This article was originally published on The Denver Gazette by Seth Boster.
For years, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers have driven out to the eastern plains in the middle of the night, a predator’s hunting hours, in hopes of spotting a pair of green, gleaming eyes.
Officers are expected to do just that sometime next year, out on a sweeping ranch near Lamar. This is where they recently released 17 black-footed ferrets in the latest attempt to boost the population of what’s been called North America’s rarest mammal.
As a Colorado Parks and Wildlife report plainly put it last month: “Black-footed ferrets are endangered and the work to restore them is hard.” In Colorado, work began in 2001. Black-footed ferrets were reintroduced in the state’s northwest, only to die of plague like other released groups in the years to come.
For decades across the Great Plains, those late-night scouting trips have all too often ended with no sign of life — no sign of those little green eyes peeking out of burrows.
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