Shirley Basin Black-footed Ferrets Doing Well and Dispersing: Wyofile

We’ve been a little short on wildlife-related news lately, but fortunately Wyofile reporter Mike Koshmrl wrote an extensive piece on the recovery of black-footed ferrets in the Shirley Basin.  There’s also an interesting comparison of conditions there compared to the population Forest Service folks might be more familiar with in the Conata Basin/Badlands National Park.

Although seeing a black-footed ferret anywhere is a great rarity — they were once presumed extinct — the Shirley Basin is about the best place in the world to do it. Ferrets in this ecologically rich complex of state, private and federal land southwest of the Laramie Mountains have lasted longer than any other subpopulation on Earth and they’ve fared well enough that they are even fanning out on their own unassisted.

Wyoming wildlife managers have found pockets of ferrets near Carbon County’s Chalk Mountain and Bone Creek, a drainage northeast of Medicine Bow, where they were never reintroduced, Gygli said. And they’ve also started to detect more dispersers west of Highway 77 south of Casper.

“That’s the other spot we’ve been trying to turn into a population source,” Gygli said. “Every year we find more kits. I’m really excited about that.”

In April 2023, Gygli even learned of a road-killed ferret hit on the highway near Centennial in the eastern foothills of the Snowy Range Mountains. It was an otherwise healthy male.

“Other than the roadkill, it was in very good shape,” Gygli said. “This was a portly ferret doing very well for himself.”

There’s also a great deal in the piece about plague and efforts to combat it, in both the prairie dog and ferret populations. And how and when mammals (as well as insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, plants and so on) is always interesting and many times surprising.  And some great photos!