Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau

by Lawrence Lenhart

Twice declared extinct, North America’s most endangered mammal species, the black-footed ferret (BFF), is making a comeback thanks to an evolving conservation regimen at more than thirty reintroduction sites across the continent. Lawrence Lenhart lingers at one such site in his proverbial backyard, the Aubrey Valley in northern Arizona. He clocks hundreds of hours behind the wheel, rolling over ranch ruts as he shines a spotlight over dusky sage steppe in the hopes of catching a fleck of emerald eyeshine.

The beguiling weasel at the center of this book is more than a charismatic minifauna; it is the covert ambassador of a critical ecosystem that has dwindled to 1 percent of its former size. In a landscape menaced by habitat fragmentation, bacterial plague, settler colonialism, and soil death, a ferret must be resilient. Lenhart investigates the human efforts to sustain the species through monitoring, vaccination, captive breeding, and even cloning.

Lenhart balances this lens of environmental witness with personal essaying that captures the parallel story of his wife’s pregnancy as he realizes the ferret’s conservation story is dramatically synchronized with her trimesters. In preparing to raise a child in the Anthropocene, Lenhart takes stock of his own ecosystem and finds something is amiss. Through an ethic of “deeper ecology,” Lenhart must hone his ecological interest in the black-footed ferret to assure it isn’t overshadowed by his own paternal interests.

Genres: Nonfiction

253 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2023

About the author

Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His essay collection, The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage, was published in 2016 (Outpost19). His prose appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Terrain.org, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, and climate science writing at Northern Arizona University and a reviews editor and assistant fiction editor of DIAGRAM.

Reviews

[Luísa Andrade]

"Backvalley Ferrets" has a strong subject: the near-desperate effort to reintroduce the black-footed ferret, a species declared extinct twice and now reduced to a sliver of its former range, caught between bacterial plague, soil collapse, and habitat fragmentation. The book also attempts a deliberate juxtaposition: captive ferret insemination alongside the pregnancy of Lenhart's wife, weighing what it means to have a child as a member of the predator species currently laying waste to the natural world. The idea has potential, but the execution never decides what to do with it. Lenhart shifts between field reportage, personal memoir, and digressions that don't hold up on their own, and the personal material, which should have been the bridge between the two threads, works more like a crutch. It shows up when the reportage runs out of steam, disappears when the data comes back, and occasionally wanders into episodes that add nothing to either line. The result is a scattered book, important for its subject but frustrating in its execution. There's material here for something genuinely necessary, but it stays at the draft stage.

[MJ]

I wasn't sure what rating to give this book. Yes, there is some very fascinating information on the recovery of the black-footed ferret (BFF) from extinction. Unfortunately, most of the book is about the author's life beyond his interest in BFFs and, since I listened to the title on Audible and didn't read a physical book, I had to slough through all that to get to the interesting tidbits on BFFs, the main reason I was listening to it in the first place. Though he tried to tie in his teenage-age sex life and his wife's pregnancy that resulted in his son to his study of the BFF, it didn't really work for me. Maybe it was a sort-therapy for Mr. Lenhart to deal with the issues in his earlier life? What the heck did a woman seating next to him in a bar berating the bartender's breasts because the woman didn't have money for the jukebox and the bartender didn't think it her job to give her quarters have to do with BFF recovery?
If you don't mind that sort of thing, by all means, enjoy. More information on BFFs and less on his personal life would have been much better for me.