Hobbies And Interests
Habitat
Black-footed ferrets originally inhabited a broad range covering the North American Great Plains. In a fact sheet funded by the North Dakota Division of Wildlife, Valerie Naylor writes that these ferrets could once have been found from southern Texas to Saskatchewan, a range including parts of 12 U.S. states. Now, this highly endangered animal is found only in small reintroduced populations and in breeding groups in U.S. and Canadian zoos.
Food
Like most members of the Mustelidae family, ferrets are carnivorous. These small meat-eaters will prey upon such small mammals as mice or rabbits, but according to Naylor, their primary food is prairie dogs, with which they share a habitat. She explains that black-footed ferrets eat prairie dogs "almost exclusively and cannot survive for extended periods away from prairie dog towns." Ferrets hunt down prairie dogs and drag them to their nesting burrows.
Habits
Black-footed ferrets not only eat prairie dogs, they also rely on them for housing. They make their dens in abandoned prairie dog burrows. They are usually, but not exclusively, nocturnal, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Naylor adds that they can sleep up to 21 hours a day. They typically bear litters of four or five kits, who live underground for their first six weeks.
Threats and Implications
Ferrets were an important control on prairie dogs, which are widely considered by ranchers to be pests, because they damage grazing lands. Eradication of prairie dog populations by hunting and habitat destruction have led to the near-extinction of the ferrets that rely on them for food and burrows. Naylor sees the threatened demise of ferrets as a harbinger of disaster for the native prairie ecology as a whole, a view supported by a study on the importance of predators to ecosystems reported by Bjorn Casey in Live Science.