First Creek Prairie - The Ferret Comeback

Photo: USFWS Mountain-Prairie, public domain (cropped)

A stop on Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Loop, a free self-guided tour.

As the road follows First Creek north, you are passing through prairie dog country, and somewhere out there, mostly underground, lives one of the rarest mammals in North America. The black-footed ferret is a slender, masked hunter that lives in prairie dog burrows and eats almost nothing but prairie dogs. As prairie dog colonies were poisoned and plowed under across the West, ferrets vanished with them, and for a time scientists feared they were extinct.

A captive breeding program brought them back from a handful of survivors. On October 5, 2015, the Fish and Wildlife Service released about 30 captive-born ferrets onto the refuge. A year later biologists counted 47, including young born in the wild here, a promising sign for a species with only a few hundred animals in the wild at the time.

Ferrets are active mostly at night, so you are unlikely to spot one from the car. Your best chance to see one is the live exhibit at the Visitor Center.

Getting here: Stay on the one-way road as it curves north along the trees of First Creek, past mile marker 4.

Did you know?: Black-footed ferrets were thought to be extinct until a small population was found near Meeteetse, Wyoming, in 1981.

Photo op: Frame the line of cottonwoods along First Creek with the open grassland in the foreground.

More on Wikipedia: Black-footed ferret · Black-tailed prairie dog

First Creek Prairie - The Ferret Comeback

Stops on this tour