Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day! You ask, "How can I help the black-footed ferret?" Contact any zoo that is involved with the captive program. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs is a zoo involved with saving the ferrets and check out what they're doing. If you enjoy spending time in our lovely prairie grassland ecosystem and think it's worth saving, get the word out on saving this ecosystem. Tell all that restoring this grand ecosystem is dependent on saving the keystone species and proper spatial allotment for prairie dog colonies. Send your friends, colleagues...etc my link and tell them why protecting the prairie grassland and communing with nature is valuable on so many levels.  Like the quotable movie line in "Field of Dreams" "If you build it, he will come." 'It' is the protected, managed grasslands, and the 'he' is the black-footed ferret and the whole host of communities needed to sustain our beautiful ecosystem. Except this won't be a movie and the reality will be results that are mutually beneficial goods and services to both the ecosystem and living things--like us--that depend on one another.

Check this out!

Get 'em, armed Park Rangers!

This has not been vetted academically, but for sheer coolness I thought I would bring this up. Sometimes you have to take charge for your actions or for those of others.  We have the last remaining white rhino because poachers have all but extirpated these magnificent creatures, so armed guards are here to make a stand.    Anyhoo here's the link to the article on Powerful Primates website about this magnificent beast and its imperiled future because superstitious people think its keratinaceous horn is magical...still!  Unbelievable.

You also know what's unbelievable? The story of the black-footed ferret. The pluckiness of the black-footed ferret is due a conglomeration of zoos, individuals, philanthropic organizations, and our federal government's Department of the Interior (i.e. the US Fish & Wildlife). The story begins of a farmer and his wife receiving a dead, black-footed ferret (BFF) as a gift from his dog in Meeteetse, Wyoming in 1981.  I'm paraphrasing the Black-Footed Ferret's Recovery Program's website, click here to read it yourself. This led to a captive breeding program because BFFs are considered one of the most rare mammals in North America (including yours truly)! Sadly, these guys are vulnerable to canine distemper, sylvatic plague and a whole host of other diseases that eventually killed the Meeteetse captive bred program.  Fast forward to the 90s and whole host of conservation minded organizations get on board to try to save these guys. Reintroduction efforts in the Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions are firstly miss, now they are hits with the Black-Footed Recovery Program stating there are more BFFs in the wild than in captive breeding program.

Reintroduction of the BFFs are dependent on prairie dog colonies.  The tale of the juxtaposition of urban dwellers and prairie dog colonies usually ends in prairie dog habitats becoming fragmented and unmanageable numbers of prairie dogs (due to a lack of predators as pioneers) blighting the area  before being poisoned due to human perceptions of them as pests.

Relocate the prairie dogs away from the urban environment with acres of prairie grasslands and reintroduce the BFFs at the colonies and let nature do her work.  The dynamic interaction and energy flow within prairie dogs and the BFFs aids in the health of the ecosystem and keeps the prairie dog population manageable. In a perfect world this should go on without human intervention; but alas, we put them into this position so conservation managers should facilitate monitoring of ecosystem health via BFF and prairie dog populations.  It's the Goldilocks Effect: not too much, not too little but just right.

Click on the Black Footed Ferret Recovery Program's link to educate yourself even more!

Once upon a time...

...around B.C. (before conservation), I was pretty ignorant of the fact or facts or the factoids surrounding anything related to urban development. I said to myself, "Self?  Radiating urban development regardless of land we're encroaching is the price we pay for progress!" I thought I was sensitive enough, I was a vegetarian and I didn't buy most consumer goods with leather.

I can ride a bike y'all!

As a competitive cyclist living in Denver-a city with a fairly glorious bike path system thingy-I would ride through bike trails that encroached upon and bisected prairie dog colonies. I seemed to be playing a very human game of Frogger. Avoiding the scurrying, quasi-cute little rodents, but, noticing what kind of havoc they wreaked as I passed through this area.  I noticed the mounds, the burrows, the communication, the exposure of soil then I remembered someone telling me that they can pass the plague (well technically not the p. dog but the fleas that infest them). Not  the most auspicious start in my book for these critters for my inaugural visit to prairie dog town. In fact, ranchers poison these guys because they compete with their cattle for grazing (grass).  I figured, poor little rodentia misunderstood dudes.  Well actually, it was me who misunderstood them and what turned it around was education.
Fast forward a decade or so, and you'll find yours truly attempting to get a Masters degree in Conservation Biology and becoming enlightened in the way of the prairie dog and their contributions. Let me rewind a couple hundred years when Denver and most of the United States really were surrounded by prairie grasslands.  The same grasslands that provide us food, oxygen, ground water, arable soil, carbon sinks, and grazable material (if you don't believe me, click on this link).

That's right! It's a large ecosystem!

So you're probably saying who cares about these prairie dogs. Well Madams and Sirs, this ecosystem is dependent on the aforementioned prairie dogs to keep the ecosystem services robust and mutually beneficial. When uneducated managers make bike paths on prairie dog colonies, habitats get fragmented, and prairie dog populations get too large for the ecosystem's good.  It's like the Goldie Locks effect, not too much, not too little, but just right.
Like our government running on a system of checks and balances, these cute, plague carrying rodents also need a system of checks and balances. Where their habitat is fragmented, we need to relocate them to an appropriate parcel of land away from ranches or busy roads. Next, to spend minimum time maintaining their habitat so that it becomes self-sustaining, we need a prairie dog's natural predator to do that for us.  That role would be provided for us by reintroducing the black footed ferret into prairie dog colonies.

Get 'em my BFF!

These weasels (literally) are the yin to the prairie dogs yang. They provide the prairie dog population a natural dynamic system of checks and balances therefore keeping this ecosystem healthy AND if managed properly, surrounding communities can reap the therapeutic value of being surrounded by nature via a healthy ecosystem.
So now, when I see prairie dogs, i say, "Self! More power to the prairie dogs because not only are they a keystone species to keep the prairie grasslands healthy but they are the snickers of the grasslands to my new BFF the black-footed ferret."

So educated blog reader, have you changed your mind about prairie dogs yet?  Want to support the black-footed ferret reintroduction?  Yeah, I thought so.

You can support this, check out my links on my blog page.

What's it worth?

Some of you are not aware of how crucial prairie dogs are to the grassland ecosystems. In fact, some of you see prairie dogs as a pest species because of the perceived health and landscape threats you associate them with.  Threats like carrier of the bubonic plague and how prairie dog colonies tend to expose more ground cover, especially within hiking or biking paths can bias your perception; but did you know, prairie dogs and their burrows provide ecosystem services like better filtration of ground water, increasing insect and reptilian species, and provide homes to other vertebrate species? Relocating prairie dogs along with reintroduction of the black-footed ferrets to undisturbed areas of prairie grassland or along the steppes can help communities identify with a flagship species and bring the robustness of prairie grasslands and the therapeutic services of living close to nature.