National Zoo asks public to choose names for baby ferrets

A trio of baby ferrets need names and the National Zoo is asking for the public’s help.

The black-footed ferret kits were born May 19 at the zoo’s conservation and biology unit in Front Royal, Va. The facility is where experts breed and study more than 20 different species — many of which were at one point extinct in the wild, including the black-footed ferret.

The kits, which is the name for baby ferrets, were born to third-time mother Potpie. She’s 3 years old, and the father, Daly, is 1 year old. Two of the kits are males and one is a female.

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Officials said the birth of the animals is special because this September marks the 40th anniversary of the “discovery of a small population of black-footed ferrets, whom we thought were extinct at that time,” said Will Pitt, deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), in a statement.

Pitt said the species has made a “remarkable recovery” due to conservation efforts.

The baby ferrets can be seen on a web camera.

Officials are asking for the public and select groups to choose from a list of nine preselected names that they said “reflect black-footed ferrets’ significance as a distinctly North American species.” The public can vote on names for the three young ferrets through July 25.

The public can vote on a name for the female kit on the zoo’s website. One of the males will be named in an e-newsletter poll of the National Zoo’s members, while the other male will be named by players in the zoo’s educational mobile game called “Zoo Guardians.”

Here are the name choices for the female:

Americana: This word is common in many prairie species’ scientific names.
Aster: This is a purple flower found on the American prairie.
Prairie Rose: This type of rose is found in central North America.

These are options for the male whose name is going to be chosen by the zoo’s members:

Albus: This is a name in honor of an endangered fish — a pallid sturgeon, known by the scientific name Scaphirhynchus albus.
Cupido: This name honors the “greater prairie chicken,” which has the scientific name Tympanuchus cupido.
Swifty: A name in honor of the swift fox.

Here are options for the male whose name will be chosen by the Zoo Guardians players:

Aspen: This is short for quaking aspen, a plant found in the American prairie.
Cottonwood: This is a plant native to the American prairie.
Falco: This name is meant to honor the prairie falcon, known scientifically as Falco mexicanus.

Experts said black-footed ferrets were once found in the wild in the western plains and were thought to be extinct until 1981, when a small colony of 18 black-footed ferrets was found near Meeteetse, Wyo. That group was taken into human care by federal wildlife experts to make sure the species didn’t go extinct, according to zoo experts.

In 1988, SCBI was the first group to receive offspring from that colony and breed them outside of Wyoming. In the past few decades, the zoo said, more than 1,000 black-footed ferrets have been born at SCBI. More than 350 kits that have been born at SCBI have gone into a program to get them ready for release into the wild, according to officials.

When the latest set of new ferrets at the zoo’s Virginia facility are about 4 months old, they will be separated from their mother. Then officials will evaluate them as part of a larger program that oversees black-footed ferrets in human care to figure out if they should stay at the zoo’s facility, be transferred to another breeding facility in the United States or eventually be released into the wild.