8
WILD ENOUGH FOR WOLVES
On a hot May afternoon, Michael Phillips of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is checking a trap line near the newly designated Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. The landscape is a tangle of maple, gum, bay, oak, and pond pines, all crowded so closely together that one must cut a way through with a machete or stay on the road. The road has been made by dredging up muck from the swampy ground and piling it into a causeway. Water lies so close to the surface that any digging makes a lake, and the trenches dug beside the roadways are blackwater canals that reflect the riotous greenery. Flies and mosquitoes buzz and whine in the air, and large black swallowtail butterflies dart between the thickets. Green herons squawk from the edge of a canal. A huge black-snake glides across the road.
Phillips is looking for a female radio-collared red wolf that has drifted off the neighboring Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, where since 1986 Phillips has been releasing captive-bred red wolves. It is part of an attempt to restore a creature that has been absent from this swampy world for nearly two centuries.
The collar on the wolf Phillips is seeking needs a new battery. He checks the trap line daily, and this has already been a long day. After driving more than ninety miles from the refuge office in Manteo, he has checked one trap after another, and found nothing. In the heat, his near-shoulder-length blond hair sticks in ringlets to the side of his face.
As he approaches one of his sets at the edge of a canal, he sees something standing in the water. He cannot see clearly what the dark, spidery thing is. It is some kind of canid, but it is emaciated, black, and almost hairless. Caught in Phillips’ trap, it has hobbled into the canal, where the drag hook has stuck. The animal is unable to lie down, and it stands helplessly in the shallows, staring vacantly, holding its head low. As Phillips gets closer, the animal offers no resistance. He easily restrains it and pries open the jaws of the trap. “This guy looks poor,” he says, “but he’s alive. Rascal is alive.”
It is a coyote—its ears are too big and its snout is too narrow for a red wolf—but Phillips has to look closely to tell. Wet and muddy, it has lost 90 percent of its hair to mange, and probably suffers as well from heartworm, hookworm, and other intestinal parasites. Its sun-blackened skin hangs loose over its bones. When Phillips has eased the creature into a portable kennel, it sags listlessly. With its leathery skin and protruding bones, it looks more like a large fruit bat than a coyote. The eyes are dull and lifeless, and there seems to be a brown spot on the edge of one iris, a condition Phillips knows is common to such dog breeds as the German shepherd. He suspects it might be a coyote-dog hybrid.
For Phillips, questioning identities is reflexive. Biologists debate whether red wolves are a separate species of wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf, or a hybrid resulting from the matings of wolves and coyotes.* Phillips leans to the view that it is a subspecies of gray wolf, but if he were to say so at a scientific gathering he would be sure to start an argument.
The red wolf is the most puzzling of wolves. It was originally described in 1791 by John Bartram, who regarded it as a subspecies of gray wolf and gave it the name Canis lupus niger. In 1851, Audubon and John Bachman held that there was a gray wolf in the North, a black wolf in Florida and the Southeast, and a red wolf in Texas and Arkansas. In 1898, Outram Bangs designated the Florida wolf a separate species, Canis ater. In 1905, Vernon Bailey recognized the red wolf of Texas as a separate species and gave it the name Canis rufus. In 1937, Goldman combined the Florida and red wolves into a single species, Canis niger. But twenty years later, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature changed the name to Canis rufus. In 1967, Barbara Lawrence and William Bossert of Harvard University argued that the red wolf was a subspecies of the gray wolf. In 1970, David Mech held that the red wolf most likely originated from the crossing of gray wolves and coyotes. In 1972, Ronald Nowak, endangered-species coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, examined historical and fossil specimens and concluded, “The red wolf is the surviving stock of the basic progenitor of all wolves. And it originated right where it survives today, in the southern United States.” He believes the red wolf’s descendants migrated north, crossed the ice-age land bridge into Asia, and there evolved into the gray wolf, which later migrated back into North America.
What makes the argument difficult is that by the early twentieth century the red wolf had vanished from the Southeast and the gray wolf from the Northeast. Nowak is a morphological taxonomist: he classifies animals on the basis of their skeletal dimensions, especially their skulls. Few skulls or other remains are available with which to appraise the identity of southern wolves. By 1970, the red wolf survived only in parts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. There are no red-wolf remains from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky. And there are few historical specimens of gray wolf from the eastern states. Nowak says he knows of only three complete skulls of gray wolf, and a half-dozen of red wolf, surviving from the United States south and east of Lake Michigan with proof of the time and place they were collected. “All the wolves were killed off before anybody gave a darn,” he says. “They were just obliterated before anybody was interested in collecting.”
Edward Goldman identified one historic Florida specimen as a gray wolf, but Nowak and Barbara Lawrence argue that it was a red wolf. The identification of this one specimen is an important question. Says Nowak, that is the only evidence in the literature of a gray wolf in Florida within historical times. If gray wolves didn’t exist in the South, then red wolves couldn’t be hybrids. And with perhaps only three specimens of red wolf from Alabama, one from Mississippi, and one from Florida to judge by, there is little baseline data upon which to argue the issue of hybridization.
Given so little historical evidence, the argument has turned on the relative sizes of coyotes, red wolves, and gray wolves. Do their average dimensions overlap? And if so, do they overlap because wolves and coyotes have hybridized, or because gray wolves, red wolves, and coyotes have been shaped by the various prey species they hunt?
The red wolf is almost invariably described with reference to the larger gray wolf or the smaller coyote. It has a thinner muzzle and a narrower head than the gray wolf, and its ears, though the same size as those of a gray wolf, appear larger by virtue of its smaller head. It has longer legs than a coyote. Observers sometimes think they are seeing coyotes because of the bigger ears and pointier nose. Even its behavior is described as intermediate between wolves and coyotes. For example, zoologist Vernon Bailey in 1907 held that the voice of the red wolf was “a compromise between that of the coyote and lobo, or rather a deep voiced yap-yap and howl of the coyote. It suggests the coyote much more than the lobo.”
But there seem also to be clear distinctions between red wolves and coyotes. Color often distinguishes red wolves: they usually have a reddish tinge to their coats, and strong white highlights around their black lips; on many, the back is drably coyotelike, but some individuals are black and others have dark patches, like forest camouflage. At Alligator River, red wolves kill and eat deer, while coyotes tend only to feed on deer fawns and hunter-killed adults. The red wolves at Alligator Refuge also eat raccoons, which coyotes rarely attack. The red wolf forms packs, and is so intolerant of strangers that five of the animals released in reintroduction efforts have been killed by other red wolves. Coyotes, on the other hand, disperse before their second summer and seldom kill one another.
Before European colonization, coyotes were absent from the wooded areas east of the Mississippi. They inhabited only the fringes of wolf range, the open country of the American West and Mexico. Coyotes moved into wolf range after humans replaced the forest with fields and pastures and eliminated the large prey species that wolves depended upon. They arrived in Minnesota in 1875, southern Ontario in 1890, Pennsylvania in 1907, Isle Royale in 1912, Alaska in the 1920s, Tennessee in 1930, and Massachusetts in 1936.
Generally,
wolves seem to view coyotes as competitors and kill them. The coyotes on Isle Royale disappeared three years after the wolves arrived. John Weaver found that one wolf pack in Jasper National Park killed four coyotes in a single month. But when dispersing wolves find no other wolves to mate with, they will interbreed with coyotes. In 1951, Stanley Young reported that two of the wolf specimens in the Royal Ontario Museum were coyote-wolf hybrids. In 1971, George Kolenosky, of the Ontario Fish and Wildlife Research Branch, reported that in the two preceding years a captive Algonquin Park wolf had mated with a captive York County, Ontario, coyote and successfully reared litters. Biologists presumed that if individuals mated across species lines the offspring would—like the mules that result from all but a few horse-donkey matings—be sterile. But Kolenosky’s wolf-coyote hybrids proved to be fertile. The finding fueled suspicions that wolves were interbreeding with coyotes near Lakes Superior and Huron, where there were reports of a smaller race of wolves. This speculation was not confirmed until 1992, when Dr. Robert Wayne, of the University of California at Los Angeles, showed through molecular-biological tests that wolves around Lake Superior had coyote mitochondrial DNA. That meant that male wolves were mating with female coyotes.
There is no doubt that, by the middle of the twentieth century, red wolves and coyotes had hybridized in Texas. Howard McCarley, a biologist at Austin College in Sherman, Texas, began to wonder about red wolves in the 1950s. As he traveled around Texas, he would look at red-wolf and coyote carcasses ranchers hung from their fences, and he noted that most of the red wolves seemed to resemble coyotes. McCarley concluded that coyotes had replaced red wolves in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and eastern Texas. By 1964, he recognized that the red wolf was in a precarious position.
Roy McBride, who was trapping coyotes and red wolves in Texas ten years later, recalls, “When the coyotes came in, it was love at first sight. Hell, they were inseparable. You’d see tracks of a wolf and two coyotes traveling with it. You’d take pups out of a den, and one would grow up to be a sixty-eight-pound male and the other would grow up to be a thirty-five-pound male. They weren’t coyotes. They weren’t like wolves, either. They had strange habits. They killed small animals. They lived on nutrias. There were cows all over the place, but they didn’t take them.”
The question today is whether hybridization occurred all along or only after human persecution reduced red wolves to small numbers and coyotes moving into the emptying niche began to breed with them. Nowak found that specimens collected from west of the Mississippi River before 1930 were larger than those taken after 1930, and took this to indicate that the red wolf had hybridized only recently. He believes, with biologist Ernst Mayr, “By far the most frequent cause of hybridization in animals is the breakdown of habitat barriers, mostly as a result of human interference.” He concluded, “Hybridization with the coyote did not begin until about a century ago, and the gray wolf was never involved.”
When the wolves were first brought to Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, there were no coyotes known to be in the area. Coyotes weren’t present in the southern states when Europeans arrived. They began to turn up again in the 1920s and 1930s, after white settlement had eliminated wolves and pushed back the forest. The pattern of their reappearance does not suggest an enterprising canid gradually expanding into a niche vacated by the extinction of wolves: the coyotes appeared quite suddenly, here and there. For example, they appeared in Florida in 1925, but in Georgia not until 1929. They turned up in 1924 in South Carolina, but in North Carolina not until 1938. They were in Maryland in 1921, but in Virginia not until 1947. Almost certainly they were released in most of these places by humans. Possibly they were captives whose owners grew disenchanted with them, or they had been kept by hunters and were released to train chase dogs. Today, some hunters raise coyotes for just such purposes.
In 1986, a coyote turned up near Pungo Lake, west of the Alligator River Refuge. In that same year, two gray wolves and a cougar were released in the area by parties unknown. The cougar was shot and found to have an identifying tattoo in one ear. One wolf was shot by a Fish and Wildlife Service employee after it walked into his yard; on the basis of tooth wear, it was judged to have spent considerable time in captivity. Three coyotes were found in the area as well. The whole menagerie could have been a single release, perhaps the work of an owner of exotic pets who decided his animals would all be happier running around in the wild. Or it may have been an attempt to monkey-wrench the release of captive-bred red wolves. Says Michael Phillips, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were released just when the [reintroduction] project was getting under way.”
The Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge is the only refuge in the United States that permits hunting of deer with chase dogs. It does so because hunting with dogs is a tradition in these thickets, and because the reintroduction of red wolves depends on the support of local hunters, who would be a lot less cooperative if wolf reintroduction led the government to ban hunting. Hunting has been curtailed in parts of the refuge to protect black bears and migratory waterfowl, and while some hunters erroneously attribute the restriction to wolf reintroduction, so far as is known, none has gone after the wolves. One wolf drowned after being taken in a leghold trap, but it was not clear whether the trapper intended to take a wolf (illegally) or take a muskrat (legally). Another was shot by a man who claimed he mistook it for a wild dog. And whether the coyotes that have been showing up in greater numbers since 1986 are an act of retribution or just another dumping of exotic pets into the wild, no one is saying.
There is a risk that coyotes will interbreed with wolves, as they have in Texas and in the Great Lakes region. If they do, the mixture of genes could make red wolves ineligible for reintroduction under the Endangered Species Act, for a series of solicitors’ opinions have held that hybrids are not protected by the act. Biologists say hybridization may slip the wolf in some way from the harness of nature and make it less fit. Others feel that, since the coyote arrived by human agency, hybridization would taint the wild wolves with human carelessness and purpose, would take away their wildness—would mean, in spiritual terms, that the wolves were no longer truthful.
The spectral coyote Phillips has caught worries him. In recent weeks, a male wolf, number 505, has been seen in the company of coyotes. If it mated with a coyote, that would mean the Alligator River red wolves had been tainted. The male coyote Phillips has just found is in an area being frequented by a female wolf. So far, all the known matings of wolves and coyotes in the wild have been between male wolves and female coyotes, and it is not clear whether male coyotes and female wolves can mate: it may be that female wolves are too tall or too aggressive for male coyotes. Phillips doubts the female wolf could be ignorant of the coyote’s presence, and he wonders why she didn’t kill it. He wonders what would happen if he took this coyote to a veterinarian and had it cleaned up and cured, sterilized, fitted with a radio collar, and then released it.
He lifts the portable kennel into the back of his truck and drives the ninety miles back to the Roanoke Island Animal Clinic in Manteo. The next morning, Phillips is on the phone with Gary Henry, red-wolf coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Atlanta, to ask for permission to rehabilitate and release the coyote. Says Phillips, “Part of putting a program together here that’s doable means understanding how coyotes and wolves interact. I think there’s going to be a problem with these guys maintaining themselves in the presence of coyotes. We can put out trap lines and give it a good go, but there’s certain things that can’t be done. The service is going to have to accept certain issues we can’t control. I think they may have to accept a certain low level of natural hybridization, and that may not be bad.”
Henry refuses. He doesn’t want to risk the intrusion of coyote genes into the wild-wolf population. It could bring the whole reintroduction effort to a halt. In the end, the question will be moot: despite antibiotics and veterinary care, the coyote will die befor
e the next morning.
The sick, spidery coyote Phillips caught poses an important question: is the world wild enough for wolves? A creature is not a wild creature unless it is being polished by the evolutionary forces that originally designed it. The wolf was shaped by unfenced landscapes, abundant prey, and the freedom to pursue it. We have added roads and radio collars and exotic animals to the forces of evolution. Have we so carved the world into the geometric shapes of possession, liability, privacy, and commercial haste that it cannot abide wolves?
A great deal of effort has gone into the reintroduction of red wolves. In 1967, the red wolf was designated an endangered species. When Curtis Carley became project leader for the red-wolf recovery program in 1974, he assumed that there was a pure red-wolf population in the wild and that recovery would mean protecting it there. But in 1972, Roy McBride and Glynn Riley, having been sent out by the Fish and Wildlife Service to search for red wolves, estimated that most of the survivors were in extreme southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana, and that even they were hybridizing. Once it appeared that there was no population of red wolves free from the threat of hybridization, recalls Carley, “we had to reorganize and rethink it. It was grab what information you can quickly. We didn’t have time for extended study. In July 1975, we got authorization to capture the remaining genetically pure red wolves. Removal was problematic, because we, for all practical purposes, were making this animal extinct in the wild, and that can only be justified if you intend to put them back into the wild.”
They set their traps on the raised-board roads leading to oil platforms and the dredge-spoil cow walks of marshy pastures. The last wild red wolves were taken from a marsh near an industrialized section of Galveston, Texas, in 1980. They were sent to the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington.
The Company of Wolves Page 21
