Getting ready to face life in the wild

Meet the black-footed ferret - the most endangered mammal in North America. In the mid-1980's, the last 18 surviving wild ferrets were brought in for captive breeding at a specially-built Wyoming Game and Fish Department facility. In "Life In Dogtown," Alan Alda checks in with the biologists racing to save this struggling species.

Scientific American Frontiers first covered the rescue effort back in 1993, when biologists had successfully bred some 450 baby ferrets, called kits. But the captive-born animals weren't having much luck making it on their own. Just ten percent of those released survived their first month in the wild.

		By measuring the distance between burrows, scientists can estimate the size of a prairie dog town

So biologists like Dean Biggins, who are part of the large state-federal-private ferret recovery team, started putting the ferrets through school, in the hopes that training them to hunt would dramatically improve their survival. The scientists feed the kits prairie dog meat, their main source of food in the wild. Later, the young animals hone their hunting instincts on live prairie dogs by navigating in a lifelike prairie dog town burrow system, built by the scientists. Then, the animals are moved out of the lab to test their new skills in the wild.

The improvement is dramatic -- 70% of the trained ferrets survive the first year in the wild. But disappointingly, so far a self-sustaining population of ferrets has become established at only one of the seven prairie dog towns at which ferrets have been released. So the fight to bring wild black-footed ferrets back from the brink of extinction continues.