The Other Endangered Wolf in America: The Red Wolf
In our episode about the Bear Lady Kay, we spent some time talking about the Red Wolf (Canis rufus) that lives in North Carolina per the request of the listener who told us about the story. Below is the post we originally posted to Patreon after we released Episode 69: Abusing the ESA, an episode all about wolf conservation (or the lack thereof) in the U.S. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, check it out for more context about wolf conservation.
A red wolf. Image credited to USFWS.
The plight of the red wolf is as, possibly even more, depressing as the stories of other species of wolves in America. Back in the day, the red wolf used to be common throughout the eastern and south central U.S., from Texas all the way to New York, but by the early 20th century, hunting/poaching and habitat degradation caused them to go extinct in the wild. When scientists realized they were declining, what were thought to be the last pure red wolves were taken from the wild in Louisiana and Texas. Red wolves were first listed under the federal Endangered Species Actin 1967, and that's when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began efforts to try to save them. According to their website, only 15-17 individuals are in the wild in eastern North Carolina, while there are 241 red wolves within captive breeding facilities.
In 1987, the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) began releasing captive-bred red wolves into North Carolina, creating the only remaining wild "population". By the early 2000s, there were nearly 100 red wolves. However, their continued success required the USFWS to continue to captive breed the wolves, then put the captive-bred pups into wild dens to be raised by individuals in the wild.
And then, the USFWS dropped protections for the red wolf.
To understand why their continued conservation has been so hard, we have to talk about coyotes.
Red wolves are pretty visually similar to the coyote (Canis latrans), and that has contributed to their continued struggle as a species (which I'll talk about in the next paragraph). In fact, in North Carolina (the only state red wolves exist in anymore), their state wildlife department had to create an info graphic on how hunters can identify red wolves from coyotes, and the pamphlet is titled "Before You Shoot". Below is the graphic they have to inform hunters the differences between the species.
Because as red wolf recovery started to pick up, coyotes moved into the state. Because it's open season on coyotes in North Carolina (you can shoot them day or night), some hunters began mistakenly shooting red wolves, thinking they were coyotes. At the same time coyotes were moving in and hunters began mistakenly shooting red wolves, the USFWS stopped their captive breeding and release program. They also stopped removing coyotes from areas where red wolves lived, because coyotes and red wolves hybridize. They hybridize so much that, people who oppose red wolf reintroductions actually managed to get Congress to pay $400,000 on a study to determine if the remaining "red wolves" were actually now more coyote than wolf. We'll get to that in a minute. Because the USFWS as of 2014 went so far as to allow landowners to kill red wolves that just happened to be on their property, and in one case a nursing red wolf mother who was suspected to be searching for food for her pups was shot and killed.
So to recap, the USFWS, the agency in charge of enforcing the Endangered Species Act, gave up on recovering the world's most endangered wolf, and allowed landowners to shoot and kill wolves that were not doing any damage or causing problems on their property.
Thankfully, a federal judge in September of 2016 charged the USFWS with breaching the Endangered Species Act, which "[stopped] the Fish and Wildlife Service from capturing and killing, and authorizing private landowners to capture and kill wild red wolves."
Around this time, some new discoveries were being made - a team of researchers in Louisiana were researching the Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus), when their cameras detected an animal that looked a lot like a red wolf/coyote hybrid. So the researchers started collecting scat from what had thought to have been coyotes in the area, and found that "55 percent had at least 10 percent red wolf ancestry. Several had more than 40 percent ancestry. One had as much as 100 percent red wolf ancestry, according to one analysis method." This is a huge deal, because people opposed to red wolf conservation were trying to say that the existence of coyotes would cause the red wolves to hybridize so much that eventually there'd be no more pure red wolves, but this study from Louisiana shows that it's possible for red wolves to continue to persist in spite of hybridization. In fact, these hybrids could provide genetic diversity to the very small populations of remaining pure red wolves.
Because remember that $400,000 study I talked about earlier? The results from that study show that “The evidence . . . supports the classification of the contemporary red wolf as a distinct species.” Now, the red wolf is actually more genetically related to coyotes than the gray wolf, hence why they can hybridize, but this study also determined "...the red wolf has some degree of genetic ancestry not found in reference populations of western gray wolves or coyotes.” Further, the study said that given the option between a coyote and a red wolf as a mate, behaviorally the red wolf will always choose to mate with another red wolf.
In wake of that study and all the other information coming out about red wolf/coyote hybridization, as of spring of 2023, the USFWS has finally agreed to continue releasing red wolves in the wild to boost the current population of only 30 wild individuals. But this is only following all of the lawsuits that forced their hand to do so. But the red wolf is still struggling - as of August of 2023, one was found shot dead, and the USFWS is asking for help from the public on what happened. The state of North Carolina is also being forced to embrace the reintroduction (although an overwhelming amount of people in the state support their reintroduction), and in certain areas, the state of North Carolina is asking hunters to pull a tuft of hair from each coyote they kill and submit it for testing to ensure it's not actually a red wolf and to inform coyote management. If you're a coyote hunter in North Carolina, you can read more information about rules and restrictions here.
At the end of episode 69, I mention how important it is to vote in local elections. The red wolves are another great example of how important it is to vote. Vote for people who listen to science and care about endangered species. Wildlife is held in a public trust, meaning they belong to all of us, and the governments are only trustees. They are responsible for managing wildlife for us. Make sure they remember that!
