October 4, 2006

Ten swift fox that were trapped by Fish, Wildlife & Parks crews in northern Valley and Phillips counties were released last week on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

The release was the culmination of several months of coordination between state and tribal wildlife agencies to restore populations of the diminutive canine to shortgrass prairie on the reservation. The translocation was approved by Montana’s FWP Commission in April.

“This effort was intended to jump-start populations of fox that are just starting to return to the reservation,” says Ryan Rauscher, FWP’s native species biologist in Glasgow. “We have detected a sizeable and growing population of swift fox to the northwest of the reservation. Tribal wildlife folks have identified and assessed suitable habitat on the reservation. The tribes detected a single fox on the reservation last winter and then, as they were preparing for the translocation, they detected a den with pups in the receiving area. Consequently, we had the assurance that the new fox were going in to suitable habitat.”

Swift fox were once abundant on the Northern Plains, but the combination of poisoning during the wolfing era more than a century ago, habitat loss and fragmentation, unregulated harvest and secondary poisoning with rodent-control efforts removed the canines from Montana.

“When wolves disappeared from the plains, coyotes replaced them and readily killed swift fox, not only as outright predators but also as competitors for prey,” says Rauscher. Swift fox were declared extirpated in Montana in 1969.

The return of swift fox was accelerated by the release over the last 20 years of several hundred captive-reared fox by Canadian wildlife officials just north of the Montana border. Those fox and their descendents have repopulated much of Montana’s northern tier. In fact, Rauscher says much of the suitable habitat north of the Milk River has been reoccupied.

Weighing less than 5 pounds and about the size of a jackrabbit, swift fox are smaller than the more common red fox and prefer vast stretches of unbroken shortgrass prairie, where they feed mostly at night on insects, rodents and birds. They are sandy-blonde in color and have black-tipped tails. Red fox have white-tipped tails.

Another state-tribal partnership is just getting underway in Region 6. The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation will receive a portion of an ESA allocation to survey endangered black-footed ferrets on tribal land. A simultaneous survey, funded by the same federal funds, will be conducted by FWP off the reservation on land adjacent to sites where ferrets have been released over the past 12 years.

“The last ferret release on Fort Belknap was in 2000,” says Rauscher. “Reintroduction was halted because of poor reproductive success and plague on one of the two reintroduction sites. We know that ferrets can disperse several miles from their release site, and this fall’s monitoring effort is designed to answer the question of whether any ferrets are surviving on or off the reservation. We need to answer that question before we can move forward with black-footed ferret recovery in the state.”

It’s important to include tribal lands in the restoration of mobile species, says Rauscher, because “wildlife don’t recognize political boundaries. These cooperative projects with our tribal neighbors are critical to conserving our shared resource and working to make uncommon animals common again.”