CAN RED WOLVES BE SAVED AGAIN?

This sprawling mix of swamp and forest is the only place in the world where red wolves live in the wild, and on a breezy afternoon Ron Sutherland set out to find one.

He drove an SUV slowly on lumpy dirt roads for nearly four hours, scanning spindly trees, murky canals, green thickets and muck. Two other sharp-eyed conservationists helping to search from the back seat also saw nothing.

A second fruitless search the next morning left little doubt: The red wolf, which went extinct in the wild before the federal government managed to revive the species, is disappearing again, maybe forever.

A few weeks after the 30th anniversary of reintroduction, there is serious doubt that the only distinctively American wolf, which once ranged throughout the southeast United States, can survive outside zoos. If wild red wolves are lost, it would mark one of the biggest and most dramatic failures for a federal endangered species recovery plan.

The story of the rise and fall of the experimental red wolf population at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge is a testament to the power of the Endangered Species Act to protect wildlife — and its limitations.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who manage the restoration program have introduced more than 100 captive-bred wolves into the refuge and watched as the population peaked at more than 225 wolves a decade ago and plummeted to fewer than 45 now.

Wolves have been shot by hunters and private landowners in a state where officials want to end the program. They’ve also been accidentally run over on roads and trapped and removed by federal officials after doing what comes naturally to wolves: roaming to find new territory.

Missteps by the Fish and Wildlife southeast regional office in Atlanta that oversees the program hasn’t helped. Poor communication with state officials about the number of wolves released in and around the refuge at the start of the reintroduction and a recent decision to allow a private landowner to shoot a wolf have angered both the agency’s friends and enemies.

The project is mired in politics, distrust, open bickering, scientific disputes and a legal challenge. It reflects the discord on Capitol Hill as lawmakers debate Endangered Species Act revisions that could dramatically weaken one of the most powerful environmental laws in the world.

A House committee recently passed five bills that force Endangered Species Act enforcement decisions to consider the economic impact of protecting plants and animals, strip away much of the ability of interest groups to sue when protections fall short and remove some protections of gray wolves, which live mostly in the West.

On top of all that, the red wolf program is facing a basic question that could undermine its very reason for being established: Are the penny-colored canids now roaming North Carolina really the descendants of wolves, or is the species so interbred with coyotes that it is ineligible for federal protection?

In July 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced an effort to pull wolves from the refuge and put them back in zoos because the genetic purity of captive animals was at risk. The agency’s assessment relied on an independent analysis by four scientists.

Within days, those same scientists said Fish and Wildlife’s reading of their analysis was “full of alarming misinterpretations” and called its justification for removing wild wolves “backwards.” The genetic purity of captive red wolves was not at risk at all, they said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s southeastern office declined to respond to questions about its management of the red wolf program but recently issued a statement through spokesman Phil Kloer: “We are working on a series of decisions regarding the red wolf.”

After giving up his search to see a red wolf, Sutherland, a scientist for the Wildlands Network in Durham, said Fish and Wildlife essentially gave up on red wolves two years ago when they stopped releasing new wolves from captivity. “Since then, they have basically been spinning their wheels with a much-reduced field staff,” he said.

Seeing a wild red wolf now, he said, is one of the rarest sights in nature.

The red wolf program might seem messy now, but its work to resurrect an animal that went extinct in the wild was a minor miracle.

For nearly a century, red wolves were gunned down by order of state predator control programs and scattered as humans seized their habitat.

By the late 1970s, the population was so depleted that coyotes — which the bigger wolves naturally chased away or killed — began to settle in the same range. Even worse, they started to interbreed.

That’s why the federal government plucked the remaining 80 or so wolves from Texas and Louisiana. About a dozen genetically pure red wolves were separated from others that were part coyote and placed in zoos that agreed to participate in a captive breeding program.

Meanwhile, authorities searched for a suitable habitat to one day release wolves into the wild. They selected the 150,000 acre Alligator River refuge for its size and selection of small prey red wolves prefer.

“They also thought this peninsula had no coyotes,” Sutherland said. “They thought this was a defensible place they could keep coyotes out of.”

Under the restoration program in 1987, Fish and Wildlife at first released three pairs of adult red wolves into a world of birds, raccoons, alligators, deer and one of the largest black bear concentrations in the nation.

Read the full story at The Washington Post.

A captive red wolf at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science. (Photos by Salwan Georges)

A captive red wolf at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science. (Photos by Salwan Georges)

A captive red wolf at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science. (Photos by Salwan Georges)

A captive red wolf at the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science. (Photos by Salwan Georges)