Photo: USFWS Mountain Region-Prairie | Wikimedia
While swift foxes and black-footed ferrets disappeared from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation generations ago, students and interns from the tribal college are helping reintroduce them to the northern Montana, US, reservation. “It’s like having your family back,” said Mike Fox, former director of the Fort Belknap wildlife program. Before European settlement, a million ferrets lived in 156,000 square miles from Canada to Mexico, wherever prairie dogs were found, but by the 1960s, prairie dogs were reduced to 2,200 square miles. Ferrets have been reintroduced to seven reservations on the Northern Plains and two tribal sites in the Southwest, while swift foxes have been returned to four reservations. Once abundant on the plains, swift foxes now occupy about 40% of their original habitat. Since 2020, the tribes and college have worked with Smithsonian’s National Zoo to capture about 100 foxes from healthy populations in Wyoming and Colorado and relocate them to Fort Belknap.
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