The Company of Wolves (27 page)

The grave threat is that eventually there will be broad areas without wolves that will serve as barriers to the dispersal of wolves and the sharing of genes. Even in Canada and Russia, where the largest expanses of healthy habitat remain, there is some threat that ultimately wolf populations will grow isolated from one another, broken into biological islands, and winnowed down to replicas of Isle Royale. The last wolf won’t succumb to a bullet. It will weaken from the slow but inexorable loss of genes. It will die of uniformity.

If the wolves vanish from Isle Royale, Peterson unhesitatingly believes they should be reintroduced. Not everyone agrees. Says Peterson, “People say they got here on their own, they went extinct on their own, let ’em come back on their own. I’ve had a lot of trouble with the word ‘natural,’ as in ‘Let them come back naturally,’ lately. Their chances are affected by the fact that there are a hundred thousand people on the north shore of Lake Superior.”

This is a difficult issue for the Park Service. For several decades, Isle Royale was the only United States national park outside Alaska to have wolves, and Isle Royale has become known especially for its predators. The Park Service has viewed the fact that the wolves came
on their own as a key part of the story, and they have kept human contact with wolves to a minimum. Says Peterson, “For the Park Service, I think it has been an important place, because it is sort of the ideal of what parks aspired to be ecologically. For a lot of people, just knowing wolves are out here that aren’t being heavily manipulated is an important thing. Isle Royale seemed to be the best possible example of letting natural management work things out.”

But there is a second question operating here. One must ask not just what the wolves need, not just what the Endangered Species Act seems to demand, but what the land requires. Should we save the species for the sake of keeping types of animals? Or should we save the function they perform as part of the fabric of life? Peterson believes we ought to be looking at the ecosystem, not just one of the parts. “I think it would be irresponsible not to bring wolves back. We’ve got so many other parks with unrestrained ungulates. We know what’s going to happen. Here, the moose will continue to eat the place to pieces. The balsam fir will disappear. This place is renowned for being a park with predators. Without predators it would be known as a place run down by moose.”

Deciding on reintroduction would be very difficult for the Park Service. “If we had to put wolves back here, we’d have to decide what brand to use,” says Peterson. Where would the new ones come from? Since genetic analysis has suggested that Isle Royale wolves are less closely related to those on the mainland shores than they are to wolves from much farther north, there is some question about whose genes these are.

One might simply reintroduce wolves from several different locations, but the individuals that prosper might do so because of momentary advantages, not because of long-term fitness. “I would tend to do it the cheap way,” Peterson says. “Take some wolves from Minnesota that are due to be euthanized because of cattle depredation, examine them for disease, vaccinate them, and get them over here quick. They wouldn’t necessarily be moose killers, but some would probably make it.”

If the wolves vanish, the National Park Service may not have the luxury of depending on “natural management.” Faced with the disappearance of balsam fir and perhaps moose, and who knows what
else in the chain of consequence, they will have to make a decision. “We’ve got to decide what species we want here and what species we don’t,” says Peterson, “and that decision hasn’t been made at Isle Royale before. There isn’t a tradition of mulling these things over. Those easy days are gone.”

The easy days are gone for wolves in general. As human activity continues to spill out into wolf habitat, wolves are increasingly going to be confined in biological islands. The reintroduced populations of red wolf in the American South are island populations that are likely to require a support program of captive breeding to avoid genetic depression. Reintroduction of Mexican wolf in the Southwest is likely to require similar support.

At Isle Royale, Peterson is anything but confident. “If I were a betting person, I wouldn’t bet on this one,” he says. “They are so flat; they’re not doing what wolves do. One pair hasn’t reproduced since 1988, but they’ve got eight hundred moose in their territory. All the experts are saying, ‘We told you so.’ It would be a big thing if they turned around.” It would show that, at least here, a small population is viable.

At the Rock Harbor dock on Isle Royale, a ranger naturalist is giving a nature talk to visitors who are awaiting the arrival of the afternoon ferry to Copper Harbor. It has been raining, and the campers on the island are gloomy about prospects for summer ease on the long Fourth of July weekend. The talk, too, is gloomy: the ranger is explaining the decline of Isle Royale’s wolves. Two young children suspend between them, like a clothesline, the sagging skin of an Isle Royale wolf. They are oddly unenthusiastic about the honor; perhaps it is a comment on the intensity of life in a living wolf that this relic seems not to elicit much excitement. An adult camper has asked why the Park Service doesn’t deal with the population crash by transplanting more wolves to the island. The ranger tells them that wolves are territorial and that the new wolves might not get along with the existing wolves: “They might kill each other.” Perhaps more important, she adds, “The Park Service has a hands-off policy,” feeling that “natural management” or management without human intervention is the best course because it offers the best chances for authenticity and for health. Besides, the research question
of what is happening to the wolves couldn’t be answered if new wolves were brought onto the island.

Off in his cabin, Peterson ponders the likelihood of solving that question. Outside the cabin, the rain continues to fall. The ragged mist of clouds hugs the lakeshore. Raindrops slip quietly from the trees into the duff of the forest floor. It is achingly silent.

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.”