Part One: A Tumultuous Red Wolf History

It was a fiercely cold evening in January, 2016, not just by coastal North Carolina standards, but actually well below freezing. I stepped out of my car into the icy blackness, leaving my 8-year-old son in the car to stay warm after a long day of fieldwork.

We were out at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), checking our red wolf cameras during the first year of the project, and this was the last camera site on our list. I crunched on frozen gravel over to the tree the camera was mounted on, and knelt down to start the process of changing out batteries and memory cards.

Then suddenly they started: long mournful howls pouring out of a field behind me, sending shivers up and down my spine as I crouched in the darkness. It was the red wolves! The Milltail pack to be precise, one of the most stable and successful packs of red wolves in the history of the federal reintroduction program, which had started at this same refuge back in 1987.

Hearing those wolves with my son (of course I fished him out of the car!) was perhaps the singular moment when I knew we were on the right track with the camera project. I knew then we had to keep going to do everything we could to save one of the world’s most critically endangered species.

At that moment in 2016, although I didn’t realize it at the time due to a media blackout at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the status of their own program, the red wolves were tumbling in a freefall towards re-extinction in the wild.

Red wolves were the original wolf of the Southeast, as seen by early explorers like William Bartram and John James Audubon. But waves of European settlers had wiped the wolves out, shooting them, destroying their habitat, and even driving their primary prey species (white-tailed deer) to the brink of extinction. It is hard to imagine deer being rare now, but such was the case for much of the late 1800s and early 1900s. By around 1900, the wolves were gone from the South Atlantic states like North Carolina, and, by the 1960s, few were even sure the red wolf still existed.

In a fortunate turn of events, the pro-environmental swing in U.S. politics that happened in the 1960s led to the creation of the precursor to the Endangered Species Act, and red wolves were one of the first species listed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent out a team in 1973 to find out if the red wolf could still be saved. And it worked: the field team found the last few red wolves hanging on in the remote marshes of coastal Texas and Louisiana, not ideal wolf habitat but perhaps the last best hiding places from the onslaught of humanity.

Fewer than two dozen wolves were caught and brought into a captive breeding program, and the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. By 1987, however, the then-brave Fish and Wildlife Service was ready to release the first red wolves back into the wild at Alligator River NWR, marking the start of the first successful attempt to reintroduce a large carnivore anywhere in the world.

For about the first 20 years the red wolves did well, not exploding in numbers like the gray wolves in Yellowstone, but climbing to a respectable population size of 120 animals by 2012. At that point there were established packs of red wolves in numerous sites around North Carolina’s remote Albemarle Peninsula, both on public refuges and on private farms.

Issues with coyote hybridization aside, the red wolf program’s future looked bright, but then a tragedy happened – a wealthy businessman who owned a hobby farm in the red wolf recovery area near Pocosin Lakes NWR decided he had had enough of the red wolf recovery program, and he lashed out against the wolves with the first in a long series of energetic misinformation campaigns. The allegation was made in 2013 that the red wolves were eating all of the deer and other game animals, thereby causing “the worst wildlife disaster in the history of North Carolina.”

I knew this wasn’t true - I had led a series of field trips to Alligator River NWR back in the late 2000s as a PhD student, and at dusk we had seen deer in every field on the way to the refuge. Plus, it is no exaggeration to say that Alligator River NWR itself provides one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on the east coast of North America. Fields full of bears and bobcats and wolves in the summer, thousands of tundra swans in the winter, and an enormous diversity of reptiles, amphibians, and songbirds.

Even though it was ludicrous, the misinformation campaign worked, and local landowners and hunters started shooting the wolves again. You see, unlike the situation with the gray wolves at Yellowstone, scientists actually had almost no data concerning what role red wolves would have played in regulating deer, raccoons, and other prey species across their former range. In contrast to Yellowstone, which was the world’s first national park when it was established in 1872, Alligator River NWR was corporate-owned land all the way up to 1984, just before the start of the red wolf program.

As a result, there was no long history of ecological field research like Yellowstone’s. In addition, the red wolves themselves had been eradicated from the forests and wetlands across the region long before Aldo Leopold and others raised the alarm that it might actually be a good idea to save top carnivores like wolves.

With a fortuitous grant (the Christine Stevens Wildlife Award from the Animal Welfare Institute) and the support of our own dedicated private donors, we were able to launch our red wolf field project in summer 2015.

Our primary goal was to treat the claims of wildlife disaster as a testable hypothesis, using a large set of motion-activated trail cameras to document the wildlife at dozens of locations around the red wolf recovery area. Our secondary goal was to start the process of elucidating the actual impacts of the red wolves on southeastern ecosystems.

We started by placing the trail cameras on trees, each at least two kilometers apart, at Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes NWRs, and at a handful of private sites as well with permission from friendly landowners.

We then checked the cameras every 3-4 months for a really long time. Since we hoped to help convince the local human communities that the wolves were not the villainous vacuum cleaners that the anti-wolf crowd had made them out to be, we took the unusual step (for a research project) of trying to put all of our wildlife photos from the project up on the internet for anyone to see (which you can access here), each album representing a different camera site.

We’ve taken every opportunity we could to share this site with people in the red wolf area, and it has close to a million photo views as of late 2023. We also put together several videos about the project to share, including one popular video in 2018 that showed three years of wildlife parading past a single camera at Alligator River in just 15 minutes, and “Red Wolves Last Stronghold”, a video about the project and what we were seeing.

Fast forward seven years, and we were more than ready to analyze the results. Read part two of this series here to see what they are.