Black-footed ferrets carry NatureServe’s S1 critically imperiled rank in South Dakota, matching a G1 global rank, one of the most severe conservation statuses in this dataset, for a species once believed extinct until a small wild population was rediscovered in Wyoming in 1981. South Dakota’s Conata Basin and Badlands area have hosted key reintroduction efforts back into black-tailed prairie dog colonies, the ferret’s sole prey and habitat base, a very different landscape than the forested Black Hills sites listed above, which reflect generic park defaults rather than this species’ actual grassland range. The record splits nearly evenly between iNaturalist (19) and GBIF (18).
Records cluster in August and September (7 of the year’s monthly-tallied sightings), tracking the season when spotlighting surveys, the standard method for detecting this nocturnal, burrow-dependent species, are typically conducted across prairie dog towns.
Full species profile
