Wildlife officials reintroduce endangered black-footed ferrets to northwestern Arizona

PHOENIX — Arizona wildlife officials reintroduced 10 endangered black-footed ferrets to the Aubrey Valley/Double O Ranch area for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) biologists are striving to repopulate the sole active recovery spot in the state.

Officials had been working for years to prepare the Aubrey Valley, an area between Flagstaff and Kingman, for the reintroduction.

Ferret kits were bred at six different locations across the United States, including the Phoenix Zoo.

The kits were then transported to northern Colorado’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, which allowed the ferrets to live and hunt in the wilderness.

After recovery efforts in the early 2000s, the species saw its population peak at 123 in 2012; however, the species has seen a steep decline since then.

“We couldn’t begin to re-establish this population without understanding the ferret die-off,” AZGFD’s senior small mammal management specialist Holly Hicks said in a press release.

“It was starting to become obvious that it was a prey base issue. So in 2020, we switched to a disease treatment study of the prairie dogs.

“Now we’re targeting the fleas that transmit plague between the prairie dogs and ferrets. We’re treating the prairie dogs with the same active ingredient that’s in dog and cat flea medicine.”

A bacterial disease called “Sylvatic plague” infected the ferrets and their main prey, Gunnison’s prairie dogs, which proved to be detrimental.

Each one of the 10 ferrets were vaccinated for the plague before being released. They were also equipped with a passive integrated transponder microchip, similar to what dogs and cats receive.

Officials said four ferrets were found “doing well” at the end of October.

AZGFD biologists said additional ferret releases will occur over the next three years in both fall and spring seasons.

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