Conservation of wolves

DEFINITION: Predatory, carnivorous mammals of the family Canidae

The gray wolf, once the most widely distributed mammal in North America, inhabits a fraction of its former range, and the red wolf is the world’s most endangered wild canid. Widespread habitat destruction, human infiltration, and predator-control programs resulted in considerable wolf population decline in the early twentieth century. Since the 1970s, however, recovery programs, combined with legislative changes, have allowed some wolf populations to increase.

Wolves, the largest members of the dog family (Canidae), were once abundant throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Gray wolves are the most abundant wolves, with two species in North America: the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and the subspecies red wolf (Canis rufus). Both vary in color, ranging from gray to brown and black, with some gray wolves even being white. Although red wolves generally have a characteristic reddish tint to their fur, they are mostly brown. As the most dominant large carnivores in North America, wolves play an important role as predators in the ecosystems of which they are a part; they are considered a keystone species. Wolves generally hunt in packs and feed on large animals such as deer and elk; one of their primary functions within ecosystems is to remove sick or injured animals from these prey populations.

Although wolves rarely attack humans, they are widely regarded as being among the world’s fiercest animals. A decline in native prey species for wolves occurred concurrently with an increase in domestic livestock animals during the settlement of North America, and over time, because of the tendency of wolves to prey on livestock, government agencies began to initiate intensive predator-control programs aimed at reducing wolf populations. In the lower forty-eight US states, except Minnesota, gray wolves were hunted nearly to extinction and ultimately listed as endangered. Only several hundred gray wolves in Minnesota, an isolated wolf on Michigan’s Isle Royale, and a few red wolves remained. In 1926, the last gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed during a time when Congress sanctioned predator control. Red wolf populations were decimated through loss and predator control; the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the subspecies extinct in the wild in 1980.

Shifts in land use and legislative changes eventually slowed declines in wolf populations in the United States. Recovery programs, natural migration of wolves from Canada, protection from unregulated hunting, and improved prey habitats resulted in growth in the gray wolf population in the lower forty-eight states to numbers exceeding five thousand by the early years of the twenty-first century. The National Park Service ended systematic killing of predators in 1933. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, and in 1980 the US Fish and Wildlife Service established the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan. In 1995, after an absence of nearly seventy years, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. Because of the success of recovery programs, in 1996 the International Union for Conservation of Nature reduced the status of the gray wolf on the organization’s Red List to that of “least concern”; it had maintained that status as of 2024.

In 1970, a captive-breeding program was established to increase the red wolf population and reintroduce the subspecies to the wild; however, by 2017, the US Fish & Wildlife Service reported that the red wolf population in the wild was estimated to be between forty-five and sixty, with approximately two hundred in captive breeding areas. In 2020, wolves were prematurely removed from the protections of the Endangered Species Act in most states, but in February 2022, a judge overruled this change. In March 2023, the total population of wolves in the US was estimated between 14,000 and 18,000. Most lived in Alaska. Restoration efforts for red wolves have included programs at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina and at other national wildlife refuges.

Bibliography

Busch, Robert H. The Wolf Almanac: A Celebration of Wolves and Their World. 3rd ed. Lyons Press, 2018.

Fears, Darryl. "Can Red Wolves Be Saved Again?" The Washington Post, 5 Feb. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/02/05/feature/red-wolves-may-be-going-extinct-in-the-wild-again/. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Mech, L. David, and Luigi Boitani, editors. Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. U of Chicago P, 2007.

Peterson, Rolf. The Wolves of Isle Royale: A Broken Balance. 1995. U of Michigan P, 2007.

"Red Wolf Recovery." US Fish and Wildlife Service, 13 May 2022, www.fws.gov/redwolf/. Accessed 23 July 2024.