A captive Mexican wolf rests in the shade. Photo: Chris Clarke One day in 1922, rancher Pauline Watson found something surprising on a trap line shed set for coyotes near her ranch in the Mojave Deserts New York Mountains. It wasnt a coyote. At 100 pounds, it was twice as heavy as the best-fed Mojave Desert coyotes. This animal was too big, too robust, covered in fluffy whitish fur with a darker widows peak, like an Alaskan husky.
It was the last wolf ever trapped in the Mojave Desert. Though Watsons daughter later said her mother had no desire to kill the wolf, it died on its way to a life of confinement as a planned zoo exhibit in Barstow.
For nearly a century, it was generally assumed that the wolf was a vagrant male from somewhere well to the north, a southern Rocky Mountain gray wolf. Recent genetic testing, though, indicates that it was more likely a Mexican wolf, a member of the most-endangered group of wolves in the world. If thats confirmed by further testing, itll raise a question: why not bring the Mexican wolf back to the Mojave Desert?
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The Mexican wolf, Canis lupus baileyi, is North Americas smallest native wolf - and likely the oldest group of modern wolves to colonize the Americas. Until the end of the 19th century, the Mexican wolf - the original Lobo - ranged the pinyon-juniper forests of the Southwest, feeding primarily on the elk, deer, and bighorn sheep that thrived in the deserts so-called sky islands.
In the first years of the 20th Century, Lobo became the Southwests Public Enemy Number One. Thats because along with those big wild deer and bighorns, along with occasional smaller mammals, Mexican wolves found themselves in a landscape suddenly overflowing with domestic livestock: cattle and (imported, non-bighorn) sheep. Starting around 1915 in the U.S., and in the 1930s in Mexico, ranching interests conducted a campaign of all-out extermination against the Mexican wolf, with traps, guns, and poisons - including the notorious broad-spectrum bait poison, sodium fluoroacetate a.k.a. Compound 1080. Wolf hunters also located active dens, shot any local adults, then dug up the pups for killing through one unpleasant means or another.
The wolf eradication campaign, which was supported by scientists at the highest levels of federal land management agencies, was very nearly successful. By 1976, when the subspecies was listed as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the wolves were gone from the three southwestern states that had made up the core of their northern range: Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The U.S. and Mexican governments conceived a plan to capture every last remaining wild Mexican wolf in the world to form the base of a captive breeding program. By 1980, theyd found five: four males and a female.
By some measures, that breeding program has been a success. By 2014, there were at least 109 Mexican wolves living in the wild in New Mexico and Arizona; during that year, officials with the Mexican wildlife agency National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) announced a healthy litter of five pups had been born to wolves reintroduced to the Sierra Madre Occidental in late 2013.
But these wolves of the southwestern forests are by no means out of the woods. The breeding and reintroduction program has been met with intense opposition from the ranching industry and its supporters, and poaching is a serious problem in wolf territory in the United States. That poaching is likely fueled by a campaign of fear. Rumors running through rural communities of aggressive Mexican wolf-coyote hybrids, or of rampaging full-blooded Mexican wolves attacking people, driving at least one rural community to build chicken-coop-like wolf-proof bus shelters for local school kids. (There are no records of attacks by reintroduced Mexican wolves on humans; in fact, wolves that dont show fear of humans are ineligible for release under the program rules. And as far as biologists can tell, Mexican wolves are far more likely to kill and eat coyotes than to mate with them.)
Ironically, the livestock ranchers seek to protect are far more dangerous to people than Mexican wolves seem to be. Between 1993 and 2004, according to New Mexicos state government, 43 New Mexicans were killed by horses, nine by cattle and two by domestic sheep. Three were mauled to death by domestic dogs. Which means that Mexican wolves actually eat animals that pose real threats to humans, at least in New Mexico.
At any rate, despite the facts countering the overblown anti-wolf rhetoric, and the fact that Mexican wolves are responsible for a vanishingly small percentage of livestock losses where theyve been introduced, illegal shooting of reintroduced wolves and their progeny threatens to undo the wolves recovery.
Biologists and wildlife managers charged with taking care of a threatened, dwindling wildlife population will often hedge their bets by keeping their precious metaphorical eggs in several baskets. Mexican wolves whose recovery is currently being threatened by misunderstandings and social media-driven fear could definitely use another basket or two. They need someplace with the kind of desert conifer forest habitat they prefer, with abundant potential prey, in a place where theyre likely to be left alone.
Someplace like the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve, perhaps.
Captive Mexican wolf | Photo: Bob, some rights reserved
It was the killing of a Mexican wolf pack that gave rise to one of the most enduring passages in American environmental writing. Biologist Aldo Leopold, in the field in the mountains of New Mexico during the first decades of the 20th Century, didnt know the day would change him for good.
We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast a
