“The new knowledge we gain with all this new wolf genetics is not always easy to swallow,” says Rolf Peterson. “It’s such a new tool, and a marvelous tool. I think where it will take us is outside our frame of reference. Certainly it’s going to take us to a new way of identifying species—that’s a good thing, a new perspective—but it’s going to be hard to accommodate.”
In the future, wildness is going to be defined by the ways the environment modifies the expression of genes. And, increasingly, wolf genes—and wolf wildness—will be modified by the ways wolves interact with humans and the ways humans manage wolves. One of the first eight red wolves released came into the village of Manns Harbor and had to be recaptured in full view of the public. A woman in Hyde County complained that the wolves were killing cats, and someone saw a wolf with a cat in its mouth. Recently, some goats were killed on a farm outside Pocosin Lakes Refuge. Twenty-two of the released wolves have died—vehicles killed eight of them, one was shot and one killed in a trap—and seven were returned to captivity, some because they couldn’t seem to stay away from the villages. Such interactions with humans and their possessions suggest to the villagers around Alligator River that the wolves are less than natural, not wild enough.
Says Orville Tillett, retired enforcement officer for the North Carolina Department of Fisheries, “I see ’em once in a while. To me, they look like a German shepherd.” He thought the first wolf he saw was a dog and tried to call it to him; the wolf stood and looked at him, then drifted into the trees. “I believe they’re German shepherds,” he says, “or crossed with them.”
Part of the suspicion that the wolves aren’t wild seems to lie in the mere fact that the wolves aren’t frightening. If they were wild, many locals suspect, they’d be bigger and more aggressive. “I’ve heard two or three [locals] say they’re dangerous,” says Tillett, “but I’ve never seen one offer to attack nobody. I saw three in one day this year. They’re used to vehicles. They’ll stand in the road until you get close to them. Then they run away from you.” A white-haired lady with arthritic knuckles and a sweet smile stands in the Manns Harbor Post Office and says, “I had them in my yard. It got so I was afraid to go out at night.” But she says that, after talking to a refuge employee who told her the wolves wouldn’t hurt her, she no longer felt afraid.
Residents of the villages around the refuge believe the refuge managers are feeding the wolves and catching them regularly to de-worm them. Says one hunter, “They trap ’em every month or so, detick ’em, give ’em shots, and feed ’em. They’re not wild as far as I’m concerned.”
At a meeting in Manns Harbor, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge Manager Jim Johnson asked local hunters to offer suggestions for opening or closing areas of the refuge to hunting. The hunters were polite and attentive. And, although the closures have nothing to do with the reintroduction program, at the end of the meeting people started to ask about the wolves.
“Do they have to catch them up and worm them?” asked Tillett.
Johnson replied, “I’ve been hit a hundred times about ‘the way you guys are feeding them critters.’ That ain’t true.” He explained, “The critters you pick up in the wild very rarely will be carrying external parasites. That wolf may have been out there three years, and it has no heavy tick load.” He reiterated that they weren’t feeding the wild wolves.
“You ain’t feeding ’em?” Tillett asked, still unable to believe it.
Michael Phillips believes the wolves are doing just fine. By 1992, there were forty-two red wolves in the wild. Says Phillips, “The story is, we got many, many animals that have four legs and are healthy. Sixty to 70 percent of our pups are wild-born animals. Of twenty-five or twenty-six puppies born in the wild, only four have died that we know of.” Most of the animals on the Alligator River Refuge can simply be left alone. Phillips explains, “Animals that use Alligator River don’t require much work, just a little monitoring. For these animals that are well established, we fly by and get a signal, and if it’s not in mortality mode, we just keep flying by. We don’t consider putting out parasiticides every thirty or forty days by dosing a piece of meat—we’d be forever driving around and dropping meat. Some people say heartworm will ensure that the red wolf doesn’t make it. Heartworm is going to kill some wolves, but one of our most prolific pair has long been heartworm-positive and they’ve contributed three litters. The population is big enough that we’re beginning to step back. We used to routinely replace radio collars. But take animal number 331: If his radio collar goes off the air, he isn’t going anywhere. He’s five years old. He’s been here since 1989. He’s going to die here.”
There are also red wolves on Bulls Island in South Carolina, St. Vincent Island in Florida, Horn Island in Mississippi, and, since 1991, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The island facilities were created because it was thought that wolves born in the wild would be more likely to succeed at reintroduction. In practice, that hasn’t always been so. Of four island-bred wolves released, two had to be recaptured after they raided turkey pens, and one was struck by a car. On the other hand, a male born at Graham, Washington, and released on Bulls Island cared for four pups two years in a row. Each of the females that bore these litters was killed by an alligator, and the male went on to raise the pups on his own. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo went over the island with a nineteen-foot surge of water. It tore out trees and destroyed the refuge headquarters. Refuge workers flying over the island after the storm spotted the widowed male and his four pups: they had survived.
In fact, living in the wild seems to awaken a liveliness and toughness in the wolves. Only a third to a half of the wolves manage to reproduce in captivity, but seventeen of the eighteen possible breeding opportunities in the wild produced litters. Of twenty-seven wolves born in the wild, all but two were surviving in 1993. “You gotta believe they like being out,” says Phillips. “Free-ranging wolves come into camp and you hold them in the pens and they seem to get depressed.” He tells of a female that was recaptured in 1989 after living wild for five months: “She never came outside of her box. In May, she had one puppy. The next day, there was no puppy. Her neck was rotting—we had to cut the collar from her neck, she had no hair on her neck. It wasn’t the collar that was the problem; she had done well with it in the wild. She was depressed. Finally, we let her go.”
Phillips believes the world is wild enough for wolves. “If you take a captive-reared red wolf in eastern North Carolina and you let it go in a good spot, when it is relatively young, it will do fine,” he says. And he believes there will be more and more space for wolves. With new refuge lands, and with cooperation from private landowners around the refuges, says Phillips, “We should have access to one million acres in eastern North Carolina. We ought to get a hundred wolves out there.”
• • •
The hard news about the program, however, is that, if it is successful, it will not end. Most people expect reintroduction to be a short-term effort, after which we will no longer need to manage the recovered creatures. But, says Phillips, “There is no end. We’re irresponsible if we don’t recognize there’s no end.
“We’re talking about fifty or a hundred years, hopefully forever. In fifty years, I’d guess you’ll have two to three good trappers in northeastern North Carolina, dealing with wolves that get into chicken coops and goat paddocks. They deal with spot fires. There aren’t that many ways the wolf is going to get in trouble with people. Depredating wolves won’t be killed—they’ll be put back into the captive population.” Wolves consorting with coyotes may also be replaced, and there will be wolves captured and fitted with radio collars so that the population can be monitored. There will also have to be managers for the captive breeding and release. The program calls for 320 animals in captive-breeding programs in order to maintain another 220 animals in the wild. There will probably be four or five larger captive-breeding sites, with thirty to forty animals each. Humans will still decide which wolves breed, which go i
nto the wild, and which are removed from the wild.
That suggests that the red wolf will never be free of human oversight and intervention. The degree of human manipulation is a persistent issue in reintroductions here and in the Southwest. Says trapper Roy McBride, “It would be a constant harassment to the wolves to have people monitoring them all the time, capturing those that get off the reservation, putting in new wolves to keep the gene pool stirred. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s right for the wolves. Sharks got to swim or they’ll drown; wolves have to travel the country. I don’t know how we’re going to reestablish that. Are we going to get all the cities out and set aside three or four states?”
As long as wildness has a human dimension, we will argue over this. We may become astute technicians and learn to account for enough of the varied factors of landform and prey, migration barrier and weather to keep the red wolf out there. But behind it all there will always be computers ticking away, committees deliberating, biologists watching. For red wolves, at least, the wild of the future promises to be very different from the wild of the past.
*A species is a genetically distinctive group of natural populations that breed with one another and are reproductively isolated from all other such groups. A subspecies is a group of natural populations within a species that differ genetically and are reproductively isolated from others of the species because of geographic barriers. Before genetic studies made it possible to compare genes between individuals, museum collectors judged the differences between species on the basis of such physical characteristics as size, color, and precise details of the teeth. Collectors noted that individuals of the same species might vary in size or color or other characteristics in different locations, and applied the term “subspecies” to such different forms. The term “race” is synonymous with “subspecies.”
9
THE RIGHT WOLF
The Sierra Vista Ranch house is a neat, white-stucco-sided building beside a tree-lined arroyo in the low, rugged hills of southern Arizona. The landscape is mesquite and cactus. A veranda looks north upon a sweeping view of the Altar Valley and the steep gray wall of the Baboquivaris. To the south are the low shapes of the Sierra Pozo Verde of Sonora, Mexico, to the east the Sierra San Luis. There is a huge vault of sky, with great white schooner clouds drifting over gray puddles of cloud shadow.
It is far from the city, from daily news and common convention. The space and silence set one apart, and the desert light seems to rob things of their substance. The hawk soaring overhead vanishes into the blinding light of the sun. The glimpse you get of the bobcat may only be its tail disappearing into the brush. The lizard you think you see scurrying over a rock may in fact be only the creature’s shadow. It is a place where definitions shift and arguments grow. Some of the arguments are about wolves: whether there are any out there—and if there are, where they have come from.
Sitting on the veranda of the Sierra Vista Ranch house late on a summer afternoon in 1991, Joyce Vanelli heard a coyote howl. The sun had just gone below the hills behind the house. And when the coyote howled, Vanelli heard something else: “Something tried to join in,” and howl with the coyote, she said. “But it couldn’t. Something that could not have been another coyote tried to mimic the coyote. I couldn’t say it was a dog or a wolf.”
In October 1991, her hybrid wolf-dog, which was going into heat, ran off into the hills behind the ranch house. “She takes off all the time,” says Vanelli. “I went after her, because it’s a bad area in there for drug runners—they shoot dogs—so I went up the hill and down the other side.” She caught up with her dog and was bringing her back when, she says, “I heard the wolf howl. I definitely, definitely heard the beautiful sound of a wolf. He was calling her back.” She says she would have worked her way down through the brush to see the wolf, but didn’t because “I didn’t know what I would run into.”
Next April, Vanelli was driving along the dusty ranch road toward the highway to Sasabe. When she drives, she says, she looks at the ground along the road for Indian relics. She had stopped because she thought she saw some bits of pottery, and as she looked down, she saw the footprints of a large canid along the side of the road.
“It was a wolf,” she says with conviction. She had raised captive wolves in Utah. “I’ve been around these animals all my life. I lived with wolves for years and years and years. I know that had to be a big, big animal. It was running with a smaller animal, maybe a coyote. I got Dale, the caretaker at the ranch, and we went down together, and we saw where they had run a deer.” They backtracked the prints to a clump of mesquite where the wolf and its companion had come out onto the road.
She called the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, which borders the ranch. The refuge superintendent, the regional director from Albuquerque, and the leader of the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team all happened to be at the refuge that day, and they sent out a technician to take plaster casts of the tracks. But the technician didn’t take casts of the smaller print Vanelli said she had seen alongside the large one. “People are strange,” says Vanelli. “These people at Buenos Aires are extremely uneducated about wildlife. They don’t get out—they sit behind a desk. They don’t see.”
It is not for lack of effort that refuge officials haven’t seen wolves. Steve Dobrott, biologist at the Buenos Aires Refuge, has photographs he took of wolf tracks on the Gray Ranch in New Mexico in 1984. And in 1990, a man cutting wood in the San Luis Mountains, just east of the refuge, reported that he had heard a wolf howl and that as it did so, his German shepherd crawled in fear under his trailer. He reported that he had seen the wolf, and its tracks. Says Dobrott, “He took me over to the wash and showed me the tracks. I couldn’t tell—they were washed out. But they were big. We went back there in the evening with the fire truck. I cranked up the siren. We got three coyote groups to howl back. When I went back to the man’s camp and told him I got coyotes to howl back, he said, ‘No, didn’t you hear that other thing?’ So we don’t know.”
Refuge officials have heard tales of wolves in the area for years. There are plenty to hear. Emma Mae Townsend, widow of locally famous wolf trapper Hack Townsend, recalls that just two years before, when Hack was still alive, he was sitting on the porch of his home in Arivaca, a few miles from the refuge, when he heard a wolf howl. “He howled back and it sounded just like a wolf, and he got a howl back. And then he hollered, ‘Emma, there’s a wolf down there at the dump!’ ”
Danny Culling, Emma Mae’s son-in-law, who works at the refuge, says he saw a wolf on the neighboring King Ranch with his father-in-law in 1985. He says, “There was a wolf spotted at Milepost Two, near Amado, a year ago,” by a surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service. Feliciano Lopez, a ninety-year-old rancher with a deeply furrowed desert-dweller’s face, says he heard wolves howl near Apache Wells the year before that. Carol Riggs, a Cochise County rancher, says she has watched wolves playing near Rucker Canyon.
And Dennis Parker, who studied wildlife biology in college and is now a wagon-maker in Patagonia just over the Santa Rita Mountains from Arivaca, carries around Ross Kane’s three glossy color photos that are to all appearances of a wolf crossing a road in the Canelo Hills of southeastern Arizona. Parker says he himself photographed wolf tracks in 1984 in the Huachuca Mountains and saw scratches and tracks there again in April 1986. “I would say that, once we got out there in the wild and took a look, we’d find a lot more.”
But neither the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged under the Endangered Species Act with leading the effort to recover the Mexican wolf, nor the Arizona Department of Game and Fish is convinced there are wolves in the wilds of Arizona. Terry Johnson, nongame and endangered-species coordinator for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish and Arizona’s representative on the recovery team, says he has heard secondhand reports of sightings and heard about Kane’s photographs, but says neither the reports nor the photographs come to the department with enough supporting evidence to prove that th
ere are wolves in the area. He declares, “There have been no documented occurrences of Mexican wolves in southern Arizona or in immediately adjacent northern Mexico during this last decade.”
It is not as if the agencies are closed to the possibility that the Mexican wolf survives in the wild. Says Johnson, “We have sight-record cards we will make available to anybody who is willing to submit them. We are ready to accept any documentation that people are ready to submit, and then try to follow them up as best we can. But we haven’t received any.” And if there are only sporadic sightings of wolves in Arizona, says Johnson, “there are not enough to call it a viable population in the northern part of the range.”
Canis lupus baileyi was the name given by taxonomist Edward Goldman to the Mexican wolf, the southernmost subspecies of gray wolf, which ranged from southern Arizona and New Mexico south into central Mexico. It was a slightly smaller wolf, as might be expected of a desert subspecies—desert races tend to be smaller than races from higher, colder altitudes. While it was not, strictly speaking, a desert wolf, but inhabited the wooded uplands above the deserts, the deer it fed on are among the smallest races of white-tailed deer in North America. Dennis Parker speculates that the northern margin of its distribution ran roughly along the present route of Interstate Highway 10 across Arizona and New Mexico, for north of that line the blue oak of the Sierra Madre habitat ends and gray oak, more typical of the Mogollon Rim country, takes over. North of that line, he speculates, the territory belonged to the subspecies mogollonensis, a larger wolf that fed on the larger mule deer of the uplands. And east of the Continental Divide, the neighboring subspecies was said by Goldman to be monstrabilis. Little record of that subspecies exists, for it was eradicated before much collecting was done. Both genetic screening and morphological studies suggest that, if the red wolf is either a hybrid or a separate species, baileyi may be the oldest North American subspecies of gray wolf, a subspecies that moved farther south as later subspecies crossed the land bridge from Asia.
The Company of Wolves Page 24