Be brave stay wild11/28/2023 The red wolf once roamed from central Texas to southern Iowa and as far northeast as Long Island, New York. That’s roughly half of the world’s total known wild red wolf population. His bushy red-and-grey beard lends him an uncanny resemblance to his quarry. “Based on the radio telemetry, there are six red wolves hunkered down in there,” says Madison, motioning to a patch of brush between two cleared farm fields. Faint beeps emanate from a radio in his left hand as he slowly swivels from side to side. On a recent visit to Alligator River, Madison parks his truck beside a canal, climbs out and hoists an H-shaped antenna into the air. “The red wolf, it’s ours,” Sutherland says. “They don’t belong here!” a woman shouted at agency staff during a recent public meeting on the program.Īdd to that a widespread mistrust of government and the road ahead looks long and perilous for “America’s wolf.” But allies like Akin and Sutherland say they have to try. The red wolf is seen by some as competition, and a threat to a way of life on a fragile landscape already imperiled by climate change. Out here, farming and leasing land to hunters are big business. And the passage of 36 years seems to have done little to soften locals’ hearts toward the apex predator. “And we can do it again.”īut the effort depends heavily on cooperation from private landowners. “It was done once before,” says Joe Madison, North Carolina manager for the Red Wolf Recovery Program. According to a draft, the agency proposes spending a quarter billion dollars over the next 50 years to rebuild and expand the wild wolf population. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to release an updated recovery plan for the red wolf. “It was the first time that a large carnivore had been returned to the wild after being driven extinct, anywhere in the world.”īut the wild population is now back to the brink of oblivion, decimated by gunshots, vehicle strikes, suspected poisonings and, some have argued, government neglect.įor the first time in nearly three decades, the U.S. “The red wolf program was a tremendous conservation success,” says Ron Sutherland, a biologist with the Wildlands Network. Over the next quarter century, it became a poster child for the Endangered Species Act and a model for efforts to bring back other species. Once declared extinct in the wild, Canis rufus - the only wolf species found solely in the United States - was reintroduced in the late 1980s on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, just across the sound from eastern North Carolina’s famed Outer Banks. In a way, the anecdote sums up the plight of this uniquely American species. “I wouldn’t shoot a squirrel in the stomach if I was hungry,” he says. “Because if it dies near you, and they come out and find the collar, they can arrest you.”Īkin is a hunter and the walls of his country house are lined with photos of the animals he’s killed. “If I see one of those wolves with a collar on, I’m going to shoot it in the gut, so it runs off and dies," Akin says the neighbor told him. The endangered wolves are equipped with bright orange radio collars to help locals distinguish the federally protected species from invasive, prolific coyotes. He was chatting with a neighbor about efforts to protect and grow the area’s red wolf population. ALLIGATOR RIVER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.C.
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