“Coexistence is possible,” Stone said. Concluding our interview, she reminded me that even in Idaho—which was once ground zero for wolves—this successful project has flourished for two decades. To end the seemingly endless wolf wars, other states could consider the wise practices along the Sheep Super Highway that have allowed both sheep and wolves to survive as well as ranchers and conservationists to cooperate—while sharing lands that belong to us all.
15. EL LOBO RETURNS HOME
In the spring of 2015 I visited Wolf Haven International, a wolf sanctuary in Washington State, to witness the first litters of Mexican gray wolf pups born there in seven years. Via live remote cameras I watched as four gangly six-week-old male pups scampered and climbed atop their very patient father, M1066, nicknamed in-house as “Moss.” The big-eared and fuzzy pups romped and feigned attacks with tiny sharp teeth, wrestling with each other, then racing into the tall cedar trees. These critically endangered Mexican gray wolves are growing up in the Species Survival Plan (SSP) for possible reintroduction into Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. “They’re being raised by their parents, just like any wolf pup in the wild,” explained Wendy Spender, Wolf Haven’s director of animal care. “Their world is so small now,” she added. “There is no concept of captivity or even humans for the pups. Just their parents, siblings, and home life.”
It’s a good and safe life at Wolf Haven, with its eighty-two acres of restored and biologically diverse prairie and oak woodlands, founded in 1982. These prairie lands are quiet buffers for this, the only wolf sanctuary in the world accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. Here the carbon-rich grassy meadows offset climate change, a lush red and blue riot of native wildflowers like purple camas and golden paintbrush attract honey bees, and the moss-draped trees offer cool shade and refuge to the fifty-two displaced and captive-born wolves. Some have now found their “forever home” here. Of the several Mexican wolf litters born at the sanctuary, two family groups have already been released into the wild (Arizona): the Hawk’s Nest pack released in 1998 (part of the initial release) and the Cienaga group released in 2000 still survive today. This wolf family is one of the most genetically valuable in all of America’s captive population. By the late seventies wolf populations in the Southwest had crashed to a mere five wolves in Mexico and were all but eliminated in New Mexico and Arizona. Under the Endangered Species Act the federal government must work to recover this critically endangered species.
“All the Mexican wolves living in the wild today come from seven founding animals, composed of three distinct lineages,” Spencer notes. “They really need the genetic boost these new pups can give them,” she pauses thoughtfully, “if any of them are selected for reintroduction into the wild.”
That’s a big if, especially given the wolf-recovery politics in New Mexico and Arizona, where governors and wildlife commissions passed new rules forbidding any reintroduction of captive-born Mexican wolves. In the Southwest, Mexican wolves are “political footballs,” explains Linda Saunders, the director of conservation at Wolf Haven.
But now, as I watched, the six-week-old pups seemed to be playing their own kind of wolf football as one pup streaked across the screen and leapt on his father, M1066, tackling his tall legs. Good naturedly, the father gave up trying to nap in the sun. He stretched, yawned, and play bowed to his offspring. Then all four pups again tried to clamber atop him, only to tumble off when he gave a gentle shrug.
Except for their long-limbed prance and exotic colorings—sable and gray-tinged fur—and their much longer snouts, the little pups could be mistaken for a litter of domestic dogs. But there is something much wilder in their golden eyes—and wariness—even as they play. These pups are hidden from any public view and see humans only for medical exams. If they are the ones chosen for release into the wild, they must remain very cautious of us.
“We’re so delighted that this spring three litters of Mexican gray wolves were born here,” said Diane Gallegos, director of Wolf Haven International. Gallegos is an energetic and articulate spokesperson for wolves, whether it’s as a member of the Pacific Wolf Coalition, the cutting-edge Washington Wolf Advisory Group, or even in a Seattle community gathering, a Wolf Salon, with a standing-room-only crowd of Millennials intent on learning more about wolf conservation. Since 2011 Gallegos has led Wolf Haven to become a leader in wolf-recovery efforts internationally. In the office she posted me in front of another remote camera to take a look at a second Mexican gray wolf family led by the breeding pair, F1222 (Hopa) and M1067 (Brother), and their rambunctious pups.
“Oh, look, there’s the matriarch,” Diane pointed to the screen, where a rather blurry, but still majestic wolf ventures into the remote camera’s view.
Like her mate, this mother wolf, Hopa, is lean and almost impossibly long limbed, with an elegant auburn buff on her forehead, intense amber eyes, and a dark mask shading into a long, pale snout. Surveying her three sons, she looks at once dotingly maternal and yet watchful. Certainly she can hear the hidden remote cameras rustle in the leaves above as they shift slightly for better angles in the trees. A first-time mother, Hopa has quite an impressive history already—and she’s only four years old.
“She was born at the Endangered Wolf Center in Missouri,” the Mexican biologist, Pamela Maciel Cabanas, explained to me in her lilting accent. Like Spencer, Cabanas is an expert at wolf handling and very well versed in international wolf politics. Cabanas works with Wolf Haven’s Hispanic Outreach and is a liaison with Mexico’s Wolf Species Survival Program.
“In 2013,” she told me, “F1222 [Hopa] was transferred to the USFWS’s Sevilleta Wolf Management Center at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico for prerelease into the wild. Then, in the summer of 2014, Hopa was transferred to Wolf Haven, where she partnered with Brother, who was born at Wolf Haven in 2007. He is older than she is, but they are well suited and have been devoted parents to their offspring.”
This breeding pair was observed in a copulatory tie in the winter of 2015. Excitedly, Wolf Haven staff hoped for pups. Gestation in wolves is usually sixty-three days; by early May Hopa disappeared into her den. Via remote cameras the staff excitedly waited and watched to see whether the mother had whelped and was not ailing or enduring false pregnancy, common in canids.
Wolves are born blind, and their eyes open after twelve to fourteen days. With their distinctive brown furry capes and tiny, flattened ears, neonatal pups live underground their first weeks, denned up and protected by their mother. She rarely leaves their cool, musty underworld, like an earthen womb. When Hopa finally emerged from her den in early May of 2015 the Wolf Haven staff recognized that she was noticeably thinner—a sure sign that she had, indeed, given birth. For several weeks Hopa left her den only to eat, drink, or eliminate. After Memorial Day three tiny pups crawled out of their den, trailing behind her, their snouts raised high to sniff this new world of air and sheltering trees and sky.
They were clumsy and shaky as they took their first steps, their temporarily blue eyes now open, squinting against the sunshine. After nursing for so long or gobbling the regurgitated bits of food from their mother’s mouth, they now could nibble small bits of meat. They greeted their father, Brother, for the first time in the open air. In their next weeks the pups would learn to play and socialize with their family and to follow their parents if frightened by an unusual sound or scent. For those first four to six weeks of the pups’ life outside their birthing den, none of the Wolf Haven staff came near. They observed and monitored the family only through remote cameras.
“Each wolf family is different, just like our human families” Spencer said. “I can already see patterns of behavior that will eventually contribute to their unique life story—routines, customs that may eventually be passed on to their wild progeny. Some pups are more gregarious or curious and wander away from the den or their siblings. Some are more dominant, others more solitary.”
We watched as the father wolf endured
his sons and daughter play by simply rolling over and yawning. He was about sixty to eighty pounds, and from tail to nose stood a little over four feet. The slightly smaller mother did a quick patrol of the underbrush, her ears perked, listening. As if on cue, a communal howl rose up in the sanctuary, where other wolves added their voices.
We all smiled as the father wolf raised his handsome head to answer a nearby howl with a long, sonorous bass song of his own. Startled, his pups glanced around, rather comically, bewildered at first. Then they lifted their small snouts and let out a series of yip-yip-yips—their very first tentative attempts at howling together with the family.
“Will this be the family chosen to go into the wild?” I asked Diane. I felt utterly privileged to observe these wolf pups without endangering or frightening them. How many people ever get to witness so intimately a wolf family simply going about their daily life?
“We just don’t know which or if any of these three Mexican wolf litters will be selected for reintroduction,” Diane said quietly. “We can only hope we’ll again get the call that our wolves will be the ones chosen to help the wild populations thrive.”
Later that spring two of the Mexican wolf pups from one of the other Wolf Haven litters died from parvo, a disease also common to domestic dogs. A Wolf Haven Facebook announcement of the pups’ deaths was met with a huge public outpouring of sorrow and support. These wolves are so precious and so essential to their wild cousins’ survival that every death is a disaster. That spring of 2015 I framed photos of the six-week-old Mexican gray wolf pups for my writing desk. Every day as I open their photos on my big screen, I gaze at the pups as if my thoughts can also protect them.
In my favorite photo—taken when the pups were crated up for their second medical exam—the frightened twelve-week-old pups huddle together in the fresh straw. Three of the pups flatten themselves in the straw, furry white-gray ears pitched forward. Their close-knit jumble is the very definition of a litter. One pup had climbed atop the others. All gazed directly out at the camera, their now-golden eyes topped by pale white and seemingly worried eyebrows. What dangers loom if they leave this sanctuary for the life of the wild?
EL LOBO, the Mexican gray wolf subspecies, is one of the most highly endangered of all wolves. Smaller than other North American wolves, these Old-World wolves long ago crossed the Bering Land Bridge to colonize North America. They flourished in the Southwest and Mexico, despite being hunted, trapped, and poisoned for centuries. In 1977 in Mexico there were only five Mexican wolves surviving. These were captured, and three of them were then bred in captivity. In 1998 four more captive individuals from the Species Survival Program were added to the founding population, and some of these Mexican wolves were reintroduced into the wild, but only in the Arizona wilderness. Now, in 2016, there are still only 12 to 17 Mexican wolves roaming all of Mexico, and in America’s Southwest the population dropped from 110 wolves in 2014 to only 97 in 2015. Thirteen wolves have died, and only 23 pups survive now in the Southwest. Although there is a new urgency to reintroducing Mexican wolves in the Southwest because of the population decline, there are also political roadblocks to federal recovery efforts, especially from New Mexico and Arizona wildlife commissions.
Wolf Haven has kept readers alerted to the swiftly tilting politics of Mexican and gray wolf recovery in their quarterly Wolf Tracks articles. The sanctuary also posts popular videos of Mexican pups now thriving in the sanctuary on their website and Facebook page. Will one of the three Wolf Haven Mexican wolf families be chosen for reintroduction? For a time prospects looked dim. In the fall of 2015 the New Mexico Game and Fish Commission denied permit requests from the US Fish and Wildlife Service for any new release of Mexican wolves raised in captivity. This was a surprising blow not only to a struggling wild population and to Wolf Haven but also to Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch—a prerelease wolf-recovery facility that has been vital to Mexican gray wolf recovery since 1997.
Ranchers opposed the release of any more wolves into New Mexico, citing that in 2015 there were thirty-six confirmed wolf kills on their livestock. The USFWS had asked for release permits for up to ten pups (to cross-foster with wild populations) and one pair of adults and their offspring. Cross-fostering is a survival strategy of moving captive-born pups when they are less than ten days old to wild dens in the hope that the wild wolf mother will also nurse and raise the captive-born pups alongside her own. Cross-fostering has also worked in the wild when pups are transferred from one wild den to another.
This is a very difficult technique because it depends upon so many variables—excellent weather for transport, discovering the exact location of the wild wolves’ den, and the wild mother’s acceptance and ability to nurture nonbiological pups. In 2015 the first-ever captive-to-wild cross-fostering for Mexican wolves was attempted. Two captive-born sister pups, Rachel and Isabella, at Minnesota’s Endangered Wolf Center were transported to Arizona with the hope of finding a wolf mother in the wild. But biologists on the ground failed to find the wild den, and Rachel and Isabella were returned to the Endangered Wolf Center and to their mother, Sibi, a very nurturing matriarch. Though cross-fostering is risky, it is an important element in helping this critically endangered species.
There are fifty-two facilities in the United States participating in the Mexican wolf Species Survival Program, with a current captive population of 270 wolves. These SSP programs await word from the federal SSP program for any chance of reintroduction to join the ninety-seven wild Mexican wolves surviving in the United States. When Arizona, which has a slightly larger wild population of Mexican wolves, denied any federal permits for the release of captive-born wolves, the situation looked really grim for reintroducing the three families of Mexican wolves at Wolf Haven. This was especially troubling because Wolf Haven International has had two family groups successfully released previously (1998 and 2000). Some of the very first Mexican wolves released back into the Southwest and still surviving came from Wolf Haven.
Because of New Mexico’s permit denial, the window for any 2015 release passed, and everything was on hold again for all captive-born Mexican wolves. But then the USFWS announced that it would simply go ahead with plans to release more Mexican wolves, over the objections of the New Mexico Game and Fish Department. The majority of the state’s residents welcomed this decision to proceed with release, and a strong Santa Fe New Mexican op-ed, “Releasing Wolves the Right Thing to Do,” echoed this prorelease sentiment: “Good for the government. Managing the well-being of wolves in the wild cannot be left to individual states. Wolves don’t recognize boundaries, either between states or countries.” The editorial concluded, “It is clear that many people want wolves to die out. But the occasional loss of livestock is no reason to destroy one of God’s creatures.… By moving ahead despite state opposition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is giving these wolves a new lease on life. And that’s as it should be.”
Everyone waited anxiously to see if New Mexico would relent and, as its major newspaper advised, “do the right thing.” The state did not agree. But it did move a little. In February 2016 the state’s game commission again granted Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch its historical prerelease permits to hold wolves at the Ladder Ranch until they could be moved to Mexico.
I happily heard the good news from Wolf Haven that one of the Mexican wolf families—Hopa and Brother, with their three yearling pups—were chosen for release into the wild. The family had already been identified for release into the wild in Mexico back in July of 2015. These were some of the six-week-old pups I’d first seen last spring. Now, at last, they were going to their native Southwest. New Mexico’s game commission’s unanimous decision to renew the Ladder Ranch’s permit to prepare Mexican wolves for wild release came as a surprise, as just one month earlier they had denied it. But it was no surprise to Mike Phillips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species fund. Phillips noted that “the commissioners indicated they saw a way forward. We acted on that hope.” The f
act that the wolf family was to be released in Mexico, not New Mexico or Arizona, might have been why the commission reversed its earlier permit denial. “It’s the beginning of us moving back to where we were,” Phillips added.
Mexico began its wolf reintroduction program in 2011, and in 2014, the first litter of Mexican gray wolves was born in the wild there in thirty years. “This first litter represents an important step in the recovery program,” Mexico’s game commission said. “These will be individuals that have never had contact with human beings, as wolves bred in captivity do.”
The Wolf Haven family had had very limited contact with human beings, but what would the effect be of their journey by highway, by plane, and then overland from New Mexico to Mexico? Everyone at the sanctuary began the protocol for release with a sense of excitement and urgency. The date for the spring 2016 transport was imminent.
AT WOLF HAVEN the forest is afloat in cool mists like a Chinese silkscreen. And the wolves are already howling—the ancient communal harmonies of high-pitched yips, eerie whines, and haunting keens that I never want to end. How can a wolf’s howl sound both elegiac and triumphant? The woven wolf music is so intricate and multilayered, with unexpected baritone riffs and ultrasonic descants. Their voices improvise and counterpoint, like animal jazz. A song sometimes tender, sometimes fierce, always mesmerizing.
“You never get tired of it, do you?” whispers Diane Gallegos, as she greets me at the sanctuary. We are all being respectfully quiet so as not to disturb the many wolves who have already sensed that something is up. “When we hear the wolves howling here in the sanctuary, no matter how many times a day, we just stop and listen,” adds Gallegos.
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