The Company of Wolves (28 page)

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 before 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.

There was concern about the purity of the captives. Says Carley, “We caught four hundred canines down there from late 1974 to mid-1980. The majority of those were coyotes or obvious hybrids.” He looked also at animals already in zoo collections which curators touted as additional candidates for the captive-breeding effort. Many of these animals, Carley saw, were hybrids. To protect the breeding
stock, Carley eliminated all but forty-three of the purported red wolves. As he and his staff continued to breed the forty-three and look at the offspring of each pairing, they decided that most of them were coyote crosses, too. They eliminated all but seventeen individuals, which were deemed to be pure red wolves. Three of these never bred, so today the entire captive-breeding population of red wolves descends from fourteen individuals.

For years, all the known red wolves in the world were in captivity. And most of them were at the Point Defiance Zoo’s Graham, Washington, red-wolf breeding facility, far from the zoo in Tacoma. The facility is on the grounds of a mink farm owned by Dale Peterson, a member of the Point Defiance Zoological Society’s mammal committee, which has been interested in the plight of red wolves since the 1960s. Peterson’s mink farm consists of several acres of sheds with rows of small elevated pens for mink, surrounded by a dense forest of fir and spruce. The breeding facility, behind a high chainlink fence and locked gates, consists of eighteen pens, some a hundred feet square, others fifty by a hundred feet, arranged in a five-acre rectangle. These pens have fir, spruce, oak, and alder trees in them, and most have a dense growth of grass and shrubs which provide cover for the animals. Here and there, the wolves have dug holes, and from time to time they unearth strange objects. Says Sue Behrns, caretaker of the facility, “Years ago, Purina owned the mink ranch. Somebody would take stuff out and dump it in the woods. When they put the pens in, some of it got buried. Sometimes, the wolves dig up old equipment, a wrench, part of a machine.”

Such encounters are only part of the oddness of the scene. It’s a little strange to think of this almost tropical wolf breeding in the somber, rainy gray of the Northwest. But, Behrns explains, the natural history of mammals these days often takes unnatural turns. Whether the turns have altered the wolves to the point where they can no longer be considered wild is the key question.

Behrns has bright-blue eyes, sun-reddened cheeks, and an easy, melodic laugh. As she drives up to the cyclone fence that surrounds the facility, the wolves howl spontaneously. But as soon as the visitors get out of their vehicles, the wolves dash to the backs of their pens or go into their dens, which are concrete septic tanks left standing above ground. They trot nervously along the back fences, and squat
to urinate timidly. Some lower their bodies and walk in a sort of slow crouch, their heads and necks low, their ears flattened out. It’s hard to say whether that is the nature of the animal or part of the conditioning of the program. From the start, the managers wanted to keep them shy of humans. Says Carley, “Every contact that a wolf has with a human should be a bad experience. You draw blood, give ’em shots, get in, get out. It’s for the benefit of the wolf. They shouldn’t ever want to get near a human being.”