Olivia Davis walking through the Aubrey Valley grassland at night, looking for black-footed ferrets.
This article was written for a special conference on “Making Amidst Extinction,” the results of which are in the works to be published in an upcoming special issue in the journal Cultural Geographies. This nonfiction piece is an experiment in reckoning with and making meaning from extinction.
April 14, 2023, 8 p.m. – Risa
I only know Aubrey Valley in darkness.
It is wide and flat and the sky is big there. Stars dance over the bumpy roads that cut through the miles of low-growing yellow sage and bristlegrass dotted with burrows.
Before this evening, I had never been here. I arrived with my friend Olivia, a fellow PhD student studying conservation and endangered species, both of us hoping to find an endangered creature so elusive it might as well be mythical: the Black-footed ferret.
Black-footed ferrets once thrived across the Great Plains, occupying every grassland that prairie dogs – their favorite food – once did. But as European settlers violently pushed westward through the 1800s, they waged war on the pudgy prairie dogs to clear the land for cattle. Prairie dog populations dwindled and disappeared entirely from Arizona. As they vanished, so did the Black-footed ferrets. In 1979, biologists declared the ferrets extinct.
But on a starry night in 1981, a cattle dog named Shep brought home a strange creature he found in the plains of Meeteetse, Wyoming – a creature that was not supposed to exist.[1] When the news broke, scientists were stunned.
Biologists rushed to Wyoming and captured all the ferrets they could find – only eighteen.[2] Of those, seven successfully reproduced and grew into a population large enough that, in 1991, biologists released some back into the wild. Over the next decade, ferrets were shipped across the country, to the South Dakota Badlands, the Crow Reservation, the Colorado plains, and to Aubrey Valley, Arizona.
Though I have read much about this endangered species, I have never encountered one; they are little more than an idea to me. Part of why I am here, in the darkness of Aubrey Valley, is because I cannot shake the desire to see one of these ferrets in the wild – as if seeing it in real life would make them real.[3]
I am not sure why seeing them matters so much to me. Maybe there is some part of me that thinks that it might help me shake – or at least understand – this feeling that something is missing in the world, something big and important.
Maybe.
8 p.m. – Olivia
My heart is pounding as we park in front of the AZ Game and Fish field house in Aubrey Valley. From outside, I’d never expect this well-worn field house to be the center for Arizona’s Black-footed ferret recovery. But it is, and tonight, we get to be a part of those efforts.
Since 2000, Arizona Game and Fish (the state department that manages wildlife, also known as AZ Game and Fish) has hosted Black-footed ferret spotlighting events in Aubrey Valley, a sprawling grassland an hour west of Flagstaff, in the north of the state, every Fall and Spring. Volunteers stay up all night driving around with a giant spotlight, looking out for the ferrets’ green eye shine. If they do spot a ferret, then they try to trap it with a long metal cage and some Big Gulp cups, and if they actually weasel a weasel, they drive it to the field house to be inspected and vaccinated by the state biologists.
Monitoring efforts in Arizona started after 1996, when biologists released the first four ferrets here. For a handful of happy years, the population kept growing. The dream of restoring a piece of this Arizona grassland seemed possible.
But after 2012, things changed. At first, the decline was too slow to raise alarm – perhaps the ferrets had just had a bad year? Perhaps they were being extra stealthy? By 2016, though, it was clear that the ferrets were in dire condition, but nobody knew why. Where had all the ferrets gone?
When the team at AZ Game and Fish explain all of this to us, they still do not have an answer. That is what we are here to help them find out. They casually hand us our spotlight and a clipboard, sending us out on the road. I bolt back to the car, my heart still pounding. I really want to help. But what happens if we fail?
There is no turning back now. I start the car – it’s time to roll.
April 15, 2023, 12 a.m. – Risa
“WOAH!”
I’m the one who shouts it. Olivia slams on the breaks.
“Did you see one?” she asks, wide-eyed.
I shine my spotlight left and right, squinting and searching the darkness.
“I’m not sure.”
I have been through this dozens of times already by now, so I know the routine: I get out of the car to check, shining my light into the burrows in the hope that I will see some glowing green eyes. But each time, I see nothing but dirt.
This is starting to feel impossible. Aubrey Valley is massive. I try to imagine this landscape ten years ago, with the sounds of yipping and hunting cutting through the night. Now, the silence here is deafening.
An eerie feeling starts to creep across my skin. I begin to wonder if I am in fact, standing in the middle of a mass grave.
6 a.m. – Olivia
The sun is just peaking over the grassy Seligman hills. If there are any ferrets here, they are snoozing by now. It’s time for Risa and me to call it a – day? Night? Who knows.
We really tried. We spent eight hours searching the same patches of grass over and over, trying to stay alert and sane between caffeine and power naps. We kept thinking we had spotted a ferret, but every time, there was nothing.
I know that what we are doing is small – this is just one night in one place looking for one species. But everyone seemed so optimistic at the beginning of the night. Not seeing a ferret just does not feel right.
As we drive away, I look at the field house one last time, a wave of disappointment washing over me.
I am not sure why this makes me so sad. It almost feels as if I failed, as if I am the one who let the ferrets down. Risa and I were supposed to help save them, but there weren’t any left to save.
Maybe I was looking to see the Black-footed ferret as some kind of sign that this is all worth it – not just this night, but conservation as a whole. But I know that seeing one Black-footed ferret would not necessarily mean that things are getting any better.
As we drive away, I realize that coming here still mattered to me. That this is what conservation looks like: people who keep trying even if they may never succeed. Maybe that is what it means to have hope.
6 a.m. – Risa
I came here wanting to witness an endangered creature, but all I witnessed was absence. But absence is heavier than nothingness; it is filled with haunting presence. Absence has a shape, has edges and corners, carries something present but unreachable within it, something that will never be visible to us.[4]
If what I came here looking for was a better sense of the world, I suppose I have gotten it. In this era of mass extinction, when the world grows quieter and emptier with each passing year, it would be easy to think that there is no hope of knowing what we are losing anymore, that you cannot make sense of another creature without a real-world encounter.[5] But there are histories, memories, echoes of the past in what still stands before us, and I leave here filled with longing to decipher them, to write them down.
As we drive away from Aubrey Valley, I feel a little haunted, too.
[1] Iver Peterson, “How the (1980s) West was won by the Black-footed ferret,” The New York Times, January 3, 1986.
[2] Amy Philips, “Conservation of Black-Footed Ferrets,” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, October 14, 2024.
[3] This piece was inspired by methods of storying encounters with more-than-humans from extinction studies: Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew, eds. Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (New York: Colombia University Press, 2017).
[4] Adam Searle, “Absence,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 167–172.
[5] On narrating species that cannot be encountered: Michelle Bastian, “Whale Falls, Suspended Ground, and Extinctions Never Known,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 2 (2020): 454–474; Dominic O’Key, “Extinction in Public: Thinking Through the Sixth Mass Extinction, Environmental Humanities, and Extinction Studies,” Environmental Humanities 15, no. 1 (2023): 168–186.
*Cover Image by authors, used with permission.
[Cover Image description: Olivia Davis walking through the Aubrey Valley grassland at nigh, looking for black-footed ferrets. A spotlight shines on a person wearing a beanie and sweatshirt walking through a grassland at night.]
Edited by Sindi-Leigh McBride; reviewed by Deniz Karakas.
