Wild Again. David S. Jachowski
winter. Whether they would be here when I returned.
By mid-November a call came through on the old camp phone that was stacked on a piece of plywood in the corner of the barn. Grabbing my hat and gloves, I rushed outside and felt ice crystals instantly form in my nostrils. The chill of the cold plastic phone on my bare ear made me recoil, forcing me to hold the phone at a safe distance. On the other end of the line, the voice of a woman from the federal government repeated my name. She seemed pleased to have tracked me down in response to the application I filed the previous year to join Peace Corps. She offered a two-year contract as a biologist in the Philippines, a free plane ticket to a country I barely knew existed. I traced my mental globe to somewhere in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, somewhere warm—I did not hesitate.
• • •
In 2002, following my two years of international service and building a life as a tropical biologist, I found myself back in central Montana. Randy offered me a full-time job to help him again with black-footed ferrets, and I accepted before even getting off the plane back into the United States. He wanted me to move up to a little waterfowl refuge on the Hi-Line of northern Montana and work full-time to help him breed and rear black-footed ferrets in Montana so that they could be released there. It was a permanent job with pay, something scripted and directed, yet we knew that the outcome for the species was still far from certain—extinction loomed.
I arrived in the small town of Malta during spring, a time of hope and activity—hope that the ephemeral prairie rains would come and last into July before the grasslands dried out and returned to their more familiar and less nutritious brown. It was a time of preparation ahead of the busy summer months when ranchers must push cows out into summer pastures, fatten calves, and harvest hay before the long winter. But in Malta I was not a homeowner, not a landowner, not even a renter, more of a squatter. I was a twenty-five-year-old wildlife biologist living in a retired FEMA trailer left over from the latest Gulf of Mexico hurricane disaster that was government surplused and then hidden behind a maintenance building on the seldom-visited Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge—a pinprick of a refuge on the larger map of federally protected areas barely large enough to justify having a full-time staff. I often imagined the poor family who had lived in the trailer before me. I created an image of a family from Alabama or Mississippi who had lost everything, cramming four kids and a grandmother into one of many white, tightly packed, federally purchased trailers in an abandoned soccer field on the Gulf Coast, each filled with a traumatized family under the government’s care. Based on the stains on the sofa and smell of the curtains, I thought that my trailer’s family must have had to stay in the encampment for months before they could find a modular house to rent with federal disaster aid checks, likely settling in a town far from the memories of the coast and where they had few relatives.
For me, the trailer was temporary living turned semi-permanent by cinder blocks under axles and power from an extension cord. The eyesore was hidden from public view by a ring of invasive, pale, stunted, and thorny Russian olive trees—few native tree species could tolerate the winter cold, summer heat, poor soil, and infrequent rain. As I cooked dinner on the cramped two-burner camper stove with borrowed pots and pans, I was given time to think, to reflect on how quickly my life became focused on a similar trailer three hundred feet away where dozens of beady eyes of baby black-footed ferret kits were still hidden from light by sealed eyelids. My list of chores for the next day accumulated in the back of my mind: clean nest boxes, weigh kits, disinfect floors, order implant tags, clean hamster colony, order new water bottles, mow preconditioning pens, feed ferrets, defrost tomorrow’s food.
In the evenings, memories of saltwater ocean and love came forward only when I finished my third bottle of beer. My thoughts and emotions of loss were likely not so different from the homesteaders from Europe who arrived in Malta more than one hundred years prior to me. Like them, the promise of the open plains drew me. I had headed west at the first chance for teenage independence to work summers on a Wyoming cattle ranch with my uncle. Spent four years at the University of Montana being trained as a wildlife biologist, and then traveled around the world once again to end up in the plains of central Montana.
Yet upon returning to Montana, the critical satisfaction I had found in its open spaces was gone. I had first met J after four months of living with hunters in the Philippine jungle. While I was digging with a pickaxe to build a hiking trail, she arrived at the wildlife sanctuary, blonde and confident on the back of a British United Nations volunteer’s motorcycle. She left with the British volunteer but came back a week later, tracked me down, enticed me to leave my post on occasion and travel the island, and made me fall in love. We had a tropical island love as only two biologists can, measuring the jungle trees, mapping the extent of coral reefs, surveying fish in the weekend market; reporting on components of natural beauty and living in thatch huts, hers on the coast, mine in the interior jungle. A life of continual motion in a corner of the world, without family so that we grew reliant on each other, yet knew there was an expiration date on our temporary lives when the two-year contract ended, a make-or-break deadline we avoided until the end, when she was first to leave. Yet nothing ended, and when forced to make a decision on the future, we made promises of finding each other back in the United States like high school sweethearts going away to college.
After dinner I went outside to smoke my next-to-last Philippine cigarette, knowing I needed to not be an addict and hoping to leave nicotine and the longings of my past in one symbolic, sweeping gesture of my body and mind. Outside the screen door of my Malta camper, I couldn’t focus on J or the tropics. I couldn’t confuse myself with the persistent question of why I chose to move to Montana, Randy, and black-footed ferrets rather than follow her to the East Coast. The mosquitoes were kept from my nose and mouth by the smoke, but they swarmed my ears, hair, arms, and legs. The mosquitoes of the Hi-Line were worse than those of any tropical forest or swamp. They swarmed on this temperate plain with the spring pulse of water to the point where you inhaled two or three with each breath. They turned the backs of white shirts grey, and then spotted with red where you had slapped one midmeal. I learned to walk fast, from door to door, car to building, home to office, to avoid the growing hemoglobin-seeking cloud from catching up to me as they honed in on my carbon signature. I finished only half the cigarette and retreated into my trailer, spending the next five minutes killing any individuals that followed me inside.
• • •
After the crash of the last wild ferret population in Meeteetse in March 1987, a captive population totaling eighteen ferrets was established at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Sybille Canyon Wildlife Research facility. This included the critical late addition on March 1, 1987, of Scarface from Meeteetse, a particularly virile male who helped breed nine of the eleven females. Of the nine bred females, only two produced litters in the spring of 1987, eventually resulting in seven surviving young. It was a surprising success compared to the experiences at Patuxent a decade earlier.
In 1988, thirteen of the fourteen females produced litters, resulting in thirty-four young. There was high hope for the captive breeding program because minimum production numbers seemed to be met. It was at least a small buffer from extinction. Within a few years, the number of ferrets in captivity increased enough to allow the captive population to be subdivided. Individuals were shipped to the National Zoological Park in Front Royal, Virginia, and Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, dividing the population and limiting the risk that a disease outbreak or other catastrophic event at one site would cause extinction of the species. Eventually, ferrets were also housed and bred at zoos in Phoenix, Toronto, Louisville, and Colorado Springs.
Captive breeding was so successful that by 1991, ferrets were beginning to be released into the wild. Demand by states quickly exceeded supply, so a movement began to start small-scale captive breeding programs at the state level for those states that wanted ferrets. Captive breeding buildings and preconditioning pens were built in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona. By 2002, when Randy brought me back to the Hi-Line, the newly created Montana ferret facility had a couple of years of experience under its belt. Randy had already hand-picked as his captive breeding team leader Valerie Kopsco, a thin, energetic biologist from New Jersey with a soft spot for cowboys. The previous year, she had already tested the specially designed outdoor pens and indoor cages with a few trial ferrets. I was brought on as a second hand ahead of the big push to finally breed