by Mark MacAllister
Page 1 : About the Report
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) recently published its "Five-Year Report" regarding red wolves and red wolf recovery. This report takes a look at what's been going on with the wild red wolf population in and around Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina over the last five years. It also addresses activities in the captive breeding program, which includes some forty zoos and wildlife centers in the United States. This article summarizes some of the key information in the report.
Program Progress
USFWS has several important goals for the red wolf recovery program. Two of them deserve special attention:
- There should be at least three wild red wolf populations within the wolf's historic range. The populations should each be large enough to allow for natural evolutionary processes within them. As well, there should be at least 30 captive breeding facilities for red wolves.
- We need to remove the threat of extinction from the red wolf species by reaching a wild population of 220 wolves and a captive population of 330 wolves.
The USFWS's success in meeting these goals is mixed. For example, there is only one wild red wolf population right now—the one in northeastern North Carolina. This means that if something really serious happens to the population, we would see terrible results for all wild red wolves. At the same time, it is very difficult to establish a new population, as the wolves require a very large area that is free of most human impacts. And, once we find that area, we still need to address many other problems, including how to monitor them, how to ensure that they have enough prey and cover and, perhaps most importantly, how to deal with all of the people that will not want wolves in their area.
Still, the fact that there are 40 captive facilities, instead of the 30 called for in the goal, is encouraging; though, as we will see below, we may need even more captive facilities in the near future.
Regarding the second goal, USFWS tells us that there are 100 to 130 wild wolves and 208 captive wolves. Both of those numbers are far short of the targets in the goal, so there's much work to be done—including finding more breeding facilities to get the captive population numbers up.
What Else Is New?
The USFWS five-year report takes a new look at the question of "historic homerange" and where red wolves were found before they were nearly wiped out by hunting and trapping. Back in the 1970s, most authors agreed that red wolves ranged as far west and south as southcentral Texas, as far east and south as Florida, and as far north as the Ohio River. However, some researchers have since extended that range further north to include Pennsylvania and, perhaps, as far north as southcentral Maine. Other researchers think that wolves may have once extended as far as eastern Canada, and that the northeastern United States and southern Canada formed a "contact zone" where red wolf and gray wolf populations mixed. There is a lot of evidence for this view. For example, it is interesting to note that this contact zone features white-tail deer habitat (white-tails are a prey species for red wolves) as well as habitat for moose, caribou and elk, which are favored by gray wolves.
Indeed, the Algonquin wolf of eastern Canada (see The Algonquin Wolves for more information) and the red wolf may one day be combined into one species, which would be called the "eastern wolf" (Canis lycaon).
Next Page : Population and Reproduction
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