Good news. The Black-footed ferret, once called the most endangered mammal on the planet, is coming to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
According to a story in The Denver Post, come September the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going release 30 captive-bred ferrets onto the roughly 27-square mile Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where it is hoped they will eventually establish a self-sustaining community, which could eventually number as many as 160.
One reason the feds are hot to turn the Arsenal into a pied-a-terre for the pieds noirs is because of the ferrets’ fondness for prairie dog. Each ferret is expected to eat between 100 and 150 prairie dogs a year (16,000 to 24,000 for 160 ferrets) according to refuge manager Dave Lucas.
Some background is in order here — about both the ferrets and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
First the ferrets: The little dickens have had three feet in the grave for about as long as anyone can remember. It made the original endangered species list in 1967 and graduated to the extinct species list in 1979 — where it remained until Sept. 26, 1981, when Lucille Hogg’s dog Shep delivered a recently deceased blackfooted ferret to the door of her Meeteetse, Wyo., home.
What was a fatal misstep for a ferret was a giant leap for black-footed ferretkind, because in short order a surviving colony was discovered and a federal captive breeding program begun.
By 1991 enough ferrets had been bred in captivity to allow the feds to start reintroducing them into the wild.
As of 2013 about 1,200 of them were chewing their way through prairie dog colonies in eight western states and Mexico.
As for the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, it was established in 1942 to manufacture both conventional and chemical munitions. Also, after World War II an insecticide plant was established on Arsenal land. Operations continued until 1985.
The waste products produced by these installations resulted in the Arsenal being dubbed the most polluted parcel of land in North America.
But then in 1986 something odd was discovered. In the absence of human activity on Arsenal land, wildlife started moving in. Lots of it.
The Fish and Wildlife Service soon discovered that more than 330 species of wildlife were living on the supposedly most contaminated piece of land in North America, including eagles, heron, rabbits, ducks, mice, snakes, geese, badgers, frogs, deer, coyotes, white pelicans and owls. And prairie dogs.
So in 1992 Congress took a cue from the critters and declared the Arsenal a National Wildlife Sanctuary. And in 1997 the feds began a $2.1 billion clean-up of the Arsenal, which went on until 2012.
“This is really a new chapter,” said Fish and Wildlife’s Lucas. “Our studies are showing that [the soils] are absolutely safe. The chemicals are not here.”
So. A horribly abused piece of land turns into a thriving wildlife refuge, and an endangered species gets a new home and earns its keep by policing dawgtown. What’s not to like about this story?
Only this: In 1982, the City of Denver had an asset of mind-boggling value — a close-in airport. Stapleton International Airport was a mere eight miles from downtown Denver. But it was relatively small and hemmed in by development so it couldn’t expand. Except in one direction — due north onto the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
Expanding onto the Arsenal was the self-evident way to accommodate Denver’s growing commercial aviation needs and still preserve the benefits of a close-in airport.
But insanely, the city chose not to take it. It opted to build Denver International Airport instead.
The official reason was that the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was was too contaminated to be considered.
(The real reason probably had to do with rampant land speculation involving the DIA site and potential development sites around it.)
So Denver’s new airport was built 20 miles further from the city, resulting in the waste of millions of man-hours annually, tens of millions of gallons of gasoline annually in getting to and from it. The adverse impact of building DIA halfway to Kansas dwarfed the environmental benefits of turning Rocky Mountain Arsenal into a national wildlife refuge.
The irony is that the existence of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge — and the fact that it has been declared clean enough to be the home for black-footed ferrets and the tens of thousands of burrowing rodents that sustain them — gives the lie to the central argument that was used to prevent the expansion of Stapleton onto Arsenal land.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
