When an epidemic of plague struck prairie dogs within South Dakota’s greater Conata-Badlands ecosystem last spring, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service black-footed ferret biologists and their state and federal partners reacted with a frenzied spate of flea-killing. 

Flare-ups of the deadly disease are considered a chief threat to the sleek weasel-like mammal. So when the plague started spreading in the South Dakota prairie less than a year ago, the scourge put at risk the world’s largest wild ferret population.

“Typically, 90-95% of the prairie dogs will die within a few weeks, and so that poses an immediate risk to the ferrets,” said Tina Jackson, former ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “All of a sudden the grocery store goes empty, so there’s nothing to eat.”

Additionally, sylvatic plague can kill ferrets directly, she said. 

The threat required a swift, decisive response. The team sprayed an insecticidal dust to knock back plague-spreading fleas and vaccinated as many prairie dogs as possible for plague. (Already, every black-footed ferret that biologists get their hands on gets a plague vaccine.) It’s a lot of work.  

“It’s a math problem,” Jackson said. “If you have an average of, say, 40 prairie dog burrows per acre, and you have a site that’s 10,000 acres, well that’s … a whole lot of prairie dog burrows that need to be dusted in a very short timeframe.” 

A costly, resource-intensive operation, emergency flea fogging is routine business in the extraordinary effort to keep black-footed ferrets from going extinct. Much work remains. While 3,000 ferrets are believed necessary to consider the federally “endangered” species fully recovered, only about 500 live in the wild. 

The all-hands-on-deck effort worked, keeping ferrets on the path to recovery. Last fall, surveys in the greater Conata-Badlands ecosystem returned one of the highest population counts to date, Jackson said.

DOGE casualties

The painstaking effort to keep black-footed ferrets from dying out has been decades in the making, with roots in Wyoming. It was rejuvenated in Park County some 44 years ago, when a ranch dog inadvertently rediscovered the species that scientists presumed to be extinct after a century-plus of habitat destruction and relentless persecution of their primary prey, prairie dogs. The elaborate multi-agency recovery plan — complete with breeding centers, reintroductions around the West, even cloning for genetic diversity — has been in motion ever since. 

Now, former staff and friends of the ferret program believe the species has been put at risk by a billionaire’s high-profile crusade to ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse” within the federal government. 

Black-footed ferrets are a story of success in conservation the entire country can feel good about, Draper Natural History Museum Curator Corey Anco told the Powell Tribune.

“There’s a strong sense of pride with the black-footed ferret. This is not only a Wyoming conservation success story, but a success story in conservation for the United States,” Anco said last week from the museum. “The fact that this animal went through two suspected extinctions and to persevere, you know, shows that resilience I think a lot of people can attach to. We want to feel strong. We want to feel resilient. And this species embodies that.”

Jackson came to the Fish and Wildlife Service after nearly three decades at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. She was fired by the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency less than a year into the new gig because she happened to have a “probationary” employment status. Jackson was given just four hours to pack up her stuff on Feb. 14,  the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, a day that claimed an untold number of federal workers in Wyoming and nationwide.

Now Jackson worries wildlife managers’ ability to respond to crises has been hobbled. During the 2024 outbreak, the veteran biologist quarterbacked the plague response. Now she — and others — are gone. 

“This year, we may not even have the capacity to help coordinate that sort of response,” Jackson told WyoFile. “Hopefully this coming summer, we don’t see another outbreak.” 

Jackson wasn’t the only federal worker devoted to black-footed ferrets cut loose. The National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, a Larimer County, Colorado facility she once helmed, also lost two of its “husbandry technicians,” staffers who did the grunt work to keep ferrets in the captive breeding program fed and alive. 

Unrelated to DOGE cuts, a job opening for a Fish and Wildlife Service ferret biologist is likely to remain unfilled indefinitely because of the federal government’s hiring freeze. That position worked with state managers.

“That was a really vital position for the program,” Jackson said, “because that position worked a lot in coordination with the different partners across the range.” 

The Trump administration’s downsizing also eliminated the job of Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Heather O’Brien, who recently moved jobs after working as the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s nongame mammal biologist — a post that had her supervising the state’s black-footed ferret recovery efforts. She continued leading black-footed ferret work in Wyoming for the federal agency. 

O’Brien shares Jackson’s fears: That remaining federal wildlife officials will be understaffed, underresourced and caught on their heels when plague strikes next. 

“To go to Conata Basin and address a huge plague outbreak across a huge landscape was a lot of work,” O’Brien said. “Those resources and those people are no longer present for the next time that happens. And it’ll happen again because plague is omnipresent on the landscape.” 

Jackson, her former colleague, worries that the federal program’s turmoil will have a ripple effect, impacting “all of the partners and all of the states that are engaged.”  

Wyoming, in particular, has a special connection to the black-footed ferret and the decades-long effort to recover Mustela nigripes from the brink of extinction. For a time, the world thought it had lost the species — until a surprise rediscovery. 

Wyoming pride

In 2016, Kristine Hogg released her first black-footed ferret, bred in captivity, culminating years of planning to reestablish the native mustelids on her family ranch and the neighboring Pitchfork Ranch. The Park County recovery sites, roughly 40 straight-line miles from Yellowstone National Park west of Meeteetse, are near where the first ferret was rediscovered more than 40 years ago by Shep, a blue heeler owned by Lucille and John Hogg.

The Hogg’s extended family felt immense pride for their role in saving one of North America’s most endangered mammals. The following year, Lucille and John Hogg’s great-grandchildren — Madison and Riley — received the honors of releasing the first feisty ferret back into the wild.

As Madison opened the door to the animal carrier, the growls of the ferocious animal sent chills through the crowd. Then, as everyone waited for the creature to escape to freedom, it temporarily refused to exit. Madison prodded the ferret, an adolescent female born in captivity at the conservation center that Jackson formerly led. But instead of running down the prairie dog burrow, it attacked the prodding stick.

Eventually, the ferret took to its new home, complete with a hind quarter of fresh prairie dog tossed in the hole behind it as a parting gift.

“I knew they had to be a part of this. It’s their legacy,” Kristine Hogg said of her grandchildren’s task eight years ago. 

The family pride extends beyond the two historic ranches west of Meeteetse, a town of about 350 residents with a flamboyant cowboy flare and thick history of working the land. 

During the first ferret release on Park County ranchland, “half the town of Meeteetse” plus many more Big Horn Basin locals showed up in fields leading to the foothills of the Absaroka Mountain Range to celebrate, said Assistant Draper Museum Curator Amy Phillips. The crowd was so large that officials made the releases the following year a private event.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t expect, like, the whole town to want to reintroduce the ferrets,” Phillips said. “They were kind of taken aback by it.” 

Prior to the release, Wyoming Game and Fish staffers sprayed for fleas on about 1,000 acres of the ranch. While it kept plague at bay that year, the disease struck the area in subsequent years. Today, the Big Horn Basin is just one of 29 release sites spread across eight states, Canada and Mexico, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Yet, ferrets are still struggling, faced with several stressors beyond plague. Drought, a lack of genetic diversity, and prairie dog poisoning and shooting have also inhibited populations from gaining a foothold and persisting. 

A setback?

The small staff that just got smaller at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center has done a great job, said Anco, who doesn’t think the species is ready to ease off recovery efforts.

“This is a species that has gone through a lot, and it’s genetically impoverished,” Anco said. “There is a lot of effort and a lot of resources required to bring this species back to stability. It’s not quite there yet.”

Biologists and employees at the conservation center are passionate and devoted to their cause, said Phillips, the assistant curator.

“Ferrets are their life,” she said. “They are so excited to be working on the front lines of conservation, as they see it.”

Cutting more than 25% of a small staff will be significant, Anco said, and losing Jackson will be “devastating.” “Let’s say you lose your grant writer, and no one else on a team has that skill set,” Anco said. “That may be one out of like 20 people. But if that one person is responsible for bringing in the funding that supports the other 19, that could have a massive impact.”

For the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, it’s not yet clear how or if cuts to federal recovery programs will impact on-the-ground operations. 

“We’ll continue doing our thing as best we can, and we’ll roll with the punches as they come,” said Andy Gygli, Wyoming’s small carnivore biologist. “Our general prairie dog monitoring, ferret monitoring that we do every year … is currently intact and we’re planning on going ahead as normal.”  

Game and Fish uses its own funds to pay for parts of its black-footed ferret work, like Gygli’s salary, though it does get some federal funding via an Endangered Species Act grant program to pay for seasonal technicians who help with survey work. 

“As far as I know,” Gygli said, “we are good to go on that for at least this year.” 

Tentatively, he said, Wyoming is eyeing a couple of ferret releases in 2025, both in the Shirley Basin. The translocated captive-raised animals in the past have come from the Colorado center where employees were cut. It’s too early to say if any of the turmoil could have implications for ferret availability, he said.

“That would be speculation on my part,” Gygli said. “I don’t know.” 

O’Brien, however, worries that the DOGE workforce cuts at the conservation center could jeopardize ferret releases in Wyoming and beyond. Amid the layoffs and chaos, it’s breeding season right now, the former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist pointed out. 

“They’re so understaffed they may not be successful breeding and rearing kits this year,” she said, referencing ferret babies. “They may not have any juveniles to contribute to any of the recovery sites this year.” 

Then there’s the threat of a sylvatic plague outbreak. A lack of available staff trained at fogging prairie dog dens isn’t the only concern. Several pots of funding to do the work are frozen, too.

“That’s where the concern is,” said Steve Olson, who’s leading the loose-knit Black-footed Ferret Friends group. “If we can’t get out during the prime period to do that dusting at those … reintroduction sites, we run the risk of fleas taking over. We run the risk of sylvatic plague.” 

Olson, a longtime Capitol Hill lobbyist, has been pressing to secure $500,000 of funding for flea fogging in 2025. One of his messages to lawmakers is simple: “Do you really want this iconic North American carnivore to blink out under your watch?” 

Laury Marshall, acting chief of public affairs for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., declined to answer questions for this story. Instead, she released a general statement. 

“The [Fish and Wildlife Service] reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the American public and the fish, wildlife and natural resources we manage,” Marshall wrote in an email. “We are working closely with the Office of Personnel Management to ensure we are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.”