First there is only one.

It rises slowly from somewhere in the park and then floats through the darkness like a ghost. Seconds later, others follow. And soon, scores of them fill the night, driving campers deeper into their blankets, or closer to their fires, gripped by the same conflicting emotions human beings have always felt when wolves howl: admiration, empathy, distrust and fear.

An overview of cultures across the world reveals a consistent trend: people can’t make up their minds about wolves. The Pawnee, for instance, revered the wolf as a wise, skillful hunter. Norse mythology, on the other hand, features Fenrir, a vicious, slavering, giant wolf that devours the earth and sky at the end of the world.

Today, this same ambivalence exists in the United States. While the wolf is managed and protected on reserves across the country and enjoyed by nature-loving tourists, many ranchers consider it a pest. Before the emergence of environmental politics in the mid-20th century, wolves faired even worse.

“Wolves were removed from large portions of the United States because of conflicts with livestock, because of competition with hunters for big game, and also people generally don’t like big predators that can kill them, even though non-rabid wolves have never been documented killing people in North America,” Roger Powell, professor of zoology, said.

Perhaps nothing conveys the scale of this removal effort better than the story of the red wolf.

Red wolves are smaller than gray wolves, with buff-colored coats that feature a reddish cast. Once widespread throughout the Southeastern region of the United States, scientists declared the red wolf extinct in the wild in 1980.

“This huge population of animals was completely extirpated by pressure to kill them off, bounties, all this sort of thing. Then somebody woke up and said ‘whoa, wait a minute, we’re gonna drive them extinct,'” Michael Stoskopf, professor of clinical medicine and director of the Red Wolf Coalition, a group of scientists that advise biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on red wolf recovery strategies, said.

During the decade preceding 1980, scientists bred red wolves in captivity, and in 1984, the newly established Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina was chosen as the site for a red wolf recovery plan.

In 1987, scientists released four pairs of red wolf mates onto the reserve.

Today, the red wolf is slowly recovering.

“About 90 red wolves are collared on the reserve, and those are monitored incredibly closely, every week – catching, picking up, finding out where they are, mapping them on the GIS grids,” Stoskopf said.

Still a wildlife refuge is not an impenetrable fortress, and the wolves still face several perils. As director of the Red Wolf Coalition, Stoskopf said he is responsible for developing strategies to manage them.

Two major challenges are of particular concern to scientists.

“All of the roads that run through any wildlife management area usually have an impact on the wildlife management in a number of ways,” Stoskopf said. “But particularly for the wolves, getting hit by cars is a big way that we lose them.”

Another major threat to red wolves is the infiltration of coyotes.

“It’s very clear that coyotes and red wolves interbreed very easily, and that was one of the major reasons for the endangerment of red wolves in the Southeast,” Powell said.

Coyotes, at one time lived primarily in the Southwestern United States, but slowly made their way eastward, where they encountered a red wolf population already in decline.

“We reduced their population sizes really, really low and kept them from their best habitat,” Powell said. “And then when their populations were really low, and they had trouble finding each other even to breed now and then, coyotes appeared, and they interbred.”

The threat coyotes pose to red wolf populations was an important factor during the planning phase of the recovery program in the early eighties.

“One of the primary reasons eastern North Carolina was chosen was that there were no coyotes there at the time,” Powell said.

Since then coyotes have arrived, and scientists deal with the threat yet again.

“They’ve done a combination of live-trapping coyotes, kill-trapping coyotes, and then live-trapping coyotes in some places and sterilizing them,” Powell said.

Of course, no recovery program can succeed without the help and support of the public.

“There’s been a huge biological, genetic and health effort to get the wolves into a position where they can be recovered,” Stoskopf said, “but there’s a necessarily equal effort that goes into the human dimension.”

Stoskopf believes public awareness and education are critical to the success of the recovery effort.

“Probably the biggest challenge that’s left related to the red wolf success relates to people, and education and helping people understand how wolves live, and what they do for a living and that they’re not really knocking down houses with their breath, trying to get at the three little pigs or taking Little Red Riding Hood out on her way to grandma’s house.”

Red Wolf Facts

Smaller than the gray wolf, the red wolf can range in color from a reddish-gray to an almost black. Though it is listed as an endangered species — it is nearly nonexistent in the central United States — numbers are slowly increasing through captive breeding. Nearly 100 wild red wolves cover 1.7 million acres of Northeastern North Carolina. In order to protect the wolves from coyotes, the Red Wolf Coalition is working to control the latter’s popularion.

source: www.encyclopedia.com and www.redwolves.com

To learn more about red wolves, get involved in or donate to the cause, visit www.redwolves.com.