The black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, is again eating prairie dogs

Rancher Gary Walker squats in his cowboy boots and jeans and rests a small animal carrier against a black-tailed prairie dog hole before swinging the door open. He's careful to keep his hands out of the way. "These are little vicious guys, too," Walker says, with a laugh. "I just love 'em." The black-footed ferret inside is timid at first, and buries herself in the shredded paper of her enclosure. But with a little coaxing, she bounds into the hole, than peeps her head out to stare across 65,000 acres of flat, short-grass prairie that will be her new home. Her pink snout twitches. Her eyes blink behind a Zorro-like mask of black fur. If all goes well, this little girl and her buddies will live to be 3 or 4 years old here on Walker's Turkey Creek Ranch, located between Fort Carson and Pueblo West. They'll live in prairie dog holes, emerging mostly at night, when they'll search from burrow to burrow until they find a sleeping prairie dog, which they'll bite on the neck and asphyxiate with their slinky bodies. A ferret can live on a prairie dog corpse for about three days before killing again. She and the 18 others being released today could produce as many as four litters, usually of three to four kits, but sometimes as few as one or as many as 10. Less than a year after they're born, the young males will begin mostly solitary lives. The females hopefully will grow up and have families of their own...more