The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to release two adult Mexican
wolves with pups, like this one born at the Sevilleta National Wildlife
Refuge in 1997, into a recovery area in southern Arizona and New Mexico.
(AP Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
This fall, for the second time, the New Mexico Game and Fish
Commission rejected a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to
release two adult Mexican wolves with pups, and up to 10 captive-born
wolf pups, into the Mexican Wolf Recovery Area in southern Arizona and
New Mexico.
An important part of the release, which was planned for next
spring, involved fostering the 10 motherless pups with wild wolves that
came from packs with good track records of preying on elk, not cattle.
The larger goal was to increase the genetic diversity of the
110 Mexican wolves now in the wild, a subspecies smaller and lighter
than the northern gray wolf and uniquely adapted to the Southwest.
The federal agency has made it clear: The clock is ticking
for the Mexican wolf. When packs have too many genetically similar
wolves, it doesn’t bode well for their survival.
But the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has also made
it clear that it will continue to thwart wolf reintroduction in New
Mexico, even though the reintroduction is mandated by federal law and
supported by a majority of citizens. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
now has to decide whether to go ahead with wolf reintroduction against
the state agency’s wishes.
Loss of biodiversity often seems to be collateral damage
from basic human activities, such as growing crops, mining ore or
building houses. But there are also targeted losses like this one – and
they are instructive.
In the 1980s, some New Mexico citizens began a movement to
return the wolf to their public lands. The animal had been vigorously –
one might say hysterically – poisoned, trapped and finally exterminated.
So in 1998, 11 wolves born and raised in captivity were
radio-collared and released in a recovery area of over 4.4 million
acres. This strategy worked. The animals quickly readapted; they formed
packs, bred, hunted and howled. They were home again.
But some of the people living closest to those public lands
have been reducing the wolf population by shooting them. They build
unnecessary wooden enclosures to “protect” their children waiting for
school buses on roads and highways. They put up billboards next to gas
stations and rural post offices that warn, “Beware! Wolves Nearby! Keep
Kids and Pets Close!”
The current hysteria around the wolf may be part of a larger
fear, as these rural communities face increasing economic hardship and
an uncertain future. The resistance to wolf reintroduction is also a
stubborn denial of the well-known cycle of prey and predator necessary
for ecological health. And it is a refusal to accept the will of the
majority of Americans, who want wolves, wildness and biodiversity.
Well, we can all be stubborn and opinionated. I also live
next to these public lands – the Gila National Forest in southwestern
New Mexico – and I am loathe to judge my neighbors for faults I might
share. I do, however, hold the state Game and Fish commissioners
accountable for their decision to subvert the reintroduction of an
endangered species. Don’t they have training in ecology or wildlife
management? And don’t they represent all of New Mexico, as well as the
laws we all live under?
In 1998, the same year the Mexican wolves were first
released, the writer David Quammen coined the phrase “planet of weeds.”
His argument was that habitat loss and degradation would result in an
earth inhabited by scrappy, adaptable “weedy” species that reproduced
quickly and cohabited well with Homo sapiens – the ultimate weed. We
would become a planet of generalists: rats, cockroaches, pigeons, deer.
So far, fortunately, that hasn’t happened – at least not
yet, not in my part of the West. I live in a healthy ecosystem that
still includes mountain lions in the hills and native trout in the
rivers. I regularly see foxes, coati, javelina, tiger beetles and
vermillion flycatchers, as well as coyotes and deer, generalists and
specialists both. I live in rich abundance. Yes, the river otter is
gone. So, too, the grizzly, the jaguar, the prairie dog. Maybe, now, the
Mexican wolf.
How easily could we slip into becoming a “planet of weeds”?
Here in the Southwest, climate change is a hot wind at our backs. We
need Mexican wolves to flourish; we need to protect every species that
we can, as fast as we can. And we desperately need leaders who will work
to preserve – not destroy – an abundance that we have come to take too
much for granted.
Sharman Apt Russell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She is a writer in Silver City, N.M.
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