Wildly In Danger(ed) Photo above by Ron Sutherland
Cat Chapman | November 2021
Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, located just west of the North Carolina Outerbanks, is home to the uniquely American wolf species: the red wolf (Canis rufus). The red wolf has recently had a rough history in its road to survival and, in 1980, hit a dead end when they were officially declared extinct in the wild. Seven years later, after the start of a captive breeding program, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided to use the wolves as part of a reintroduction experiment known as a non-essential experimental population (NEP). Essentially, the Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to see how the reintroduced wolves would react and adapt to the wild again, but had no plan for what to do with the wolves later on. The agency continued to release the red wolves into the wild from captivity for years but arbitrarily stopped releasing them in 2015. At the beginning of the experiment, the wolves were doing well, reaching a population of around 130 by 2006. However, a few years down the road, the population quickly declined; today, only about 10 wolves are confirmed to exist in the wild.
It’s a cold evening in January, and Dr. Ron Sutherland, Chief Scientist for the Wildlands Network, set out with his son to check the many wildlife cameras that had been set up to sneakily capture pictures of the not-so-shy animals all around the refuge. Sutherland, taking his time to make sure the cameras are in good condition and replacing some batteries, eventually gets outrun by the sun and the below-freezing night quickly creeps up on him. As he continues checking camera batteries, something breaks the cold silence of Alligator River, and Sutherland finds himself out of his skin in excitement. It’s the red wolves, howling. “It’s an electrifying experience to be out on a cold January night hearing wolves behind you.” And, not only did he hear the wolves howl, but he could tell they weren’t very far away. “They’re very beautiful animals,” says Sutherland, “I have the good fortune of seeing them in the wild half a dozen times now, I think” which, nowadays, is a very rare sighting. If you’ve ever seen one in the wild, consider yourself lucky!
Canis rufus is distinctly unique to the United States, specifically the Southeast, and has lived in the wild here for thousands of years. While they used to roam all over the Southeast, they have been subjected to Eastern North Carolina and the barrier island of St. Vincent in Northwestern Florida.2 Protection for the red wolf wasn’t considered until the late ‘60s/early ‘70s when predator control programs and illegal hunting (or accidental hunting) took their intentions too far or, in their perspective, not far enough. Top carnivores like the red wolf have always been in competition with the human species and, as it comes, we tend to like the same things in nature: land, space to roam, and animals to prey on. But there is more to wolves (and for that matter, bears, bobcats, lions and snow leopards) than roaming and killing deer and livestock. Carnivores are necessary for proper ecosystem functioning; they control herbivore populations which, when uncontrolled, eat too much of the greenery and change landscapes altogether —a very harmful event for other present wildlife. Sutherland decided he would test this new hypothesis of red wolves affecting the surrounding wildlife populations (like deer and wild turkey) as hunters in Eastern North Carolina like to claim, and why illegal hunting was and still is prevalent. Setting up cameras all throughout Alligator River, Sutherland and his team were hoping to find compelling evidence that, as a matter of fact, the red wolves were not destroying the local game populations.
Sutherland has been one of the main scientists involved in the red wolf recovery program the last ten years and feels very strongly about the species; he really wants to see them thrive in the wild as they once did. “We haven’t done enough to actually protect the wolves in the wild,” says Sutherland, “I also feel a tremendous amount of guilt that we’ve gotten our butts kicked in that way.” However, he does say that he and his organization’s efforts, along with other conservation organizations, have kept the red wolf from going extinct again, and “kept the Fish and Wildlife Service from pulling the plug the last ten years.” As I’m talking to Dr. Sutherland, I think to myself, if even these main conservation scientists can’t do enough to save this species, who can? The US Fish and Wildlife Service pretty much has all of the control, so why haven’t they done more to protect the red wolf? There has also been an ongoing controversy that the red wolf isn’t even a real species, that it’s just a mix between a wolf and a coyote and thus doesn’t deserve protection, something the Fish and Wildlife Service recently has played into (at least that’s what it seems). But Sutherland said that is not what the science says, and they need “to work on that messaging somehow.” Sutherland is hopeful that with the Fish and Wildlife Service back on track with red wolf conservation efforts, they will start to get more wolves back on the (wild) ground. With this, only time will tell.
Twenty motion-sensitive trail cameras were placed all around the refuge, capturing over 200,000 pictures of all different forms of wildlife: black bears, deer, river otters, possums, blue herons, owls, foxes, bobcats, and more. Deer, the so heavily prized species by human hunters, were captured 20,000 times over five years, and the study is still ongoing. “What we have so far is pretty abundant evidence that the deer situation down there is going just fine, and that hunters don’t have that much to complain about.” More surprisingly though, the study found that with a higher population of wolves present, more deer are present. The wolves (so far) have been found to be compatible with and maintain a healthy deer population. Sutherland and his team also noticed that the Northern Bobwhite (also known as quail) population was declining, mostly due to the rise in the number of nest predators such as raccoons and possums. Adding twenty more cameras to their Alligator River set-up, they delved deeper into their initial hypothesis, this time comparing the quail versus the wolves. “What we’re finding is that the number of quail right there in the fields of Alligator River is through the roof,” says Sutherland.2 While they can’t yet say that the wolves are the cause of this high quail population, they can say nevertheless that the two are compatible with each other.2
Before this narrative assignment, I didn’t even know that the red wolf existed, much less that it was on the brink of (wild) extinction. After working on this assignment for a while, I thought about the broken connection between humans and the natural world, especially other non-human species. While a lot of this is cultural, it is also something that is unique to the human species; if it doesn’t directly benefit us, then who cares? Humans have had such a big impact on the natural world now that a whole new epoch has been (unofficially) named after us and our time on Earth. It’s called the Anthropocene, and it suggests that humans have altered the earth and the processes within it so much that the most recent sedimentary layers on Earth’s crust will appear differently and distinct compared to past layers, setting our time on Earth apart from past and future times. The species that human activities have caused to go extinct will forever be lost; the species that took hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years to evolve and adapt, gone within a flash in geologic time, thanks to us. The wild red wolf could soon become one of these lost species, never to return again, if human ignorance and coldheartedness persist. While there is a captive population of red wolves, this doesn’t promise a sustainable, wild population. It is difficult and complex to introduce an animal to a brand new environment it has never experienced before.
When asking Dr. Sutherland about the true wildness of the captive-bred red wolf, and if they could even be considered wild again, he stated that “anything that is out there catching their own food, raising their own puppies, surviving cold winter nights and hot summer days, with no material help from humans, sounds wild to me.” But this doesn’t mean that wolves from captivity and the wolves in the wild are completely synonymous. Breeding and keeping animals in captivity has, overtime, an evolutionary impact and can erase certain traditions and behaviors from animals for good. “That is why I feel so strongly about getting the red wolf conservation program out of the zoos and back into the wild,” says Sutherland. With the Fish and Wildlife Service back on track, and more support from the state to protect the species, the red wolf might just have hope for thriving in the wild as their ancestors once did.
Sources
Carter, Neil H., and John D.C. Linnell. “Co-Adaptation Is Key to Coexisting with Large Carnivores.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31, no. 8 (2016): 575–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2016.05.006.
Dr. Ron Sutherland (Chief Scientist for Wildlands Network and red wolf biologist) in discussion with the author, November 15, 2021
Fears , Darryl. “Red Wolves May Be Going Extinct in the Wild - Again.” The Washington Post. WP Company, February 5, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/02/05/feature/red-wolves-may-be-going-extinct-in-the-wild-again/.
“Red Wolf.” U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. US government , November 9, 2021.
https://www.fws.gov/southeast/wildlife/mammals/red-wolf/#current-status-of-wild-population-section.
“Red Wolf.” Wolf Conservation Center. Wolf Conservation Center , October 28, 2021.
https://nywolf.org/learn/red-wolf/.
Red Wolves' Last Stronghold. Vimeo. Wildlands Network, 2021. https://vimeo.com/560578514.
“The World's Only Wild Red Wolves Are in Jeopardy.” Southern Environmental Law Center. Southern Environmental Law Center , August 30, 2021.
https://www.southernenvironment.org/topic/the-worlds-only-wild-red-wolves-are-in-jeopardy/.
Waters, Colin N., Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Clément Poirier, Agnieszka Gałuszka, Alejandro Cearreta, et al. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science 351, no. 6269 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad2622.
Cat Chapman | November 2021
Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, located just west of the North Carolina Outerbanks, is home to the uniquely American wolf species: the red wolf (Canis rufus). The red wolf has recently had a rough history in its road to survival and, in 1980, hit a dead end when they were officially declared extinct in the wild. Seven years later, after the start of a captive breeding program, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided to use the wolves as part of a reintroduction experiment known as a non-essential experimental population (NEP). Essentially, the Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to see how the reintroduced wolves would react and adapt to the wild again, but had no plan for what to do with the wolves later on. The agency continued to release the red wolves into the wild from captivity for years but arbitrarily stopped releasing them in 2015. At the beginning of the experiment, the wolves were doing well, reaching a population of around 130 by 2006. However, a few years down the road, the population quickly declined; today, only about 10 wolves are confirmed to exist in the wild.
It’s a cold evening in January, and Dr. Ron Sutherland, Chief Scientist for the Wildlands Network, set out with his son to check the many wildlife cameras that had been set up to sneakily capture pictures of the not-so-shy animals all around the refuge. Sutherland, taking his time to make sure the cameras are in good condition and replacing some batteries, eventually gets outrun by the sun and the below-freezing night quickly creeps up on him. As he continues checking camera batteries, something breaks the cold silence of Alligator River, and Sutherland finds himself out of his skin in excitement. It’s the red wolves, howling. “It’s an electrifying experience to be out on a cold January night hearing wolves behind you.” And, not only did he hear the wolves howl, but he could tell they weren’t very far away. “They’re very beautiful animals,” says Sutherland, “I have the good fortune of seeing them in the wild half a dozen times now, I think” which, nowadays, is a very rare sighting. If you’ve ever seen one in the wild, consider yourself lucky!
Canis rufus is distinctly unique to the United States, specifically the Southeast, and has lived in the wild here for thousands of years. While they used to roam all over the Southeast, they have been subjected to Eastern North Carolina and the barrier island of St. Vincent in Northwestern Florida.2 Protection for the red wolf wasn’t considered until the late ‘60s/early ‘70s when predator control programs and illegal hunting (or accidental hunting) took their intentions too far or, in their perspective, not far enough. Top carnivores like the red wolf have always been in competition with the human species and, as it comes, we tend to like the same things in nature: land, space to roam, and animals to prey on. But there is more to wolves (and for that matter, bears, bobcats, lions and snow leopards) than roaming and killing deer and livestock. Carnivores are necessary for proper ecosystem functioning; they control herbivore populations which, when uncontrolled, eat too much of the greenery and change landscapes altogether —a very harmful event for other present wildlife. Sutherland decided he would test this new hypothesis of red wolves affecting the surrounding wildlife populations (like deer and wild turkey) as hunters in Eastern North Carolina like to claim, and why illegal hunting was and still is prevalent. Setting up cameras all throughout Alligator River, Sutherland and his team were hoping to find compelling evidence that, as a matter of fact, the red wolves were not destroying the local game populations.
Sutherland has been one of the main scientists involved in the red wolf recovery program the last ten years and feels very strongly about the species; he really wants to see them thrive in the wild as they once did. “We haven’t done enough to actually protect the wolves in the wild,” says Sutherland, “I also feel a tremendous amount of guilt that we’ve gotten our butts kicked in that way.” However, he does say that he and his organization’s efforts, along with other conservation organizations, have kept the red wolf from going extinct again, and “kept the Fish and Wildlife Service from pulling the plug the last ten years.” As I’m talking to Dr. Sutherland, I think to myself, if even these main conservation scientists can’t do enough to save this species, who can? The US Fish and Wildlife Service pretty much has all of the control, so why haven’t they done more to protect the red wolf? There has also been an ongoing controversy that the red wolf isn’t even a real species, that it’s just a mix between a wolf and a coyote and thus doesn’t deserve protection, something the Fish and Wildlife Service recently has played into (at least that’s what it seems). But Sutherland said that is not what the science says, and they need “to work on that messaging somehow.” Sutherland is hopeful that with the Fish and Wildlife Service back on track with red wolf conservation efforts, they will start to get more wolves back on the (wild) ground. With this, only time will tell.
Twenty motion-sensitive trail cameras were placed all around the refuge, capturing over 200,000 pictures of all different forms of wildlife: black bears, deer, river otters, possums, blue herons, owls, foxes, bobcats, and more. Deer, the so heavily prized species by human hunters, were captured 20,000 times over five years, and the study is still ongoing. “What we have so far is pretty abundant evidence that the deer situation down there is going just fine, and that hunters don’t have that much to complain about.” More surprisingly though, the study found that with a higher population of wolves present, more deer are present. The wolves (so far) have been found to be compatible with and maintain a healthy deer population. Sutherland and his team also noticed that the Northern Bobwhite (also known as quail) population was declining, mostly due to the rise in the number of nest predators such as raccoons and possums. Adding twenty more cameras to their Alligator River set-up, they delved deeper into their initial hypothesis, this time comparing the quail versus the wolves. “What we’re finding is that the number of quail right there in the fields of Alligator River is through the roof,” says Sutherland.2 While they can’t yet say that the wolves are the cause of this high quail population, they can say nevertheless that the two are compatible with each other.2
Before this narrative assignment, I didn’t even know that the red wolf existed, much less that it was on the brink of (wild) extinction. After working on this assignment for a while, I thought about the broken connection between humans and the natural world, especially other non-human species. While a lot of this is cultural, it is also something that is unique to the human species; if it doesn’t directly benefit us, then who cares? Humans have had such a big impact on the natural world now that a whole new epoch has been (unofficially) named after us and our time on Earth. It’s called the Anthropocene, and it suggests that humans have altered the earth and the processes within it so much that the most recent sedimentary layers on Earth’s crust will appear differently and distinct compared to past layers, setting our time on Earth apart from past and future times. The species that human activities have caused to go extinct will forever be lost; the species that took hundreds of thousands of years if not millions of years to evolve and adapt, gone within a flash in geologic time, thanks to us. The wild red wolf could soon become one of these lost species, never to return again, if human ignorance and coldheartedness persist. While there is a captive population of red wolves, this doesn’t promise a sustainable, wild population. It is difficult and complex to introduce an animal to a brand new environment it has never experienced before.
When asking Dr. Sutherland about the true wildness of the captive-bred red wolf, and if they could even be considered wild again, he stated that “anything that is out there catching their own food, raising their own puppies, surviving cold winter nights and hot summer days, with no material help from humans, sounds wild to me.” But this doesn’t mean that wolves from captivity and the wolves in the wild are completely synonymous. Breeding and keeping animals in captivity has, overtime, an evolutionary impact and can erase certain traditions and behaviors from animals for good. “That is why I feel so strongly about getting the red wolf conservation program out of the zoos and back into the wild,” says Sutherland. With the Fish and Wildlife Service back on track, and more support from the state to protect the species, the red wolf might just have hope for thriving in the wild as their ancestors once did.
Sources
Carter, Neil H., and John D.C. Linnell. “Co-Adaptation Is Key to Coexisting with Large Carnivores.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31, no. 8 (2016): 575–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2016.05.006.
Dr. Ron Sutherland (Chief Scientist for Wildlands Network and red wolf biologist) in discussion with the author, November 15, 2021
Fears , Darryl. “Red Wolves May Be Going Extinct in the Wild - Again.” The Washington Post. WP Company, February 5, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/02/05/feature/red-wolves-may-be-going-extinct-in-the-wild-again/.
“Red Wolf.” U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. US government , November 9, 2021.
https://www.fws.gov/southeast/wildlife/mammals/red-wolf/#current-status-of-wild-population-section.
“Red Wolf.” Wolf Conservation Center. Wolf Conservation Center , October 28, 2021.
https://nywolf.org/learn/red-wolf/.
Red Wolves' Last Stronghold. Vimeo. Wildlands Network, 2021. https://vimeo.com/560578514.
“The World's Only Wild Red Wolves Are in Jeopardy.” Southern Environmental Law Center. Southern Environmental Law Center , August 30, 2021.
https://www.southernenvironment.org/topic/the-worlds-only-wild-red-wolves-are-in-jeopardy/.
Waters, Colin N., Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Clément Poirier, Agnieszka Gałuszka, Alejandro Cearreta, et al. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science 351, no. 6269 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad2622.