ecological balance over extermination.

“I have no love for prairie dogs,” Walker said, “but I’m also against poisoning or trapping them. I prefer natural solutions, like having predators such as ferrets to keep the population in check.”

May and Walker both emphasize the role of cattle ranching in maintaining prairie ecosystems.

“Cattle have replaced bison and elk as the large grazers that keep native grasses intact,” May said.

Walker agreed, saying: “Without cattle grazing, grasslands would revert to states that Mother Nature didn’t intend.”

Terrestrial Biologist Ed Schmal, based in CPW’s Pueblo office, has been working with the Walkers for the past 11 years on black-footed ferret restoration on the Walker Ranch.

Schmal said with, “so much private land ownership, there is no way we could do this without the cooperation and commitment of private landowners,” Schmal said. “These guys, ranchers and farmers, they know the land better than any of us could know. Their heart is tied to it. Their livelihood is tied to it. 

“They have an extremely strong conservation ethic. They want to see the wildlife persist as much as we do. They rely on it and know it sometimes better than our staff does. Having them as a partner and as a teammate is extremely vital to getting this work done. We would not be able to do a fraction of this work without their cooperation and commitment.”

Like May, the Walkers are dedicated to protecting the ecosystems on their sprawling ranch and vow to keep the land undeveloped in perpetuity through conservation easements.

“Not to pat myself on the back, but it takes somebody who cares more about the land and the environment than he does about making a lot of money off of the land in development,” Walker said.

Both May and Walker emphasize the importance of USFWS safe harbor agreements, which protect private landowners from liability if the presence of an endangered species impacts neighboring properties. These agreements have been essential for getting landowners like May and Walker on board with ferret recovery. Such protections provide peace of mind for ranchers, who otherwise risk potential legal issues if the presence of endangered species interferes with their property management or neighboring lands.

“We wouldn’t have been able to participate without the safe harbor agreements,” May said. “The work of CPW and organizations like Colorado Cattlemen’s Association was key in making it possible for us to bring in an endangered species without putting our neighbors at risk.”

At every step, restoring black-footed ferrets in Colorado requires a collaborative effort, and that’s just so the work can get started. 

Biologists like Reitz and Schmal, instrumental in CPW’s BFF recovery program, often spend long hours conducting night surveys to spot the rare creatures. Spotting a ferret in the wild is challenging. Teams use spotlights to catch the telltale glow of ferret eyes and monitor burrows to identify individual ferrets using PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags.

The labor-intensive process is essential for tracking the success of reintroduced populations and allows CPW to track wild ferret survival rates, health and population growth.

Reitz said discovering evidence of natural reproduction on the May Ranch was “a big deal because kits born in the wild have a much higher survival rate than those raised in captivity.”

Wild-born ferrets are more adept at navigating their environment’s challenges, facing fewer mortality risks than their captive-bred counterparts. Female BFFs have a typical lifespan of only five years in the wild, with males averaging a little less at four years. 

One of the biggest threats to black-footed ferrets in the wild is predation. To help young ferrets, CPW has been experimenting with predator exclusion methods on properties like the Southern Plains Land Trust. Methods such as badger translocation and mesh electric fencing aim to keep out predators like coyotes and badgers, improving the survival odds of newly released ferrets.

As Preserve Manager at Southern Plains Land Trust (SPLT), CPW Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Jay Tutchton is a partner in this recovery work, often working alongside field staff to monitor ferrets and implement protective measures. He said SPLT worked with CPW to release 30 black-footed ferret kits recently on October 29.

Before the releases, he had spent weeks helping put up electric fence enclosures to capture predators inside the enclosures and move them outside it in anticipation of the black-footed ferret releases.

“We can at least try to buy the ferrets some time to adjust to a new world with predators,” Tutchton said.

The idea to track the behavior of badgers and see if they could pinpoint if they were a predation issue for ferrets came to fruition because of a Director’s Innovation Grant proposed by Reitz, which provided GOCO funding to help create some innovative badger traps and collars to track badger movements.

Reitz suspects predation may be one of the factors limiting reproduction success and the project could provide insight into whether badgers might be one of those factors.

“By keeping predators out for the first few months after release, we give the ferrets a chance to acclimate to their new environment,” Reitz said. “If this method shows promise, we may expand it to other properties.”

Even after the reintroduction work is done, ferret recovery efforts continue year-round. CPW Species Conservation Program Manager Dan Neubaum described early outbreaks of plague in prairie dog colonies that caused collapses in both prairie dog and ferret populations at initial release sites. Now, biologists have refined their approach, knowing precisely when to apply the Delta Dust or Fipronil to treat the prairie dog colonies for plague-carrying fleas, how to make and distribute a plague vaccine hidden in peanut butter pellets resembling blueberries (a method perfected by CPW researcher Dan Tripp), when to reintroduce and when to survey. Reitz is already scheduled to be back out on the SPLT release sites in early December to see how the ferrets are faring.

Despite challenges, both May and Walker remain optimistic about the future of black-footed ferrets on their properties.

May is excited for upcoming releases on May Ranch in November and continues to involve the local community in recovery efforts. Each year, May collaborates with the Lamar school district to give every grade school student the chance to witness a ferret release on his property. May figures this way, at some point, every student who goes through the Lamar system will have seen an endangered species release, and he will have helped impart some of his own passion for caring about conservation to future generations.

The success of CPW’s black-footed ferret recovery program hinges on the dedication of private landowners like Dallas May and Gary Walker. Their commitment to biodiversity and conservation is vital to restoring this species that was once thought extinct.

Every step forward is made with cautious optimism. Neubaum said CPW had first seen evidence of BFF reproduction at a site called the Liberty complex (several private ranches combined) in southeast Colorado back in 2015, but the sylvatic plague had wiped it out by 2016.

“Yep, they found one kit on Liberty,” Neubaum said. “They got a year in, and the plague started hitting that Liberty site and took out those prairie dogs. I do believe we’re more dialed in now. CPW has put a ton of work into research and we know far more than we did in the past. We have more resources and we’re putting more effort toward plague mitigation. We continue to gain ground to combat the problem.”

Neubaum said the next survey of the May Ranch would be in 2025.

Written by Travis Duncan. Travis is a public information officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife in Denver. He has lived in Colorado for nearly 20 years and loves the outdoors.