By Todd Wilkinson
On a recent afternoon at Badlands National Park in South Dakota, a prairie dog colony comes to life. Jittery prairie dog sentinels stand on their hind legs, bleating warnings that a scattered group of invaders is approaching. Nearby, a resident badger emerges from its den in a puff of dust; a burrowing owl sprints through the short grass to snatch a mouse diving for cover; and coyotes position themselves beside a warren of prairie dog holes, ready to pounce.
Healthy prairie dog towns have been associated with more than 100 different animals and birds, yet even among this wealth of critters, a few are missing. Soon, thanks to a new three-year reintroduction effort, one of these creatures-the swift fox-will be back in the picture.
In the fall of 2003, biologists began transplanting wild swift foxes from Colorado into the national park and the surrounding Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Led by park biologists Greg Schroeder and Doug Albertson, the plan calls for 30 foxes to be turned loose annually through 2005. The animals will be released near prairie dog towns because they provide the greatest cover and a ready source of food. South Dakota is regarded as a premier location for reintroduction because its prairie dog colonies remain free of the sylvatic and bubonic plagues, which in other states have killed prairie dogs and other animals, including black-footed ferrets.
The smallest wild canid on the continent and roughly the size of a house cat, the swift fox began to disappear from its former haunts in the latter half of the 20th century. Prairie ecologists noticed that both swift foxes and their western desert cousin, the kit fox, were caught in a dangerous downward slide.
Conservationists began a campaign to list the animals as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act.
In 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that the listing was warranted but precluded by other priorities. Recognizing that listing could possibly hasten calls for restrictions on land use, representatives from ten states joined together with independent researchers and officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service to form the Swift Fox Conservation Team. The objective was to slow the decline of existing swift fox populations. A major component of the strategy also called for re-establishing swift foxes in suitable areas.
Still, the proposal was initially met with skepticism when it was presented before the powerful South Dakota Animal Industry Board, which protects the interests of livestock producers. Advocates for the fox's reintroduction eventually won an endorsement from the board, in part, because it was clear the animals posed no threat to livestock.
"Too often, efforts to protect imperiled species are framed within a context of conflict. Yet the reintroduction of swift fox to Badlands reaffirms the value of parks and the opportunities that can arise when people come together to work toward common, creative solutions," says Mark Peterson, who oversees NPCA's State of the Parks initiative. "I think what's happening here could very well become a model for other places. The $70,000 being spent annually recovering swift fox at Badlands is a bargain, and the dividends that are going to come from this modest investment will only grow."
Dating back to at least the end of the Pleistocene era, swift fox inhabited a wide swath of bison country covering ten states and a few Canadian provinces, extending more than 350,000 square miles from Texas northward to Saskatchewan and Alberta. The animals' sleek frames and fleet speed endeared them to nomadic peoples. The Oglala Sioux, for example, whose Pine Ridge Reservation encompasses the South Unit of Badlands Park, named one of their ancient warrior societies, the Tokalas, in honor of swift foxes.
The animals also were mentioned in the journals of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In 1805, when the explorers came up the Missouri River near present-day Great Falls, Montana, Lewis offered the first detailed written description of swift fox in his diary and later captured a specimen that was shipped home to President Thomas Jefferson. However, over the next 150 years, a number of factors caused swift fox numbers to decline. Widespread habitat alteration caused by the near annihilation of bison was among the biggest. The foxes prefer short- and mixed-grass prairie. Without bison to graze the lands, the grasses grew tall. In addition, prairie dogs, considered a pest by ranchers but one of the fox's primary foods, were reduced to less than 5 percent of their historic range. Besides prairie dogs, the mostly nocturnal swift foxes also subsist on a diet of insects and small rodents, including ground squirrels, rats, mice, and voles.
In its purest sense, the effort at Badlands is the result of a blossoming public-private partnership initiated in South Dakota by media mogul Ted Turner, who owns several large bison ranches in the region including the Bad River Ranch, just east of the national park.
Under the auspices of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, led by biologist Mike Phillips (who, as a federal scientist in the 1990s, oversaw the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone), swift foxes were first returned to the 138,000-acre Bad River Ranch in 2002. Studies show the ranches could support a swift fox population of more than 200.
The following summer, Turner's biologists were again granted permission to trap and transport swift foxes from a thriving wild population in southern Wyoming, while a corresponding team from Badlands secured foxes from eastern Colorado. "We've gleaned some valuable insights from the Turner team," Schroeder says. "They've been great to work with and very supportive of what we're trying to do. We've got a lot of heads thinking about doing this right."
The reintroduction of foxes builds upon the quiet successes of several other wildlife reintroduction programs at Badlands, where in recent years the park has been a stage for restoring the most endangered land mammal in North America, the black-footed ferret. Ferrets rely almost entirely on prairie dogs as a food source. A self-sustaining population of 200 ferrets exists primarily in Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, where 15 years ago they were considered extirpated. In addition, the park has offered sanctuary to a growing plains bison herd and a band of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep.
Researchers have identified more than 1,000 different threatened and endangered species that once were native to national parks. Large and remote western parks like Badlands represent some of the best opportunities for restoration.
"We are looking to reassemble as many pieces as we can of the original ecosystem puzzle," Schroeder says. "Watching foxes out here again is exciting."
Schroeder and Albertson released the animals in a remote, rolling corner of Badlands near a prairie dog colony on the edge of designated federal wilderness. Every fox is equipped with a radio collar that enable researchers to track its movement on the landscape. "This is an experiment that began the day the cage doors were opened, and it's going to continue as long as there are foxes," Schroeder says of research involving the Park Service, Marsha Sovada with the U.S. Geological Survey's Biological Resources Division, and Dr. Jon Jenks from South Dakota State University.
The hope is that as swift fox populations take hold at Badlands, Bad River Ranch, and other sites, animals will eventually recolonize a wider area of prairie.
"Badlands and Bad River are the first beach heads, but for this to work, you've got to have more than beach heads. You need human cooperation," Phillips says. "You can have all the habitat in the world, yet unless people are willing to consciously make room for wildlife in their daily lives, we'll continue to repeat the old patterns that caused problems."
For Badlands biologist Schroeder, a native of South Dakota who grew up close by in Wall, restoration represents an exciting new frontier. "If you are looking at the United States as a whole, this is one of the few geographical areas that remain relatively untouched. We still have native prairie inside the park, which because of the remoteness and ruggedness of the land around it, got passed by when the settlers came through," Schroeder says.
"Every day that we're out here, whether it's tracking ferrets or swift foxes, we have to pinch ourselves. It's hard to believe we're getting paid to do this work. We're able to look into the past because these animals bring us closer to understanding what a healthy prairie ecosystem was really like."
