by Andy Ostmeyer
EUREKA, Mo. — The wooded hillside looked like countless others across Missouri on a hot summer day.
With one exception.
Resting in the shade of a tree was one of the last surviving red wolves left in the world.
While this female warily tracked visitors, a male companion paced, then ran, then paced again, back and forth, aware that what was left of a white-tailed deer waited at the bottom of the hill, but the humans were uncomfortably close.
Long the villain of lore and literature, from Old World folktales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” to modern movies such as “The Grey,” wolves are actually fearful of humans, preferring to keep their distance, explained Regina Mossotti, who is guiding the visitors this day. Mossotti is director of animal care and conservation at the Endangered Wolf Center outside St. Louis, which is on the forefront of efforts to save the red wolf and other endangered canids.
Smaller than the gray wolf, but larger than the coyote, the red wolf was once known throughout the Southeastern United States. Perhaps a hundred exist in the wild today. Another 200 exist in captive breeding programs around the country, including three currently at the Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka.
But even after a half-century of conservation efforts, the red wolf’s future is far from secure, and there’s a question hanging over this most endangered of species: Are captive breeding sites such as the Endangered Wolf Center its last hope?
The center also works with other endangered canids — the Mexican wolf, swift foxes, the maned wolf of South America, and the African painted dog — but it’s the red wolf that most visitors want to see.
That’s because Missouri was once home to the red wolf; the Ozarks was one of its last holdouts.
It’s also the canid that may be in the most trouble.
“It is the most endangered wolf in the world,” explained Mossotti, as the male pushed closer for a look, then slipped back into the cover of the forest, abandoning lunch for the time being.
‘Exterminated’
The Endangered Wolf Center was founded in 1971 by Carthage native Marlin Perkins and his wife, Carol.
“The wolf is being exterminated from the earth,” Perkins, who was famous to a generation of Americans for his television show, “Wild Kingdom,” had said.
“The wolf was the one animal that stood out to him as being completely misunderstood,” said Mossotti. “He also saw through his work that wolves were in a major threat of extinction.”
With bounties on wolves dating back to the earliest settlements, hunting played a key role in the animal’s disappearance, but it was not the only threat in its home range. As forests were felled and settlement expanded, the wolf experienced the loss of its primary food source — white-tailed deer. The population of wolves was dramatically reduced in numbers throughout its range by the late 19th century and early 20th century, said Ronald Nowak, one of the leading as well as one of the earliest experts on red wolves. He is now retired and lives in Virginia.
But in Missouri, even as the deer population fell to an estimated 400 statewide in 1925, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation, a population of red wolves hung on. Nowak believes that a group of red wolves that survived in Missouri’s St. Francois mountains could also offer a lesson that may be key today if the animal is ever going to able to make it in the wild again.
By World War II, the red wolf had been wiped out east of the Mississippi River, and there were only two viable populations existing in the wild, one in the Ozark/Ouachita mountains, the other in parts of Louisiana and Texas.
The Ozark population was next to fall. In 1950, a small female taken in Taney County became the last red wolf on record in Missouri.
In 1964, a world authority on wolves, Douglas Pimlot, of Toronto University, came to Arkansas to evaluate the status of red wolves. He played recordings of northern wolf howls around the state, and listened for responses. He got two. One was from the far southwest corner of the state, part of that population that still survived in part of Texas and Louisiana. The other was from Black Mountain in Franklin County northeast of Fort Smith.
With that last howl, the red wolf faded from the Ozarks.
Nearly a memory
That left one hold-out group in Louisiana and Texas — a group that Nowak and other experts estimated at no more than a few hundred. Initially, it was hoped a buffer zone could be set up around the last population that would protect it from a threat that had moved in from the west: coyotes.
“The neighboring, more adaptable, more prolific coyote moved in and it intermingled with the remnant red wolves,” said Nowak.
Based on his studies of wolf and coyote skulls — red wolves have larger, broader skulls — he believes the red wolf existed as a separate species for thousands of years without being diluted by breeding with coyotes.
It was only in the 19th century and early in the 20th century that hybridization began in the western portion of the range, first in Texas and Louisiana, and then in the Ozarks, Nowak maintains, in part because the dwindling number of surviving wolves were looking for mates.
His work also found that red wolves maintained themselves as a separate species between the larger gray wolf and the smaller coyote as long as the core population of red wolves remained strong. Some of the specimens he studied were collected from Missouri’s St. Francois mountains from 1919 to 1925.
“Studies showed no overlap, morphometrically, the species were distinct from each other,” Nowak said of the Missouri population of red wolves and coyotes. “In the southeast portion of the state, the red wolf population appears to have maintained itself.”
His conclusion, shared by Mossotti and others involved in wolf recovery: As long as the core population of red wolves can maintain critical mass, it can resist dilution by breeding with coyotes, even if some of the red wolves occasionally mate with the coyotes. But if the core population is weakened and reduced by disease or manmade pressure, such as hunting, hybridization increases and the red wolf population and coyote population move toward becoming indistinguishable.
To the scientists working with the survivors in Louisiana and Texas, it soon became apparent that a buffer zone was impractical. The red wolf’s only hope, scientists concluded, was to remove the last survivors from the wild, breed them in captivity, and then try to find a new home for them — somewhere without coyotes.
“We extirpated the species from the wild in order to save it,” said Leopoldo Miranda, an assistant regional director with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who is based in Atlanta, Georgia. “It was probably the right thing to do. We saved the species from extinction by putting them into captivity.”
It was the first time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had ever done such a thing, but not the last. Other species, most notably the California condor, would later follow the red wolf’s path, removed from the wild in a last-ditch effort to save it.
Over a period of several years, biologists began trapping the last surviving red wolves and wolf-coyote hybrids in Louisiana and Texas — around 400, in fact. More than 90 percent of those were ultimately determined to be wolf-coyote hybrids, using among other factors skull size to sort out survivors.
In the end, they found only 17 they considered pure red wolves, without traces of coyote, and of those only nine males and five females were able to breed, meaning they were going to be taken on the ark as the founder population.
“They were a year or two away from becoming a memory,” said Mossotti.
Success … and failure
Small-scale reintroductions began a few years later on two Gulf Coast islands, but finding a large tract of habitat within their former range was problematic.
An early consideration, the Land Between the Lakes between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, was proposed, but some residents in that area balked. A second site came on their radar when Prudential Insurance donated more than 100,000 acres of land in northeastern North Carolina, which became Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. In 1987, red wolves were released at the site.
“The red wolf was the first reintroduction of a large carnivore in history,” said Mossotti.
A female, named Brindled Hope, from the Endangered Wolf Center, was one of the first eight wolves reintroduced to the wild. A year later, two litters were born there, with Brindled Hope becoming the first red wolf to give birth in the wild, according to Mossotti.
A few years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, looking for another site, settled on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. At a half-million acres, it represented one of the largest tracts of public land in the red wolf’s former range. The goal all along has been to establish several distinct populations in the wild, because one would be vulnerable to disease or disaster. Over the next few years, 36 pups were born in the park, but only four lived to six months, the others succumbing to parasites, disease, and other threats. The small animals the red wolf needed as prey also were hard for them to find, according to scientists. In 1998, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ended the Great Smokies restoration, and those red wolves that could be recaptured were brought to Alligator River.
With Land Between the Lakes off the table, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park a failure, the wolf had struck out at two locations. Now a new threat was compromising the one area in North Carolina where there was hope for survival: Coyotes, which had been expanding eastward, reached the Red Wolf Recovery Area, and Miranda said that today their presence represents perhaps the biggest roadblock to red wolf recovery in the wild.
“The biggest challenge is hybridization with coyotes,” said Miranda. “That is the original threat and that is why we took them out of Louisiana and Texas. That is one of the reasons we picked eastern North Carolina. The coyote population was virtually zero at the time.”
Today, coyotes are found in every county in North Carolina, and 27,000 were harvested last season in the state, according to Geoff Cantrell, spokesperson for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.
With the proliferation of the coyote in the red wolf recovery area, U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists began an experiment, capturing coyotes in the wolf’s range but sterilizing them and releasing them, as “placeholders.” They discourage other coyotes from moving into the range, but at the same time won’t produce a litter if they should pair with a red wolf.
‘Escalating problem’
Last year three wildlife groups — the North Carolina-based Red Wolf Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute — sued the state of North Carolina in federal court, asking a judge to ban coyote hunting in the five-county recovery area. That’s because the shooting of red wolves — either accidentally or deliberately — has become the biggest cause of death among red wolves in North Carolina, and many of those deaths occurred during coyote hunting.
Between the start of the reintroduction of the red wolf in 1987 and 2003, 28 red wolves were shot, or less than two per year. Between 2011 and 2013, 24 red wolves were shot, said Kim Wheeler director of the Red Wolf Coalition, or eight per year.
With a wild population estimated at 90 to 100, some of the biologists believe gunshot fatalities are breaking down the critical mass that scientists believe the surviving population needs, weakening the effort to build a core population and making hybridization with coyotes more likely to happen.
The lawsuit pitted the conservation groups on one side, and the state of North Carolina, which regulates coyote hunting, on the other, but neither local landowners nor the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were party to the suit, and Miranda declined to comment on it.
This summer, a federal judge agreed with the conservation groups, ordering the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to ban hunting in the five counties that make up the Red Wolf Recovery Area.
But afterward, in a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the director of the state commission noted that the ruling removes a “primary tool for landowners to manage coyotes.”
He said private landowners should be allowed to use lethal methods, including hunting, to manage coyotes, including sterilized “placeholder” coyotes.
“Current circumstances do not allow these options; therefore I cannot authorize sterilization and release of coyotes,” wrote Gordon Meyers, the executive director of the Commission, responding to a request from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and expressing concern about the federal agency’s current management strategies.
Meyers also ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could only trap coyotes if it euthanized them, but could not sterilize and release them.
That was just one problem, he noted.
Another was the expansion of the Red Wolf Recovery Area from the initial peninsula that comprised the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to 1.7 million acres, including other nearby federal land but also hundreds of thousands of acres of intermingled private land. Myers was critical of the federal agency’s slow efforts to trap and relocate red wolves on private property, despite promises to that effect from the agency when it expanded the wolf’s recovery area.
Myers then called for an “immediate programmatic evaluation” to determine whether the red wolf effort should continue.
‘Living a nightmare’
North Carolina resident Jett Ferebee said he welcomed having wolves as neighbors. At first.
“Hey, that’s really cool,” he remembers thinking, hearing them howl for the first time.
Today, he has a different outlook: “I am living a nightmare with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because this farm has been taken over by red wolves.”
Ferebee, 55, has 2,800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat in the Red Wolf Recovery Area. He bought it in 1997, as a place to share his passions of hunting and fishing with his own children and their friends, church group and others.
“I love wildlife. I love to hunt and fish.”
Not long before he bought it, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had expanded the Red Wolf Recovery Area beyond the Alligator River National Wildlife, adding in other federal land, including the nearby Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, near where Ferebee lives. The Red Wolf Recovery Area eventually grew to 1.7 million acres in five counties, and includes numerous private landholders as well as federal property.
Ferebee said U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists were only supposed to release red wolves on federal land, but in subsequent years, he argues, nearly half of the releases took place on private property. He and other private landowners also were told that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists would remove unwanted wolves that strayed onto private property.
What’s more, scientists also realized that the wolves preferred agricultural property over native forests and swamps in the region.
Ferebee believes that today 90 percent of the red wolf packs in the recovery area are on private land.
“The wolf can’t read a boundary line. It can’t read a survey. They committed to something they could not do,” Ferebee said of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The result of that today is that deer have disappeared from his property, as have turkeys and rabbits.
“North Carolina’s wildlife population is being devastated.”
And with the judicial ruling banning coyote hunting in the region, he believes that will get worse.
Biologists, Ferebee said, initially told him that he did not have wolves on his property, until he hired a private trapper who he says in 30 days trapped five wolves and 13 coyotes on his land, including two placeholders. One of the wolves, a large alpha male, was released again elsewhere in the recovery area, but showed up back at his farm two weeks later.
Nor does he have any confidence in the placeholder strategy, given the proliferation of coyotes in the area.
“How can you possibly sterilize or give a tubal ligation to every coyote in 1.7 million acre wildlife area?” he wondered.
What’s more, he said, the red wolf has only survived in the area with intensive, heavy-handed management by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and that runs contrary to the agency’s stated goal of maintaining a self-sustaining population.
It is not working, he said of the red wolf recovery effort.
“That is everyone’s realization at this point. The facts are the facts.”
He also called hybridization the “fatal flaw” in the red wolf plan, adding that the critical factor for success, and the reason the land was chosen — no coyotes — no longer exists, and he added: “They have hybridized with North Carolina coyotes. They are hydridizing themselves into extinction.”
What’s more, other landowners, who learned of Ferebee’s opposition, have approached him about having red wolves removed from their property, too, and he said that to date more than 300 landowners have asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove wolves from their property.
He believes it is an impossibility to preserve and restore red wolves on the mainland, and the only way to save them is to capture them and maintain the species in breeding programs.
“We got to trap our wolves and put them in captivity until we solve the hydridization issue.”
If scientists don’t, he believes the red wolf as a species is “doomed.”
“I don’t hate the red wolves. I hate how the program is administered … I hate what it has done to the wildlife in our state,” he said, adding that he doubted if the wildlife on his farm will recover in his lifetime.
“Any future restoration effort is going to be hampered unless the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finds a way to strike a balance with private landowners,” he said.
‘Looking into the future …’
Without support of private land holders, and with the director of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission raising concerns about the program, and blocking efforts to release sterilized coyotes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed this summer to evaluate the red wolf recovery effort.
Miranda said that in some ways, the program is a success. When it started nearly 30 years ago, the goal was a population of up to three dozen red wolves on the refuge, and that number expanded as the recovery area expanded.
“We have surpassed the population goal for the population in 1986,” said Miranda, and in fact the population of 90 to 100 red wolves today is double the original expectation.
“Twenty-seven years of a lot of effort … wolves are still here.”
But serious challenges remain.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to have a self-sustaining population that does not require a lot of human intervention. Right now, Miranda called his agency’s management “heavy-handed,” requiring a lot of money and intervention.
He also said eastern North Carolina might not be suitable habitat in the long term, either, because of forecast sea level rise. An 18-inch sea level rise could inundate one-third of the refuge, a meter rise would cover it all, in 50 to 100 years.
He said his agency is looking for alternative sites for the red wolf, but has not settled on any yet.
“We need at least two more established, and that is where we are trying to focus some of our energy. That is my big hope. When we do the analysis we will be able to identify those.”
He doesn’t ever expect the red wolf recovery effort to be free of challenges, or problems.
“Large predators, they are always in constant conflict with humans. They need a lot of area. Their home area is huge. Because they are predators, people usually have a very strong opinion, on one side or the other.”
Options?
Today, behind a glass case at the Endangered Wolf Center, are a number of stuffed canids, including a coyote, a Mexican wolf and Pete, one of the 14 red wolves taken on the ark nearly 40 years ago, who was brought to Eureka as part of the breeding program.
Mossotti said the program evaluation could lead in one of three directions:
• Keep the program as is, which she said is not likely given the current opposition to it.
• Attempt to make changes to the program that would accommodate landowners and others, but that could be difficult.
• End it.
“There is a potential they may shut the program down,” Mossotti said.
“A lot of people are worried about that,” said Nowak, “and whether the political pressure is such that this could be a blow to the recovery effort.”
Mossotti doesn’t think it is practical to breed the animals in captivity until they can solve hybridization and the other challenges.
“We don’t have enough space to breed them in captivity and keep them at a healthy level,” she said.
It is a sentiment shared by Will Waddell, red wolf species coordinator for the American Zoo Association. A graduate of Missouri State University in Springfield, he is based out of the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, which has a half dozen wolves on exhibit and 48 others kept at an off-site breeding location.
“Right now, there is really no room at the inn, so to speak,” said Waddell.
“The biggest challenge these guys face is that there are very few wild places left,” said Mossotti. “I think there are lot of places in Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri that could work, but in the Southeast the resistance to the federal government coming in and telling them what to do is so strong. I think it is going to be their biggest challenge.”
Nowak doesn’t see the time coming when the animal will one day be restored to a healthy self-sustaining population.
“The Red Wolf will never be able to come off the Endangered Species list,” he said.
Mossotti is more optimistic. Next week, she is going to a public hearing in North Carolina with Waddell to outline for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service their view that trying to keep the species alive in a captive breeding program using sites such as the one at Eureka is not an option. They don’t have space, and even if they did, wolves would lose their wildness.
A decision on the status of the red wolf program is expected in 2015.
“It was made in America,” she said of the red wolf, meaning it is the only wolf endemic to the United States. “It is everything about America. It is our responsibility to save it.
“I know we can (save it,)” she said. “We have to.”