Tina Jackson never tired of arriving to work at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center outside of Fort Collins.
After nearly 30 years as a state wildlife manager, Jackson took a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last year leading the federal program to save the endangered species from the brink of extinction. The center near Interstate 25 holds the world’s largest captive population of black-footed ferrets.
Jackson loved spying pronghorn antelope and burrowing owls just outside the facility. Inside, she worked closely with technicians to ferry ferrets between indoor cages and outdoor pens draped with mesh rope to guard against hawk attacks.
The work is meant to teach the mustelid mammals to survive in colonies dug by prairie dogs, their main source of sustenance in the wild. If everything goes according to plan, biologists release groups of ferrets to reclaim their former habitat in grasslands across North America. Over the last few decades, those efforts have built up a population of roughly 500 wild ferrets.
Jackson, however, no longer works at the facility.
Last month, she was fired as a part of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut thousands of probationary employees across the federal government. Two other technicians also lost their positions, cutting the total workforce supporting the ferret program from 11 to eight employees, Jackson said.
She fears job cuts and funding freezes could bring a tragic end to the remarkable conservation story. That’s because staff shortages could make it trickier to manage the upcoming breeding season, and wildlife managers might struggle to protect reintroduced populations from the plague, a leading threat to both prairie dogs and ferrets. With so few ferrets surviving in the wild, Jackson worries any slip could doom the species.
“The public hears all the time about how successful the ferret program is,” Jackson told CPR News. “We try not to talk about how it is still on the brink, but things like this push it even closer to the edge.”
A rare conservation success story
Few species have come as close to annihilation as the black-footed ferret.
In the early 1800s, the ferrets occupied burrows across the West, but their populations plummeted due to plague, habitat loss and systematic efforts to eradicate prairie dogs. An initial attempt to breed ferrets from a group discovered in South Dakota failed in the 1970s, and the source population died out shortly afterward.
Scientists considered the species extinct until a dog brought a ferret back to a Wyoming ranch in 1981. The incident led scientists to discover a nearby population, which federal biologists carefully monitored over the next few years. After disease nearly extinguished the group, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured the remaining 18 ferrets to kickstart the breeding program centered around the facility in Fort Collins. Only seven managed to pass on their genetics.
The small source population left the breeding program vulnerable to diseases linked to a lack of genetic diversity. To address the problem, the federal government contracted a nonprofit to clone Willa, a black-footed ferret who died in 1988.
A network of conservationists managed to preserve a frozen culture of skin cells taken from the animal. It contained enough genetic information to support the cloning process and, in 2020, the conservation center outside Fort Collins welcomed Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned endangered species native to North America. Other cloned ferrets have produced offspring since then, further diversifying the population.
Jackson said the conservation center outside Fort Collins now holds around 200 ferrets, representing about two-thirds of the captive population. The biologists aim to roughly double the population each year to support reintroduction efforts. But it turns out successful captive ferret sex demands careful human oversight.
“Ferrets are very solitary. They will kill each other,” Jackson said. “The staff is keeping an eye on who’s coming into season and who’s genetically best to be paired with others.”
With the latest staff cuts, Jackson isn’t sure her former team will hit their normal breeding goals, and might even struggle to replace losses within the captive population.
The Trump administration has also placed a one-dollar spending limit on most government credit cards. Jackson said the conservation center pre-purchased ferret food before the policy went into effect, and it tends to keep a few months of food on hand at all times. Eventually, however, she worries the spending limits could make it difficult to keep the critical population healthy and well-nourished.
Some federal offices have reinstated probationary employees fired by the Trump administration last month. The reversal comes after a federal judge ruled the Office of Personnel Management lacks the legal authority to carry out the staff reductions.
While Jackson’s position hasn’t been restored, it’s unclear if the fired technicians have rejoined the ferret conservation center. Laury Marshall, a spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, declined to comment on any personnel matters, adding the agency is working closely with the federal personnel administrators to “ensure we are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people.”
Frozen funding to safeguard wild ferrets
Breeding ferrets is only the first step to protect the population. After releasing the animals, a sprawling network of conservation groups and wildlife managers collaborate to safeguard the species from disease.
Travis Livieri, the executive director of Prairie Wildlife Research, helps keep watch over ferrets living in the Conata Basin area of South Dakota, a rolling set of grasslands adjacent to Badlands National Park. With a recent count of 246 individuals, Livieri said it's home to the world’s largest wild black-footed ferret population.
Plague, however, can quickly shrink those numbers. Livieri said wildlife groups contained an outbreak last year, but his group has to remain vigilant in case the disease reappears this spring. That’s why he’s anxious to employ the main prevention measure: hiring someone to ride a four-wheeler across the sprawling prairie and spray each prairie dog burrow with insecticide dust. The process kills fleas capable of carrying the disease.
The U.S. Forest Service has supported the work in the past, but Livieri has held off on hiring a contractor due to the uncertainty created by President Trump’s executive orders freezing federal spending. He’s waiting for someone to guarantee his organization will still receive the funding.
“I think we're getting caught in the crossfire. I don't know that anybody's out to eliminate conservation per se, but we've seen and read what the priorities of this administration are going to be. And it certainly does not seem to be endangered species conservation,” Liveiri said.
Other ferret conservation efforts are less reliant on federal funding. Henry Pollock, the executive director of the Southern Plains Land Trust in southeast Colorado, said his organization receives state dollars to guard their ferret population against plague. Despite the slight insulation, he still worries the “double-pronged threat” of federal staff and funding cuts will make it hard for any organization to manage a stable recovery program.
It’s the sort of instability Jackson also fears could destroy the tenuous foothold people have built for black-footed ferrets. Biological records suggest plague first started to hit North American prairie ecosystems back in the early 20th century. She expects decades of harm wrought by the disease will likely take decades to repair.
“The idea that we could recover ferrets in just a few years is ludicrous. It’s going to take a long time," Jackson said.
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