Advocates for endangered red wolves fight to bring them back—and banish stereotypes.
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Endangered red wolves once freely roamed the forests and fields of the Blue Ridge states and as far west as central Texas.
The more she talks, the more animated Tish Gailmard, director of wildlife at Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, becomes as she shares the real-life tale of red wolves: Once upon a time, these canids—the only wolves native to the Southeast—freely roamed the forests and fields of the Blue Ridge states and as far west as central Texas. But by the 1970s, an endangered species biologist named Curtis Carley suspected that the animals were in serious decline and decided to venture into the woods to see just how bad things were. When he played recorded red wolf howls, very few animals answered. All were found on the Texas-Louisiana coast.
Of the 400 animals Carley and his scientific colleagues collected, only 17 were true red wolves. They were subsequently declared extinct in the wild.
So biologists launched a Species Survival Plan based in Tacoma, Washington, set aside 1.7 million acres in rural, northeastern North Carolina where there were no non-native coyotes (the two will interbreed), and began raising the wolves in captivity. By 2010, there were 140 known red wolves in the area.
But fearing attacks on their livestock, North Carolina farmers often mistook the red wolves for coyotes and hunted them, and the numbers dropped again. Then advocates convinced a judge that wild dogs were mostly to blame and he halted hunting in the recovery area.
“We’re thinking, ‘Great. This is an awesome win,’” says Gailmard. “Well, it made North Carolina landowners really mad because the government was telling them what they could and couldn’t do on their property. So some of them intentionally continued to shoot red wolves.”
Meanwhile, 44 captive breeding facilities like Reflection Riding, which joined the survival plan in 1996 and now houses six red wolves, were slowly reviving the population. “The way we were operating it just a few years ago, it was incredibly successful,” says Gailmard. “The gray wolf program that everybody’s familiar with out of Yellowstone was modeled after the red wolf program.”
But the effort hit another snag a few years ago when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service “reevaluated” the program, leading to court battles and various efforts to downsize it, says Gailmard. Today there are believed to be only 27 red wolves in the wild, all on the designated property in North Carolina.
“It’s super frustrating,” Gailmard says of all the obstacles. “This wolf is the only truly all-American red wolf. There is no other wolf that is indigenous to the United States. The gray wolf migrated. The red wolf was bred, born and raised in the Southeast, so it’s worthy of conservation just for that reason alone, not to mention all the wonderful ecological balances it provides.
“If you take the red wolf out of the landscape, the deer population increases and the raccoon population increases,” she adds. “The deer over-browse all the trees and the shrubs, which can cause erosion, which can cause creeks and rivers to actually change their pattern. And over-browsing can cause the songbirds to leave. If your songbirds leave, you’ve got a whole bunch of bugs.”
Currently, Gailmard and other conservationists are working to educate residents in the North Carolina recovery area about the importance, and harmlessness, of red wolves. Recent polls show that the vast majority of the state’s citizens support the recovery efforts, she says.
“Humans did all this, because when Europeans settled the states, they brought all their fairy tales with them. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, and all those, have perpetuated through time, which just blows me away,” Gailmard says. “People still think wolves are mean, snarling, horrible animals that are going to carry away your children and eat your dog, and that’s simply not true. There’s a great bumper sticker that says: Little Red Riding Hood Lied. So every person that comes through our facility, we always tell them, ‘No, those fairy tales are not real.’”
The story above is from our September/October 2019 issue. For more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!