By Coastal Review Online on November 27, 2016
The program was started in 1987. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
By Catherine Kozak
Coastal Review Online
As the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service’s red wolf recovery program here
marked its 25th anniversary in 2012, it was basking in nationwide
accolades as a groundbreaking conservation success. Just four years
later, it is teetering on the edge of failure, a turn of fate fanned by
politics, mistaken identity and public ill will.
First of two parts
“There’s something going on, and I can’t figure out why the agency
has been so willing to backtrack,” said Ron Sutherland, a Durham-based
scientist with the Wildlands Network. “The red wolf program in the Fish
and Wildlife Service has basically been drawn and quartered.”
Sutherland said the agency has not responded to a petition submitted
in July that was signed by 500,000 people in support of wild red wolves,
which are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Critics say the program has been a failure from the outset and that
the Fish and Wildlife Service had released wolves on private property
without the written permission of landowners.
Red wolves had been declared extinct in the wild when four captive
pairs were transferred from Texas to the Alligator River National
Wildlife Refuge in 1987. Through intensive management tactics that
included sneaking captive-bred pups into dens with wild-born pups, the
population grew steadily.
At its height in 2005-07, 130 red wolves roamed the forested recovery
area spanning 1.7 million acres of public and private land in Hyde,
Dare, Tyrrell, Washington and Beaufort counties.
Today, just 45 wolves remain in the wilds of northeastern North
Carolina, as well as 200 or so in captivity, and Fish and Wildlife has
sharply scaled back the recovery program.
At
the height of the program, about 130 red wolves roamed their native
habitats in Hyde, Dare, Tyrrell, Washington and Beaufort counties. (U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service)
In September, the agency announced, after a two-year review of the
program, that by 2017 it planned to reduce wolf territory to an area in
the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and the military bombing
range in Dare County. Wolves outside that range would be removed to
captive populations that reside in numerous zoos.
“It was disheartening to see how they want to pull the animals back
to almost where they started the program,” said Kim Wheeler, executive
director of the Tyrrell County-based Red Wolf Coalition, a nonprofit
education and advocacy group that started in 1997. “You can only have so
many wolves in so much space. Everybody needs their own room and their
own territory.”
Red wolf recovery would require changes to “secure” the wild and
captive populations, the agency said. In addition, it acknowledged
questions about whether the wolves’ genetics qualify for them to be
classified under the Endangered Species Act.
Shortly after the agency’s announcement, U.S. District Judge Terrence
Boyle issued a preliminary injunction that forbade removal of wolves
from private property, unless it can be shown there is a threat to
humans, pets or livestock. Boyle accused the wildlife service of failing
to adequately protect the wolves.
“What had been happening lately is that individual landowners have
required wolves to be removed from their property because they don’t
like them,” said Jason Rylander, senior attorney for Defenders of
Wildlife, one of the plaintiffs. “They can’t be removed just because
they’re present on the property.”
An earlier lawsuit ruled on by the same judge led to a ban in 2014 of
nighttime coyote hunting in the recovery area, a practice that
conservation groups blamed for a spike in wolf gunshot deaths.
The result of the recent injunction is that the wildlife service’s
plan to remove wolves in all but the Dare County and the Alligator River
area will not be allowed, essentially forestalling it.
The program’s path from bold experiment, to successful innovation, to
despair for its future is perhaps more dramatic, and compressed, than
most accounts of wildlife-conservation efforts.
Twenty years after the first red wolves were released onto Alligator
River lands, more than 100 wolves were inhabitants, and the program was
credited as a model for other successful efforts.
“That was the prototype wolf-recovery program that gave legs to the
wolf-recovery programs in Yellowstone and the northern Rockies, as well
as for the Mexican wolf, Walter Medvid, executive director of the
Minneapolis-based International Wolf Center, said in a 2007 article in
The Virginian-Pilot.
Medvid said that top predators such as wolves are good for ecological
stability and help keep prey populations healthy and vigorous.
Smaller than gray wolves but bigger than coyotes, red wolves weigh
about 55 to 85 pounds and are brown with patches of red behind their
ears. Long ago, they ranged from southern New England to Florida and as
far west as central Missouri and Texas before being gradually hunted to
near-extinction. By the 1970s, fewer than 100 red wolves were believed
to exist on the Gulf Coast.
An analysis of species characteristics was done by the wildlife
service before 14 wolves were selected to begin a captive-breeding
program. Four pairs were chosen for release in 1987 in Alligator River,
an area with natural boundaries and plenty of prey.
Sparsely developed, heavily wooded northeastern North Carolina seemed
as if it would be perfect habitat for red wolves, shy creatures not
known for aggression toward humans. But the red wolf preys on deer and
roams private as well as public land. Conservationists may regard the
wolf as an important part of the ecosystem, but to a significant number
of landowners and hunters, the wolf is little more than an interloper
and a competitor. And to the wolf’s misfortune, it looks very similar to
a coyote, which arrived in the region not long after the wolf’s
re-introduction. Shooting wolves is illegal; hunting coyotes is
permitted.
Wolves will mate with coyotes if a mate is killed, exacerbating a
threat to the species: hybridization. But the wildlife service’s
recovery team developed an effective tactic that used a sterilized
coyote to serve as a “placeholder” in keeping other coyotes out of its
territory. Before it was discontinued, the measure seemed to curtail the
problem of diluting the red wolf genes with those of coyotes. The
controversial issue of whether the red wolf is a separate species is
still being debated by the wildlife service.
Another method the recovery team devised is putting similarly aged
captive-bred pups in with other pups in a wild den, after sprinkling
them with a little urine from the wild pups. To the team’s joy, the
mothers accepted the pups as their own, helping to ensure the genetic
viability of the species.
But from the beginning, gunshot mortalities had been a growing issue
with red wolf management. By 2003, 28 wolves had been shot. Between 2004
and 2011, another 52 wolves had been shot, despite possible penalties
of up to a year in prison and a fine of $100,000. When coyote hunting
was expanded in 2012 to nighttime hours, shooting deaths of wolves
increased again.
But when the judge later restricted coyote hunting, the political
winds seem to turn in a fury toward the wolves. Pages filled with nasty
comments about the wolves started cropping up on Internet hunting
forums. Legislators started hearing demands from constituents to do
something about the wolves.
In January 2015, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission
adopted a resolution asking the wildlife service to end the red wolf
project, and another resolution asking the wildlife service to remove
all “unauthorized releases” of wolves and their offspring from private
land.
U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., is among those who have called for eliminating the red wolf recovery program.
Tillis, speaking in September at a House Committee on Natural
Resources hearing, said the program had failed to meet population
recovery goals while negatively affecting North Carolina landowners and
the populations of several other native species. He said 514 private
landowners and farmers had sent individual requests to the Fish and
Wildlife Service to not allow red wolves on their land.
“Before we do anything more in North Carolina, I think it makes the
most sense to shut the program down to figure out how to do it right and
build some credibility with the landowners,” Tillis said during the
hearing. “There is a less than respectful history of dialogue between
folks in North Carolina and the Fish and Wildlife Service. This is going
to be an issue my office will be focused on for as long as I’m a U.S.
senator.”
Wheeler, of the Red Wolf Coalition, said the issue was more political
than she ever thought it would be. “Certainly, our red wolves are
getting caught in that political mess,” she said.
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