Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Robert Wayne and his colleagues have been approaching the debate by looking not at fossil DNA but at the comparative genetics of existing animals. In 2011 Wayne and no fewer than eighteen coauthors published the results of their most recent work on the topic, an article titled “A Genome-Wide Perspective on the Evolutionary History of Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids.” It directly challenges the conclusions and policy of the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the most thorough genetic study so far, the researchers tested genetic markers from 208 gray wolves, 12 red wolves, and 57 coyotes. In contrast to Fish and Wildlife’s conclusions, Wayne found no evidence that eastern and red wolves share a common lineage. Great Lakes wolves, he insists, are essentially a population of gray wolves with about 20 percent coyote admixture, and that admixture goes up to as much as 40 percent coyote in the wolf population of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. The hybridization events this study pinpoints are decidedly not the result of today’s coyote manifest destiny. Using molecular clock dating strategies, the researchers determined that coyote hybridization with gray wolves in the Great Lakes region initially began between 550 and 950 years ago.

  As for the red wolves the federal government has lavished so much effort on recovering? “Structure analysis consistently assigned 80 percent of the red wolf genome to coyotes,” the geneticists argued. Large blocks of coyote DNA in red wolf populations imply to Wayne and his colleagues that the creature we now call the “red wolf” is not an ancient American wolf surviving into our time but a hybrid that originated when coyotes began to interbreed with southern gray wolves at some point between 290 and 430 years ago. “We find a coyote-wolf admixture zone that stretched from southern Texas to the Great Lakes and the northeastern U.S. This admixture zone is the largest in area ever described for a terrestrial vertebrate.”

  Wayne links the dates for these hybridization events to humans, specifically the arrival of Europeans and the changes that followed them. But it doesn’t take much of a historian to realize that virtually none of the geneticists’ molecular clock dates could possibly reference European history in the Americas. No Europeans were altering landscapes or killing wolves in the Great Lakes area in the 1460s, let alone in 1060. As for the South, only Wayne’s event date of 290 years in the past (i.e., 1721) allows for any European influence at all. The southern colonies with red wolves closest to a potential coyote invasion would have been Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana was not settled by the French until 1714 (in Natchitoches) and 1718 (New Orleans), and Texas did not acquire a permanent settlement until Spain founded San Antonio in 1718. Any appreciable European effect on predators in those areas wouldn’t have occurred until decades after 1721 from humble beginnings like these.

  However, one series of events in the South could provide a historical story to support the time frame in Wayne’s molecular clock. The actors were not Europeans, though, except indirectly. Indians had invented agriculture long before Europeans arrived. Native crop growing reached its heyday in the South in the form of the so-called mound-building Mississippian Culture 1,000 years ago. A large agricultural Indian population that also regularly burned the woods subsequently transformed the South, creating a more open setting that featured bluestem-grass prairies in many areas.

  Then around 1500, two additional transformations took place. The first European explorers traveled through dense Indian settlements, and in their wake Old World diseases unknown in the Americas swept through the Indian villages, killing millions. That occurred simultaneously with another change, the onset of the three-century weather anomaly known as the Little Ice Age. It produced cooler, wetter conditions that grew such bumper crops of grasses on the Great Plains that swollen bison herds began colonizing in all directions, including into the South. Although not a single early European had seen buffalo in the South earlier, beginning around 1650 and lasting until at least 1725, European travelers reported significant numbers of bison along the woodland trails and in the bluestem prairies of the Deep South.

  Early in the 1700s the Indian population began to build up again, European settlers arrived, and the bison herds began falling back westward.

  I suspect Wayne’s coyote–red wolf hybridization in the South 290 to 430 years ago refers to this bison event. Coyotes must have followed bison from the plains into the Southeast 350 years ago, and over their seventy-five-year stay, a good number of stilt-legged red wolves and sharp-nosed coyotes formed pair-bonds and had litters. By the time coyotes retreated west with buffalo, they’d left a genetic imprint on the canids of the Southeast. The red wolf had became the coyote-like wolf the naturalists would describe a hundred years later. Perhaps some different but corresponding Indian-bison event of 550 to 950 years ago took coyotes into the Great Lakes country and eastward, with similar results.

  I did not know until many decades later that as an adolescent growing up in Louisiana in the early 1960s, I had been downstream of a biological tsunami sweeping on padded feet in the direction of the Mississippi River. I had gotten a confusing glimpse of a once-in-several-hundred-years phenomenon. It was sort of like being there to witness the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa but not grasping the bigger picture of plate tectonics. What some canid biologists now describe as one of the most extensive “hybrid swarms” of animals in the North American historical record began moving eastward from the edge of the Great Plains in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I got to witness it.

  The “hybrid swarm” in question consisted of wild canids that were partly coyote and partly wolf. The wolf was of course the red wolf. As for the geographic source of the hybridization act, it appears to have been the very Edwards Plateau where proud Texans had all but eradicated predators in the decades from the 1920s through the 1940s. This Texas Hill Country had long been famous for preserving an interesting and unusual intermixed ecology. The hilltops there were grassy and studded with cactus and junipers typical of the edge of the Great Plains. But the river valleys presented a relict southern woodlands setting that even included bald cypress trees.

  No one knows just how long western coyotes and southeastern red wolves had ranged through this intermingled West-South setting. But in the 1920s the Biological Survey, with typical fervor for the job, killed 2,209 red wolves in the Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas region. When Texas’s version of Animal Damage Control then subjected the Hill Country to a predator scorched-earth campaign, the pressures led the remaining wolves to hybridize with coyotes. Then, in a move straight out of the main plotline of the coyote’s twentieth-century story, unceasing human harassment in one place led this “swarm” to colonize another. The direction of least resistance was eastward, where the disappearance of the southern wolf population was creating a vacuum that hybrids and coyotes rushed to fill.

  Coyote–red wolf hybrid, Louisiana, 1960s. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  By the time I was sitting in my tree, open-mouthed at the leggy canid below me, biologists were daily becoming more aware of the eastward advance of hordes of hybrids and coyotes across the mid-South. Ron Nowak, growing up in New Orleans, was still a decade from writing his dissertation and becoming the Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species guru. But he was already interested in red wolves and became alarmed enough at stories of the coyote invasion that—moved in part by letters like mine—he actually visited my home parish, Caddo, and other northwestern Louisiana sites in 1965 and 1966, looking for remnant populations of red wolves. In the two years before red wolves were first listed as an endangered species, he found only hybrids and coyotes. As a doctoral student, in 1970 Nowak figured there were no more than three hundred true red wolves left wild anywhere on the continent, with genetic swamping as a result of advancing coyotes and hybrids now the primary threat to their existence.

  In the lead-up to passing the Endangered Species Act of 1973, biologists trying to protect red wolves as a species dreamed up some wildly impractical schemes to “save” them from coyotes. One that ought to resonate in our age was a canid-proof fence they hoped to build north-south through East T
exas and Oklahoma! When that seemed too daft to implement, the Fish and Wildlife Service brainstormed a canid-free “buffer zone” reminiscent of the infamous “fur desert” the Hudson’s Bay Company had attempted to create 150 years earlier to keep American trappers out of the Rockies. Biologists actually planned to kill every coyote and hybrid entering the buffer zone in order to protect the purity of red wolves beyond the line.

  In truth, without a sound grasp of canid evolution or any good genetic science to back up their hunches, 1970s biologists working on the coyote-wolf hybridization phenomenon in the South (and, in the same decades, far to the north in Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Canada) were mostly shooting from the hip. When the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, Fish and Wildlife appointed Curtis Carley the first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program. Working primarily in southeastern Texas and heroically trying to untangle, among the canids he trapped, which was a wolf, which was a hybrid, and which was a coyote, Carley developed a technique using morphology measurements and recorded howl profiles. It wasn’t quite Crania Americana, Samuel Morton’s mid-nineteenth-century treatise on his human-skull studies using buckshot to determine cranial capacity for the various “races,” but it was close enough.

  Carley decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf’s purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough “pure” animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again.

  How difficult was that? After establishing a certified captive breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself.

  In 1980 the Fish and Wildlife Service proclaimed the red wolf to be extinct in the wild. Out of some four-hundred-plus canids its trappers had captured in Louisiana and East Texas, the program had recognized only forty-three as real red wolves and designated just seventeen as breeding candidates, three of which were unable to have pups. So with just 14 animals selected out of at least 450, the United States’ federal wildlife agency began to breed red wolves in captivity. All those other captured canids deemed to have been betrayed by the sin of contaminating coyote blood? The team destroyed them, every one.

  A Louisiana anticoyote program resulted in scenes like this in the 1970s. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  In the full light of day half a century later, this sounds like a wild canid version of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, designed to keep the American population untainted by genetic undesirables, with Curtis Carley recalling Madison Grant, the early-twentieth-century conservationist and eugenicist who urged genetic purity in the name of a larger good. Now the task for this increasingly Dr. Strangelove–like program became finding suitable locations for releasing red wolves—locations where, of course, horny coyotes could not get at them.

  In Canada, New England, and the northern states, the battle for canid purity hasn’t been fought at the same level of intensity as in the South, although the new “canis soup” did pretty much squash plans to launch recovery of endangered wolves in the Northeast. Both in ancient times and in the last century, coyotes certainly interbred with the Great Lakes’ wolves, whose genome now seems about 20 percent coyote. They’ve contributed considerably more genetics to the eastern wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park, where mingled packs of wolves, hybrids, and coyotes are more common every day as members of a newly formed “coywolf” population. Farther south, as coyotes have spread across states like North Carolina, it has taken heroic efforts of every kind to beat coyotes back from the jealously guarded, endangered red wolves finally released into the wild in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in 1987.

  The Red Wolf Recovery Program, to its dismay, has gotten little help from the red wolves themselves in what it has called “hand-to-hand combat against the invading coyotes.” Because red wolves so readily mate and create pair-bonds with coyotes, the program had to abandon the national park site in 1998 and pull back its recovery efforts from the Alligator River refuge to the more defendable Albemarle Peninsula of the Atlantic shore. It also—obsessively—had to find and destroy hybrids. According to David Rabon, the current coordinator of Red Wolf Recovery, in the mid-1990s biologists realized to their horror that they had missed by two generations a single hybrid pair-bond between a male coyote and a female red wolf. Following existing protocols would have compelled them to destroy the entire wild red wolf population of nearly one hundred animals. Sanity finally prevailed, but this story puts to the test our own conceits about species “purity” and even what we thought we knew about why hybridization happens at all.

  For example, why is it that coyotes have made time with wolves in the Northeast and South, yet we preserve no record, from either history or the present, of coyotes and gray wolves hybridizing in the West? The size difference is the answer, some biologists have told me. Yet Mexican gray wolves are also small, the size of red wolves or Algonquin wolves, but scant or no record of hybridizing between coyotes and Mexican wolves exists. Some suggest that hybridization occurs when humans have driven one of the species to rarity. Yet didn’t we extirpate gray wolves in the West a century ago, affording all kinds of last opportunities for wolf-coyote hybridizing? We have records of the last gray wolves mating with dogs but not coyotes.

  And if rarity of potential mates really is the sole explanation, why do today’s red wolves, which the Red Wolf Recovery team has with much effort maniacally winnowed of coyote genetics, have to be pried loose from coyote mates so often? The North Carolina program has actually had to resort to capture and sterilization of the coyote population bordering the refuge in hopes that sterile “space holder” coyotes will create buffer territories against fertile newcomers that might prove irresistible to red wolves. With something like desperation, biologists have looked for natural “behavioral reproductive barriers” between coyotes and red wolves. They’re still looking. Something strange is going on here, and it looks very much as if the answer leads us back to the evolutionary lineage of America’s canids. What we are seeing happen before our eyes in the eastern United States appears to be something very much like canid behavioral recognition of evolutionary kinship.

  The geneticists are offering us two different explanations of what’s happening. In their 2011 paper on enigmatic wolflike canids, my Yellowstone wolf-watching companion Robert Wayne and his coauthors argue that genetics show neither a distinctive red wolf genome nor any proof that wolves from Canada and the South were originally related to one another. Further, they argue, Canadian and southern wolves were all originally gray wolves, not distinctive American wolves related through deep evolution to coyotes. Eastern and southern wolves, they insist, are related to coyotes now because of hybridization events, in the deep past and recently.

  The other argument, also based in genetics, offers up a different scenario. Its advocates, a group of Canadian researchers led by Paul Wilson, contend they can find no gray wolf mitochondrial DNA in either eastern wolves or red wolves and that those animals have coyote-like genetics not due to ancient hybridization but because they have come out of a purely North American lineage of canids that split from co
yotes only some 300,000 years ago. Wolf guru David Mech, who argues that the Great Lakes wolves he’s studied are actually gray and eastern wolf hybrids, seconds their ideas.

  Mech also points out that killing coyotes, not mating with them, is intrinsic to gray wolf behavior. Julie Young of the Predator Research Facility even told me that in experiments there, coyotes inseminated with gray wolf sperm actually killed the puppies they bore. The Canadian argument thus offers up an evolutionary explanation for why coyotes and eastern-southern wolves are so readily hybridizing in our time. Canis lycaon and Canis rufus breed and form packs with coyotes because they “recognize” one another. Coyotes and gray wolves do not.

  Robert Wayne, however, continues to insist that his own study has settled the debate with its different scenario. After the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 followed the outlines of the Canadian argument with its monograph An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves, in 2014 Wayne persuaded the agency to halt its wolf programs to take account of the “unresolved science.”

  Regardless of who ultimately wins this scientific debate, there is a natural and logical solution to the penchant eastern and southern wolves and coyotes have for one another. The animals certainly know what that is. I respect the heroic efforts of so many to preserve the red wolf, but if a single coyote getting lucky with a red wolf—in a North America now blanketed with coyotes—threatens the whole show, the work of red wolf recovery simply seems too intrusive and heavy-handed to be lasting.

  Besides, as has happened so often and with so many species in the past, genetic purity may be just a momentary accident of time and geography anyway. Both evolution and logic seem to point to a different solution. Why don’t we just let coyotes and red wolves do what coyotes and Algonquin wolves are doing already, what comes naturally to them as bequeathed by the Coyote god of North American canid evolution? Let them form pair-bonds, raise litters, and take joy in their creation of a new (or maybe not so new) American animal better adapted to modern conditions. They’ll return wild canids to continental ecology, and we’ll take joy in having them among us. We’ll eventually sort out what to call them, and with their coyote genes, we won’t need to continue protecting them so religiously. Then we can just value them as the remarkable new outcome of North America’s long, unique canid history.