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The Why of Ferrets

10,000 Birds

Sorry for banging on about black-footed ferrets, but here’s a bit on why this trip was so special to me: Forty years ago the black-footed ferret was a bit more like the Loch Ness Monster than it is today. The species was extinct, a vanished part of the vanishing prairie — and not for the first time.

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Thoughts for the Day

10,000 Birds

Last night I lay awake from 4 am til almost 5, worrying about the black-footed ferrets I met in Montana and the humans who had devoted their lives to helping them. As my fellow blogger Meredith Mann pointed out last summer, the Endangered Species Act in particular has been a massive success for birds.

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When conservation and animal rights collide

10,000 Birds

I’ve written at length about the specific vulnerability of insular faunas and the catastrophic extinctions caused by the arrival of rats, mice, ferrets, cats and possums (amongst others), here in New Zealand fully half the pre-human bird species were lost.