DOGE firings rattle Colorado ferret program as populations rebound- The Colorado Sun

A wildlife conservation program to reintroduce black-footed ferrets, once thought extinct, back to their prairie ecosystems, has new worries about its own future.

In February, a purge of federal employees and sudden funding freezes hit the black-footed ferret conservation program particularly hard. Tina Jackson, the ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was fired from her Colorado post. 

Jackson worked as a species conservation coordinator for Colorado Parks and Wildlife for nearly 30 years, before taking a job with FWS in March 2024.

That meant when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency asked for a list of probationary employees earlier this year, Jackson was on it, having spent less than a year in the position. 

One of the black-footed ferrets released on Nov. 17, 2021, near Lamar, Colorado. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

She clocked into work Feb. 14 like it was any other day. By 9:30 a.m. there were murmurs that something was up. Around 11 a.m. she was told she had until the end of the day to pack her things. Two wildlife technicians were also fired. The 11-person staff was whittled down to eight. 

“A lot of the day was forwarding emails to my deputy,” Jackson said. “You might need this, you might need this, you might need this.”

With FWS, Jackson oversaw ferret releases at 34 sites across 12 states, Canada and Mexico. She helped coordinate more than 40 partner organizations, including tribes, land trusts, researchers, nonprofit organizations, conservationists and a whole network of “really, really smart people that wanted to help this ferocious little predator,” Jackson said. 

Twice extinct and on the mend

Wild ferrets — different from domestic ferrets found in pet stores and starring in documentaries — were thought to be extinct starting in the late 1950s. In 1964, a small population was discovered in South Dakota. Nine ferrets were captured for what biologists hoped would be a captive breeding program. However, neither the wild population nor the captive one survived, and in the 1970s ferrets were declared extinct for a second time.

Then, nearly a decade later, a dog in Wyoming delivered a black-footed ferret carcass to his owners’ ranch porch. 

There were still ferrets to be found on Earth — but where?

The 3-month-old black-footed ferret kits that are the offspring of Antonia, a cloned black-footed ferret, mark the first time a cloned U.S. endangered species has produced offspring. (Photo by the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute)

In the nearly five decades since, scientists have fanned out, collected, bred, cloned — yes, cloned — nurtured, studied and released around 500 ferrets back into their natural habitat: the Great Plains ecosystems where plenty of prairie dogs, their main source of food, can be found, and where around 170 other species rely on their existence, according to Jeff Baughman, black-footed ferret programs manager at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. The zoo is one of six breeding facilities around the country.

Like the delicate ecosystem that the ferrets inhabit, their recovery is dependent on a complicated network of federal, state, nonprofit and private partners. 

“If one of the sites reaches out to the rest of the partners and says, ‘I have an issue,’ people are going to step up and try to help,” she said. “But there is such a domino effect to these sorts of things. If there’s a cut in one place, then that affects the ability for everyone else to step up and help.”

The business of ferrets

The National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Carr, between Fort Collins and Wyoming, is the nation’s largest breeding center, and houses about two-thirds of the current population, according to Jackson. 

It’s also where ferrets from other captive breeding facilities are sent for “ferret boot camp,” said Baughman from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It is there they learn to hunt and live in burrows before being released into the wild.

But before they make it to boot camp, the kits — or baby ferrets — live closely monitored lives at six breeding facilities around the country, including the conservation center. 

CPW assists in black-footed ferret release on Soapstone Prairie Natural Area on Feb. 7, 2023. (Colorado Parks and Wildlife photo)

It begins in the dark of December. The lighting in the ferrets’ shelters is decreased to about nine hours of light per day, and is gradually increased by one hour per month to trigger their reproductive hormones, Baughman explained. 

The ferrets are analyzed and paired to ensure genetic diversity. Their genetic makeup is run through a program that assigns each pairing a score of 1-6 based on compatibility. “Basically a matchmaker service,” Baughman said.

Anything above a 3 is detrimental to genetic diversity and anything below it is beneficial. The analysis is especially important because ferrets are a genetically “closed” population, meaning no new, unrelated ferrets have been found since 1987. 

Once paired, the scientists have to consider timing: which ferrets are ready to breed when. Females tend to be ready starting in March — right about now — which Jackson is concerned about given the recent firings. 

Once the female is paired and impregnated, it’s “42 days, pretty much on the dot,” until the kits arrive, Baughman said. The kits and their mother are left alone for about four days, then it’s go time. 

At 13 days old their teeth start to grow in, at 21 days they’re weighed and identified by gender. At 37 days the kits’ eyes start to open.

“That’s when they’re sort of seeing and learning the world,” Baughman said. “So we introduce enrichment to them. It’s really important that they learn those motor skills for running, trying to hunt or avoid predation. We start very early in trying to replicate what it might be like out in the wild.”

They learn to hunt. They get vaccinations and microchips. 

At about 90 days old, the business of baby ferrets — “business” being the species’ collective noun — is either held back for their valuable genetic material, put on display or sent to the northern Colorado center, where they begin their training for the wild.

Finally, after three months of breeding, weaning and training, they are released in places like May Ranch in southeastern Colorado, Walker Ranch near Pueblo and Soapstone Prairie in Larimer County.

Of the seven ferret release sites in Colorado, May Ranch is one of three located in Prowers county. Ten male and five female ferrets were released on the ranch Wednesday. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

“I’ve worked a long time in wildlife conservation. It’s a hard field because you’re working with what can be kind of a depressing topic: the extinction of an animal,” Jackson said. “So in some ways we are all optimists, and we’re really good at celebrating our successes. But we’re still only talking about 800 individuals in the world. That’s not a lot. They still are on the brink.”

There need to be at least 3,000 individuals in the wild for an animal to make it off the endangered species list, according to FWS. 

“This is the group that could actually get there if we have enough funding, staffing and resources,” Jackson said. 

What was actually cut

The February job cuts hit about 420 employees at the already short-staffed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, representing about 5% of the workforce. 

The FWS and the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service administer the Endangered Species Act, and issue millions of dollars worth of grants every year for conservation efforts domestically and abroad. Internal communications obtained by Vox in mid-February showed that the agency had frozen all grants to partners working on international conservation efforts.

The FWS operates 22 locations in Colorado, including two fish hatcheries in Hotchkiss and Leadville, and 11 wildlife refuges, including the former nuclear weapon-building site of Rocky Flats near Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal where bison roam between Denver and DIA, and the sandhill crane stopover site in Monte Vista.

It is unclear how many positions were affected overall in Colorado. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined an interview, saying in an email, “Thank you for your inquiry. Nothing to share at this time.” 

The FWS site in Colorado is the only ferret breeding site run entirely by a federal agency. The National Zoo’s Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia, another ferret breeding facility, receives about 70% of its funding from federal appropriation funds. However, most of its research budget is funded through individual donations. 

U.S. Parks and Wildlife officers look for prairie dog burrows in which to release captive-bred black-footed ferrets on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021, in Lamar. Black-footed ferrets were assumed to be extinct until 1981 when a dog discovered one in Wyoming. Ten male and five female ferrets were released on the ranch Wednesday. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s ferret program is funded entirely by the zoo, largely through their Quarters for Conservation program, which collects 75 cents on every ticket to the zoo, and a portion of annual membership dues. Because of its internal funding, the zoo does not expect its ferret program to be impacted by federal cuts, a spokesperson said.

“There are just so many unknowns, it’s hard to say what could be that one last thing that pushes us over the edge, and makes it so we’re not able to keep going,” Jackson said.

Looking ahead, she worries what the uncertainty means for the younger generation hoping to enter the field. The technicians fired alongside her had recently been hired out of college, after working seasonally and as volunteers. 

“I look at these students and I just think, if I was them, is wildlife conservation the place I’d want to go?” she said. “We need people coming up behind those of us that are later in our careers. Otherwise all the work that we’ve done, all the work that the people before us have done, gets lost. We need that next generation of people.”

Last fall, in her new role as the official FWS ferret wrangler, she participated in releases all over the U.S. 

“Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah. Each one of the sites is so different,” she said. “Ferrets are nocturnal, so we release them late in the day. And I’ll tell you, there is nothing more beautiful than doing a release in Montana right as the sun sets and the Milky Way comes out.”