One of North America's rarest species, the black-footed ferret was thought to be extinct for a few tenuous years in the 1970s and 80s until a remnant population was discovered in Wyoming in 1981. A breeding program was launched and eventually the captive population was robust enough to allow for reintroductions into the wild. Conata Basin in South Dakota's Buffalo Gap National Grassland was one such recovery site and received black-footed ferrets for release in 1996, two years after the nearby Badlands National Park celebrated their own reintroduction. Today, the two locations are managed in tandem, and thirty years later, Conata Basin/Badlands continues to host one of the special few black-footed ferret populations remaining in the grasslands of the Great Plains and Intermountain West.

A portion of the proceeds collected via sales of this t-shirt is donated to Prairie Wildlife Research, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that monitors the black-footed ferret population in Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Designed by our wildlife technician, Nicole!