Field Guide: Red wolf

The wolf of the South came back from the brink—only to be decimated again. Is it time to rethink what a wolf even is?

A photo of a running red wolf by Curtis Carley, the scientist who designed the initial recovery program / U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Wolves once freely roamed not just across the mountain west, but throughout all of North America. The Southeast had its own particular species: the red wolf, which, after centuries of slaughter, was listed as endangered in the 1970s. By then, the red wolf survived in one narrow sliver of habitat: the forests and swamps at the edges of Louisana and Texas.

The obvious approach to saving this species—simply protecting this last remaining population—was already doomed to fail. The numbers were too low. Plus, coyotes had recently invaded the region; by interbreeding with wolves, they tainting the bloodline. So the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service tried a bold approach: for its own protection, the red wolf was removed from the wild.

Trappers rounded up over 400 canids, which were tested to determine their ancestry. The 14 true wolves in the bunch were transferred to zoos and reserves; the rest—the coyotes, the mongrels—were euthanized. In 1980, the program was declared a strange sort of success: the red wolf was officially extinct in the wild.

For decades, though, there were whispers and rumors. Coyotes in certain patches of Texas seemed, well, bigger than coyotes. Did the red wolf remain out there, haunting the swamp? Yes, in a way, a fact that may force us to rethink our idea of what a wolf even is.

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The image of the wolf—head tilted back, howling at a full moon—is a potent symbol of an American, well, something. Fierceness and freedom and wide-open spaces, I guess.

The dead wolf, meanwhile—poisoned by a rancher, shot dead by a poacher—has become a symbol of our divided times, in which concerns for ecology are pitted against the sacrosanctity of property rights. We tend to associate such conflicts with the land out west; indeed, a poached wolf plays a key role in the latest season of Yellowstone. But wolves set off political controversies in the South, too. At least three red wolf deaths are currently being investigated in North Carolina.

These wolves are the captive-bred descendants of those rounded-up 14: their progeny was reintroduced into “the wild” in 1987, in a newly established national wildlife refuge along the North Carolina coastline. Over the next seven years, sixty wolves were released into the preserve, carefully selected from captive-bred pups across the country for their ability to thrive in wild conditions. The North Carolina pack grew through the years; at its peak, in 2012, until 120 wolves roamed the coast. This was considered a great conservation success, helping to inspire the more famous wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park.

But perhaps it was too successful. A few powerful locals grew frustrated, and soon the Fish and Wildlife Service was granting broad permission to landowners to take out wandering wolves. The agency was “dragging their feet,” as wolf biologist Joey Hinton told me: doing as little as possible, in other words, to enforce the Endangered Species Act. (For a full account of the red wolf program’s failures, see Jimmy Tobias’s 2021 story in The Nation.) The population plummeted, hitting a nadir of seven wolves in 2020. Now, though, after losing several lawsuits, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has toughened its protection for these wolves again. Last April, for the first time since 2018, a new litter was born.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is supposed to release an updated recovery plan for this species today. Hinton, who served on the planning team, told me that he doesn’t expect any radical changes, though he does think there will be new policies about how federal officials interact with local landowners. Hinton, though, has argued that the key to the species’ survival may lay far to the South, along the Gulf Coast, where rumors of the red wolf’s survival have never waned.

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We have to back up, though, to consider what a red wolf is. Coyotes, as you can tell are already, are a key player in the red wolf story. Once, the range of these two canids had little overlap. The coyote lived to the west, on the plains; the red wolf lived in the forests to the east, presumably adapted to hunting its white-tailed deer. This is a candid slightly bigger than a coyote, but smaller than the famous grey wolf.

A plate from Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, by John James and John Woodhouse Audubon

As white settlers spread across the continent, they snuffed out wolves wherever they found them. So the red wolf was gone from the Northeast before anyone much bothered to record its presence; according to Hinton, the killing reached the South by the late 1920s, when over a decade several thousand red wolves were killed in east Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

At the same time the wolf was declining, the coyote was spreading—and by the 1970s had reached the last remaining territory of the red wolf, in Louisiana and Texas. The reintroduction site in North Carolina was chosen in part because in 1987, coyotes had not yet traveled so far east. But they arrived just a few years later, so the Fish & Wildlife Service began a sterilization program, meant to protect the wolves.

The fact that coyotes and wolves can interbreed offers a reminder that the idea of “species” is a human construct. Sure, there are discernable morphological distinctions between coyotes and red wolves, but the borders are hazy. It does not help that no one is quite sure how red wolves evolved. Perhaps they’re an offshoot of coyotes, having branched away back in the Pleistocene. Or perhaps they’re descended from a few grey wolves who wandered east. Perhaps red wolves are already hybrids—part wolf, part coyote, maybe even part domestic dog. The tiny pool of red wolf genetics we have to draw on makes the deep past of the species hard to know.

In 2018 and 2019, separate studies confirmed that the oversized wolves being noted in the red wolf’s old territory, in Texas and Louisiana, retained substantial doses of red wolf genes. When we spoke, Hinton pointedly called these animals “Gulf Coast canids.” Some are 40% red wolf; some are 70%. How can you decide what to call these beats?

Whatever they are, these canids thrive amid the Gulf Coasts’s marshy land, where they feed on nutria and proudly swim across the local networks of the canals. The wolfiest of the canids were found in places where hunting is forbidden: on a private ranch in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, for example, as well as on wildlife refuges and on corporate oil lands with little public access. Hinton sees these wolf-coyote hybrids as a key source of genetic diversity. All of the country’s “true” red wolves, after all, are descended from just 14 individuals. These wild holdouts allow for an injection of lost genes into that pool: hybridization not as a threat, then, but as a genetic ark.

Red wolf pups / U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

There are bigger questions, too, raised by this strange pack. “Forty years of no management and some of these animals are pushing a hundred percent wolf?” Hinton says. “What’s going on there? It brings up the question—do we really have to manage the hybrids and the coyotes as heavily as we do in North Carolina? When can we tolerate the presence of hybrids?”

Whatever the answer to those questions, whatever the classification of these canids, Hinton believes the Gulf Coast packs are rare enough and unique enough that they too ought to be considered a population that deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act.

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It’s worth asking: why do we bother to protect red wolves? The most accurate answer, really, is the existence of the Endangered Species Act. We’re legally obligated to save declining species. But the ESA is now fifty years old, and, despite its many great triumphs, its old age is revealing flaws. Why are we waiting until a species is on its last legs to step in? The Gulf Coast canids raise another question: why are we focusing on “species” as the unit of conservation? What good does it do the world if a dozen wolves—or even a hundred—live contained in one small patch of North Carolina? Maybe what’s more important is that the Southeast retains some kind of apex predator. Such a presence has demonstrably helpful effects on the ecosystem.

The fact that coyotes have spread so thickly across the landscape suggests that these canines are better adapted to our modern world than wolves. If a bit of coyote blood helps the red wolves, is that so bad?

I have to say, when I lived in a country house in rural Mississippi, I delighted in the evening coyote howls. It was thrilling just to know that the predators were out thee. Still, I can’t help but think that if the red wolf genes disappear into the vast abundance of coyote blood, then something ancient and beautiful has been lost.

I guess I don’t just want to save the red wolf. I want to build a Southern landscape where the red wolf can thrive.

To see them

Mostly nocturnal and very secretive, the red wolf is one more beast that is going to be hard to spot. You’re looking for something much like a coyote—brown and beige—only bigger, 45 to 80 pounds. Also key are the namesake red streaks on their ears, legs, and heads.

The easiest route will be the many zoos and rehab centers where captive wolves are housed. To see wolves in the wild, you have three shots: first, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, home to the 20 or so survivors.

There is also a single breeding pair of wolves housed at St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge near Apalachicola, Florida. Their young pups are caught and transferred to other facilities for potential release in North Carolina. I visited last weekend and, as I expected, saw no wolves, but I did see their scat and their footprints. It was enough, to me, to know they were bedded down somewhere on this land.

Your last shot is to see the mysterious Gulf Coast canids, which have been identified on Galveston Island and on the nearby mainland in Texas, and in Cameron, Jefferson Davis, and Calcasieu parishes in Louisiana.