A federal appeals court has upheld a decision by a lower court in 2023 to downlist the American burying beetle to threatened and reduce its federal protections. The American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) is the largest carrion beetle in North America. Its range extends from the southern borders of three eastern Canadian provinces and across 35 states along the eastern seaboard to Florida and other Gulf states. Since it was first listed as endangered in 1989, the beetle has been found in only about eight states, representing a 90% loss of its historic range. Scientists believe this decline is linked to habitat loss, fragmentation, environmental changes and the extinction of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), a key part of its original ecosystem. Following a request from the oil and gas industry to delist the species in 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the beetle had recovered parts of its historical range in eight states and downlisted the species in 2020. The Center for Biological Diversity challenged the decision, arguing that it violated the U.S. Endangered Species Act. That organization also cited projections that the beetle could lose nearly 60% of its remaining range within 15 years. The court ruled in a partially split decision that the species is not at imminent risk of going extinct. The species is still listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as critically endangered.
The Wildlife Society has awarded Elisabeth “Elli” Teige the Donald H. Rusch Memorial Game Bird Scholarship, which honors the memory and furthers the legacy of Donald H. Rusch by supporting graduate students researching the biology and management of upland game birds or waterfowl.
“It feels really wonderful to be recognized,” Teige said. “I like to use the term ‘grouse-greats’ to describe researchers who have moved the needle for sage- and prairie-grouse conservation. There are a lot of ‘grouse greats’ who have won this award, and I’m excited to join their ranks.”
Teige is a doctoral candidate at Kansas State University, where she researches lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) use of Conservation Reserve Program grasslands in Kansas—a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that helps farmers and landowners restore native grasslands. She studies with David Haukos, unit leader of the Kansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (CRU).
Teige’s research focuses on how lesser prairie-chickens use Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) plantings and lands, including evaluating how the land affects lek attendance and breeding habitat quality. She said that the CRP has been one of the most successfully implemented conservation efforts in the U.S. “We have some information about how these birds are using CRP plantings, but we need to know more about them across their entire range in Kansas,” she said. Her research focuses on the quality of CRP as reproductive habitat and how it affects lesser prairie-chicken lekking behavior, demographics and survival.
“Elli already has contributed much to the conservation of wildlife, and I strongly believe that she will be an outstanding leader in our profession for decades,” said TWS member David Haukos, Teige’s PhD advisor who has known her for nearly nine years, in his nomination letter. “Her work has considerable influence in recent actions related to lesser prairie-chickens, a species recently listed as threatened in Kansas under the Endangered Species Act.”
Teige holds a lesser prairie-chicken as part of a capture effort for a conservation translocation. Credit: Nicholas J. Parker
She was brought to this work by a desire to bridge wildlife research and management, rooted in an understanding of the importance of hunting in wildlife conservation. Growing up in rural northwestern Wisconsin, she loved watching ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus)—what she called “tree chickens” growing up—ambling through her yard.
But it wasn’t always birds that sparked her interest. She was working with mammals as an undergraduate and then got a technician position doing lesser prairie-chicken translocation work that turned into her master’s project. She was immediately captivated. “It was so amazing, and I realized that not a lot of people had the chance to see what I saw,” she said. What kept her in the field, Teige said, was her colleagues. “There’s a passion for conservation and wanting to work hard across agencies to make conservation projects happen,” she said. “The people I work with are really cool, and I feel so supported.”
Teige holds a Master of Science from Kansas State University and a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM). She has been involved with TWS since her undergraduate years and is an Associate Wildlife Biologist®. She has also engaged with TWS leadership, including as vice president of the MSUM student chapter, board member-at-large for the Central Mountains and Plains Section, graduate student liaison for the KSU student chapter, and secretary and treasurer of the Kansas Chapter.
Teige said she’d like to continue working with game birds, specifically at the intersections of research, policy and conservation. “I really want to help move conservation actions forward so we can see on-the-ground benefits, especially on private lands.”
Tropical forests—and their ability to capture and store carbon—are at the forefront of fighting climate change. New research shows that trees need help from their animal neighbors to fully unlock their carbon-capture superpowers, especially those critters responsible for seed dispersal. In a new review published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which included data from thousands of studies, researchers found that after an area had been logged, tropical forests with healthy populations of seed-dispersing animals could absorb up to four times as much carbon compared to similar areas with fewer seed-dispersers. The scientists also found that in areas where reforestation is possible, seed disperser declines lead to an average loss of 57% of carbon capture potential. “The results underscore the importance of animals in maintaining healthy, carbon-rich tropical forests,” said Evan Fricke, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a press release. “When seed-dispersing animals decline, we risk weakening the climate-mitigating power of tropical forests.”
San Diego is a global hot spot of bee diversity—or at least it should be. A new study shows that introduced honey bees take around 80% of available pollen, leaving hundreds of native bee species to forage on the scraps.
“The entire life cycles of bees are dependent on pollen and nectar,” said Dillon Travis, an environmental consultant and former doctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego, where he conducted the study. “They are inexorably tied to floral resources.”
The paper, published recently in Insect Conservation and Diversity, quantifies the pressure that nonnative western honey bees (Apis mellifera) put on native bees through competition for resources.
A native bee, Tetraloniella davidsoni, pollinates a flower. Credit: Keng-Lou James Hung
How honey bees came to dominate
Typically, species increase in biodiversity closer to the tropics. But bees don’t follow this rule. Bee diversity is clustered in Mediterranean Europe, the Middle East and the U.S. Southwest. These sandy, dry spots with open vegetation are attractive to bees and have accumulated many species over millennia. “Bees like dry places with areas with large floral blooms,” said Keng-Lou James Hung, another author on the study and an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.
When he first came to San Diego to study native bees as a doctoral student at the University of San Diego, Hung said he trained himself to “just tune out” all the honey bees he saw that were unrelated to his project at the time. But that led him to ignore about 90% of all the bees he saw.
San Diego’s coastal sage scrub is home to more than 700 species of native pollinators. Credit: Keng-Lou James Hung
Through conversations with his mentors, he realized that honey bees deserved more attention. “My mentors were convinced that this is where the real story was at,” he said. “And I found out that they were right.”
When European colonists first brought the bees to North America in the 1800s, they quickly became feral, escaping beekeepers and reproducing in the wild. But they weren’t well-adapted to the hot, dry climate of the American Southwest, and their population numbers stayed relatively in check. Then, in the 1950s, people brought western honey bees native to southern Africa (A. mellifera scutellata) to South America to pollinate farms. “They’re the same species but a different lineage that is better adapted to hot climates,” Hung said.
Once the bees from Africa escaped cultivation and started mating with the European lineages, they began migrating northward, and scientists first documented them in California in 1994. These hybrid honey bees are much better suited for San Diego’s environment and quickly came to outnumber native pollinators.
Hung’s prior research found that honey bees comprise up to 90% of insect visitors to blooming plants in the area. “It’s almost insignificant, the number of native pollinators we have,” Travis said.
A bee’s life
To determine how many resources honey bees were taking that native pollinators would otherwise leverage, Travis and Hung headed to San Diego’s coastal sage scrub ecosystems. Travis looked at how much pollen honey bees were removing. The night before a field day, he went out and marked flowers that were just about to bloom, covering them in chiffon bags. He returned to the field the next day and uncovered the flowers one by one, allowing a single honey bee to visit the flower before collecting the bloom for lab analysis. He gathered flowers that had been exposed to pollinators for the entire day and collected other flowers before they had been visited at all as points of comparison.
A white sage stigma—the female reproductive organ—is surrounded by pollen grains, which are stained dark purple so researchers can count them. Credit: Dillon Travis
Travis didn’t have to wait more than 10 minutes for a honey bee to visit each of the exposed flowers so he could collect them. That hasn’t been the case when the researchers were conducting projects studying native bees.
Travis brought the flowers back to the lab, where his research team used a microscope to count individual pollen grains that would help them determine how many the honey bees harvested. “I had an army of undergraduates to help me out, and they made this work possible,” he said.
Looking at flowers from three plant species common in the coastal sage scrub ecosystem—black sage, white sage and distant phacelia—Travis found that in just two visits, honey bees can remove up to 60% of a flower’s available pollen. Within the first day that it’s open, 80% of that pollen will be gone.
Keng-Lou James Hung in the field ready to catch and identify bees. Credit: Jena Donnell
Hung also spent time in the field to determine the number and size of pollinator visitors to coastal sage scrub flowering bushes. “We were able to do pretty intricate calculations on the average size of bees,” he said. “With all this information, we were able to estimate how heavy [all the honey bees are] versus how heavy all the other native bees are combined.”
Hung and Travis then determined how much pollen was needed to produce a bee of a given size and species. He found that honey bees represented around 98% of all bee biomass around San Diego, indicating about 98% of all floral resources in the region were going to honey bees. The resources they take from one hectare of coastal sage scrub daily could feed thousands of native bees.
The researchers estimated that if these floral resources were dedicated to native pollinators—and if the main limitation of native bee populations is food availability—native bee numbers could be up to 50 times greater than they are now.
The honey bee effect
Honey bees didn’t evolve with coastal sage scrub plants, unlike native pollinators. These plants are the foundation of the ecosystem, providing key habitat for a variety of wildlife, and the bees help the plants reproduce through pollination. “If you chisel away at the bedrock of your building, the whole thing’s going to collapse on itself,” Travis said.
In their goal to understand how honey bees are affecting native pollinators, Travis and Hung have run up against a common problem in ecology. “We don’t have a baseline understanding of what the environment looked like before honey bees were introduced,” Travis said.
Nonetheless, “I would not be surprised if native bee diversity is taking a hit,” Hung said.
A native bee, Diadasia opuntiae, pollinates a flower. Credit: Keng-Lou James Hung
Hung is alarmed by how resilient the honey bee is. “It’s a very, very good competitor,” he said. They are effective at foraging in patchy, inconsistent, unreliable environments. “With climate change, we’re going to create landscapes that more and more favor honey bees and more disadvantage native bees,” Hung said. Less than 10% of historic coastal sage scrub exists now.
“Our study adds evidence that some management action needs to be done,” he said. “Right now, the ratio of honey bee biomass to that of all native bees combined—of which there are 700 species in San Diego—is 50 to one,” Hung said.
While Hung and Travis note that honey bees are important for the economy, there are some management actions that can be taken in vulnerable, biodiverse areas like San Diego.
“The vast majority of people I talk to aren’t aware that honey bees aren’t from here,” Travis said. “We need to stop looking at honey bees as wildlife in the U.S. but as a managed species like chickens or cattle.” Travis quoted a popular maxim in pollinator ecology: “Keeping honey bees to ‘save the bees’ is like keeping chickens to save the birds.”
After decades of groundbreaking work in the ecology of large mammals and inspiring a new generation of wildlife biologists, Terry Bowyer has won the 2025 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award.
Now retired to the foothills of the Cascades in northwestern Oregon, Bowyer has spent over four decades as a wildlife biologist at Unity College in Maine, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Idaho State University.
Bowyer is the recipient of the 2025 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award, the highest honor bestowed upon wildlife biologists by The Wildlife Society. The award recognizes wildlifers’ lifetime contributions to the field.
Bowyer, who is 77, is originally from Southern California and grew up in Ojai, a small town in the Topatopa Mountains, hunting mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and California quail (Callipepla californica) with his dad. At Humboldt State University, Bowyer studied wildlife management and graduated in 1970.
After a stint in the Army Reserves during the Vietnam War working as a combat medic and X-ray technician, he decided to go back to school to study wildlife biology. “I spent a lot of time in dark rooms and wanted to be outside again,” he said.
Throughout his career, his primary focus was on sexual segregation—the differences between sexes in wildlife. “We’re still not managing wildlife populations as best as we might because we don’t recognize the different needs between the sexes,” he said. “For example, understanding habitat needs of females during the critical reproductive period has a lot to do with survivorship of young,” he said. He recently published a book that digs into the topic.
Now retired, Bowyer spends much of his time with his hunting dog, Pippin. Courtesy of Terry Bowyer
His main focus has been on ungulates—he’s studied every North American ungulate except the collared peccary. He has also worked on a range of carnivores and mesocarnivores with his students.
But Bowyer hasn’t only focused on understanding animal behavior and wildlife management. He’s also studied the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on a marine population of river otters (Lontra canadensis) in coastal Alaska. For this work, he collaborated with a biochemist to develop biomarkers that became an industry standard for documenting exposure to oil. “Scientists need to be collaborative to really be effective,” he said.
He has also held leadership roles in TWS, including president of the Maine Chapter, the Alaska Chapter and the Northwest Section.
Helping the next generation
Of everything he’s done in his career, Bowyer said he’s most proud of his students. “I’ve been really lucky in having superb students,” he said.
“Many of these students have themselves gone on to make important contributions to wildlife science and management,” wrote James Sedinger, a foundation professor emeritus at the University of Nevada Reno, and a TWS Fellow, in his nomination letter for Bowyer. “ I count at least eight university faculty among Terry’s former graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, which, by itself, is a major contribution to the wildlife profession.” He noted that other students have become conservation leaders, and one was even an editor of Wildlife Monographs.
He has also worked toward gender equity in the wildlife profession, said former graduate student Kelley Stewart. Stewart is a TWS Fellow, former representative to the Western Section and a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. “A very important contribution of Dr. Bowyer’s is his support of women in the wildlife profession,” Stewart wrote in her nomination letter. “After starting families, several of Dr. Bowyer’s women graduate students, including myself, would not have remained in science without his strong support and guidance at that point in their careers.”
For Bowyer, gender equity has always been intentional. When he was an undergraduate, three out of the more than 300 students were women. “They were told the only space for them in wildlife was as illustrators,” he said. “A lot of us began to question that model.”
Bowyer is especially honored to be recognized as continuing the legacy of Aldo Leopold. “No one can read A Sand County Almanac without being inspired,” he said. “And to have your name mentioned in the same breath as Aldo Leopold,” Bowyer paused, “it’s a surprise.”
Bowyer recommends that students pursuing a career in wildlife spend as much time in the field as they can to understand the nuances of animal behavior and, above all, to follow their hearts. “If you’re following what you’re interested in—that’s the key to success.”
A funky smell downwind may not be the only thing penguin guano produces in Antarctica. A new study published in Communications Earth and Environment found that gaseous ammonia released from Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) may increase cloud formation, which could help reduce the effects of climate change. Researchers examined new particle formation, a process where tiny particles within the air are created from gaseous ones. If these particles continue to grow, they can lead to the formation of clouds. While exploring this process in the Antarctic Peninsula, the scientists found that penguin guano is a large source of ammonia that increases new particle formation in the region. The penguin guano altered the soil, and it continued to be a strong source of ammonia long after the penguins had migrated away. This connection represents an important feedback loop between penguin populations, climate and habitat changes.
The Migratory Bird Conservation Commission has approved $102.9 million in funding through the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA), the U.S. Department of the Interior announced.
The funding will support the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partners in conserving, restoring or enhancing more than 548,000 acres of wetlands and associated uplands vital to migratory birds while improving water quality and increasing recreational opportunities.
“These grants will increase and maintain healthy bird populations and wetland habitat, while supporting local economies and improving public access to recreational activities for American traditions, such as hunting, fishing and birdwatching,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
TWS CEO Ed Arnett welcomed this news. “For more than 30 years, NAWCA has been a vital private-public funding program with demonstrated success for protecting and managing wetlands that benefits migratory birds and many other species of wildlife, Arnett said.
Pesticides likely caused a large die-off of monarch butterflies in California in 2024, according to new research. Hundreds of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) died in January 2024 at an overwintering site in the Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary in California—researchers found them twitching or dead in piles. In a study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, they tested some of the insects, finding an average of seven pesticides in each individual. “The incident gave us a rare opportunity to directly document pesticide exposure and its impacts on monarchs in the real world,” Staci Cibotti, the study’s lead author and an entomologist and pesticide program specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, told The Guardian.
The python research team bends over a table beneath bright fluorescent lights, carefully slicing open the belly of a Burmese python hatchling. A veterinarian inserts a pill-sized tracking transmitter into the tissue and carefully sews it back up. The procedure, precise and practiced, is part of a long-term effort to study the survival and development of these invasive predators from their earliest days to better understand population dynamics.
In the lab’s cooler room and freezers, large adult pythons—many over 100 pounds—fill every shelf in the cooler, coiled up on themselves in gray bins ready to be necropsied and aid in knowledge acquisition. Each snake collected by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida is destined to yield data for researchers across the region, maximizing the value of the removal efforts and providing a comprehensive insight into invasion dynamics. Nearby sits a large -80-degree chest freezer filled with rows of meticulously labeled vials, a genetic archive, fragments of DNA collected over time—a treasure trove of information aimed at building a clearer picture of python invasion dynamics.
An 11-foot, 31.5 pound female Burmese python regurgitating a 35-pound white-tailed deer fawn. Credit Ian Bartoszek Conservancy of Southwest Florida
“We love snakes. We have tremendous respect for them,” said Ian Bartoszek, Environmental Science Project Manager and founder of the program. “We humanely remove invasive pythons, but we also get as much science out of these animals as possible.”
Since launching its research and removal program in 2013, the Conservancy has removed more than 20 tons of Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus), equivalent to over 40,000 pounds of apex predator, and prevented over 20,000 python eggs from hatching across both public and private lands from Naples to the western Everglades. The Conservancy removes them from the ecosystem as part of its stated commitment of “protecting our water, land, wildlife and future.”
An 11-foot, 31.5 pound female Burmese python with a 35-pound white-tailed deer fawn, demonstrating that the pythons could each prey on more than 100% of their weight. Credit: Ian Bartoszek/Conservancy of Southwest Florida
The core of this program’s success is its use of radio telemetry and aerial scouting. But it certainly isn’t powered just by legwork. Rather, a team of 40 “scout snakes,” radio-tagged male Burmese pythons deployed during the breeding season to locate reproductive females, does the slither-work. These males are carefully tracked and relocated weekly, leading researchers to reproductive females during the breeding season. On occasion, these scout males will lead researchers to other males in large, writhing breeding aggregations. These proven males that have demonstrated they can find female snakes are then incorporated into the program, expanding the unwitting workforce.
It’s this search for a mate that makes the removal program so successful. Removing breeding females is important because the team is reducing their long-term impact and the impact of their potential progeny. The program began with just four snakes and one of them, Luther, holds the distinction of being the longest continuously tracked Burmese python in the world, having led researchers to females for more than a decade.
“We have a small window of time, and we try to maximize it,” said Bartoszek, referring to the breeding season that runs from December through April, peaking in February. “Valentine’s Day, you can usually find us on a pile of pythons.”
Diet and damage
The team does not limit itself to accessible snakes. Instead, they go where the snakes go, often into remote areas of the Everglades and across public and private land, all to suppress the local population and carry the snakes out on their backs and by boat where possible.
The collaborative science they’ve published to date includes a detailed look into python ecology. Stomach content analysis with research partners at the University of Florida has revealed the consumption of over 85 native species.
Wildlife Biologist Ian Bartoszek with a 150 lb. female Burmese python and two additional males. Pythons were found in a mating aggregation by tracking a radio tagged male scout snake in southwest Florida. Credit Ian Easterling Conservancy of Southwest Florida
In some cases, prey items have exceeded 100% of the snake’s body mass. One python the team and its collaborators found weighed 31.5 pounds and consumed a 35-pound white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) fawn, defying previous understanding of mouth size limitations. Understanding the size limits of prey that predators can eat helps researchers predict the impact that this invasive snake has on native wildlife.
“Imagine what 42,000 pounds of snake represent in pounds of native wildlife consumed. These generalist apex predators are causing cascading effects through the Everglades food web.” Bartoszek said, emphasizing the impact of the species as well as the benefit of removal efforts to the ecosystem.
Despite the success, Bartoszek acknowledged that managers may never fully eradicate the Burmese python. However, there are encouraging signs. The team is encountering fewer reproductive females and smaller individuals in areas with long-term management efforts, possibly indicating that local suppression is working.
“We need to follow the science on this issue.” Bartoszek said.
Swift foxes reintroduced to Tribal land in Montana are adapting to their new homes after a program intended to connect populations to the north and south began.
“Swift foxes are numerically the most reintroduced canids in the world, so we’ve learned a lot about how to do it,” said Dana Nelson, a PhD candidate in wildlife and fisheries biology at Clemson University in South Carolina and a fellow with Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
Swift foxes (Vulpes velox) were once common in western states and provinces in North America. But landscape changes and predator control programs in the late 1800s decimated their populations in many parts of their former range. By the early 1900s, the foxes were found only in about 10% of their former distribution, mostly in scattered pockets in the southern part of their range in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Protection in Canada under the Species at Risk Act and conservation action in the U.S. resulted in a partial recovery—swift fox populations now make up 40% of their former distribution, but many patches without the canids remain.
While populations of the species became established in parts of southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and northern Montana, there was still a roughly 200-mile gap in distribution between those areas and other swift fox strongholds in southern Montana and Wyoming.
Aaniiih Nakoda College students build an enclosure in Fort Belknap for use as a soft release pen for reintroduced swift foxes. Credit: Dana Nelson
Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes, sits right in the middle of this blank spot. From 2020 to 2024, the Tribes partnered with the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute to reintroduce 139 foxes to Fort Belknap, taken from four total source populations in Colorado and Wyoming. Managers put the animals in pens for a soft release into grasslands. Wildlife managers fitted some of these animals with GPS collars after release to track their movements.
Researcher Dana Nelson carries foxes recently trapped in Casper, Wyoming intended for reintroduction at Fort Belknap. Credit: Mark Nelson
Finding new fox holes
In a study published recently in Restoration Ecology, lead author Nelson and her colleagues analyzed how well 46 reintroduced foxes, whose collars had good data, fared after release from 2020 to 2023.
Their study examined adult and juvenile movement patterns for the first 100 days after release. “That’s a pretty critical period,” Nelson said, as reintroduced individuals are more vulnerable to predation and other threats when unfamiliar with their new home range.
A soft release fox pen in Belknap with Three Buttes in the distance. Credit: Dana Nelson
They found that of the 46 animals they tracked, 35 individuals—76%—settled into a stable home range. The remaining 11 kept moving for the roughly three-month period, perhaps searching for unoccupied territory or for a mate. Some of those movements were pretty dramatic, with foxes traveling all the way from Fort Belknap to Canada after release. Others crossed the Missouri River Breaks southwest of Fort Belknap. But the average distance from the release point to their new home ranges was about 19 kilometers.
While this study only examined foxes that survived for the first 100 days, Nelson said that 22 foxes of the 121 released from 2020 to 2023 died in the first 100 days, which is a fairly small number of casualties for a project like this. Other reintroduced foxes have also successfully reproduced in their new home ranges in Fort Belknap.
Nelson believes that the fox reintroduction has been successful so far for a couple of reasons. One is that the Fort Belknap region has the kind of ecosystem that the foxes need—plenty of flat areas with native intact grasslands and soil good for digging and denning. It’s also quite suitable for black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus), a prey species for swift foxes.
Collared swift foxes reintroduced to the landscape with pups born in their new homes. Credit: Johnny Stutzman
Finally, the project was effective due to the volume of research on the topic and previous translocation experiences. “Because swift foxes have been reintroduced and studied in the numbers and intensity that they have, this is a case where we have improved reintroduction techniques and protocols over time,” Nelson said.
The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation is currently the only area where three keystone western species coexist: the plains bison (Bison bison), the black-footed ferret (Cynomys ludovicianus) and now the swift fox.
