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This morning we've traveled to the rolling prairies outside of Meeteetse, Wyoming to discover the unlikely story of the black-footed ferret.
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These adorable animals went missing from North America's Great Plains.
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At one point, only a few dozen black-footed ferrets were believed to be left in the wild, but a critical conservation movement is bringing them back.
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I think it's the best story in American conservation that we have, just the rediscovery story that happened here in Meeteetse in 1981 that turned the conservation world upside down.
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The whole world believed the black-footed ferret was extinct until one turned up right here on the hog family ranch I'm exploring with landowner Alan Hogg and environmental educator Jeff Ewelt.
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Oh, home on the range.
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Your first cattle drive.
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First cattle drive ever.
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Do I get to call myself a cowboy now?
1:09
You bet.
1:12
Yeah.
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Alongside cattle, Hog Ranch is also home to pronghorn enlow, grizzly bears, wolves and black-footed ferrets.
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Why have you brought us up to this spot?
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Well, this spot is where ferrets first made the return in the Meeteetse area.
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The hog family has lived on this land for over 100 years.
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In 1981, Alan's parents made a discovery that would change the ranch forever.
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My father got up and he found a what they found out later to be a black-footed ferret dead in the yard.
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And the dog had apparently killed it.
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And he told my mother about it at breakfast and showed it to her.
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And she said, well, that's just the neatest thing I ever saw.
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That was our first introduction to the black-footed ferret.
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A black-footed ferret is a small weasel.
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They're nocturnal.
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They're completely solitary.
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People fall in love with the ferret.
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Black-footed ferrets are one of the most charismatic, endangered species in the country.
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It's kind of a mystical creature.
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When black-footed ferrets were rediscovered, no one had seen one in the wild for decades, even though they once thrived on these vast prairies.
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Black-footed ferrets existed across a very large part of the western United States and and edged into Canada and Mexico as well.
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They live in prairie dog burrows and they eat prairie dogs.
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They rely 90% on Prairie dogs for their survival, food and shelter.
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Female requires about 400 prairie dogs a year to keep her and her kits alive.
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The prairie dog is no more of a dog than a Groundhog is a pig.
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So how did they get their name prairie dog?
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Well, they live on the prairies and they have a little dog like bark, you know.
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At one time the prairie dog villages covered vast areas of the Great Plains region.
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Prairie dogs in North America once numbered in the hundreds of 1,000,000, but westward expansion, farming and plague have reduced their range by more than 95%.
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Black-footed ferrets were first known to be in trouble once we started seeing the prairie dog ecosystem deteriorate.
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Land owners that tolerate prairie dogs are few and far between.
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In the West, prairie dogs eat grass.
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Cows eat grass.
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Took us a long time to get into this mess, over 100 years of persecuting prairie dogs, and now we're slowly inching back with black-footed ferret recovery.
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We're trying to reestablish it on the landscape through some pretty remarkable intervention.
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Ground zero for the effort is the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in neighboring Colorado, and it's our next stop.
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Robin Bortner manages the captive breeding program, which raises ferrets for the release in the wild.
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They began in 1987 with the last remaining ferrets.
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We are wearing protective gear for the safety of these extremely rare animals.
4:20
I see.
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This is Biggs.
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Yeah, so she's coming to see what I'm doing.
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So the instincts immediately go down the hole, right?
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The ferrets, even older ones, continue to be wary of their human keepers.
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You can kind of see that this tunnel systems is sort of like a burrow for them.
4:38
Great.
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So how can we help?
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We're going to feed a couple of rows of our black-footed ferrets in this room.
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This is our formulated zoo diet, made to meet their nutritional vitamins with everything they need.
4:49
Yep.
4:50
Toss that in there, buddy.
4:57
Yep, Yep.
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Trying to encourage some natural behaviors, even though they're inside the indoor environment.
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Foraging for food, searching, hunting, smelling different things.
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So this is just a standard cat kibble and we use it in as enrichment, something different to mentally stimulate them.
5:14
Yep, it encourages some forging and food finding behaviors.
5:18
Oh yes, we hear you.
5:20
But I'm also curious.
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Yeah, Cesar is a young male.
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He's actually one of my juvenile males that is a proven sire this year.
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He's sired a litter.
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Every ferret in this facility is incredibly important to the future of their species.
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But this next little beauty is somewhat of a celebrity.
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Hi, Elizabeth Ann.
5:40
Elizabeth Ann.
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So your snacks have arrived.
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It's really cool.
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She is the first cloned North American endangered species cloned animal.
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I mean, that's absolutely amazing.
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Healthy.
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Doing well.
5:53
Yep.
5:54
Happy and healthy black-footed ferret. Is there a significant advantage to having a cloned animal?
5:59
The reason that we cloned Elizabeth Ann was to bring back genetic diversity that had been lost or never existed in our original source population.
6:10
Excellent.
6:10
Every living black-footed ferret except Elizabeth Ann descended from just 7 ferrets.
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Adding her genes to the population will represent an eighth founder in a fresh bloodline.
6:23
The history that we're seeing right now in front of us is amazing to me.
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Just awesome.
6:27
It's really cool to be a part of such a groundbreaking project.
6:30
You know, the science has not been done in endangered species like this before, so it's really neat to see what the future holds that Elizabeth Ann has helped us unlock.
6:38
We're lucky you, and we're very happy to share it as we are.
6:42
Yes.
