Today’s dispatch from the Annals of Wacky Conservation Schemes is a doozy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) plans to use drones to scatter hundreds of thousands of peanut butter treats across the Montana prairie in order to save an adorable endangered ferret.
Similar to previous plans involving poisonous toad sausages and Styrofoam-stuffed dead turtles, this plan only seems silly until you learn the backstory. The tale in Montana is a relatively simple one. Once upon a time, black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) ate prairie dogs (genus Cynomys), and everyone prospered. Then along came the prairie dog plague (Yersinia pestis—yes, the very bacteria responsible for the Black Death), which massacred the prairie dogs and left the ferrets with nothing to eat. Their numbers dwindled, and dwindled, and dwindled. They would have died out altogether, had it not been for USFWS wildlife managers, who rescued enough ferrets to start a healthy captive population, then introduced them back into the wild.
via Mental Floss
Image: KIMBERLY FRASER/USFWS VIA FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS // CC BY 2.0
