Endangered Species Day: Honoring Red Wolves
Last Friday, May 20th was Endangered Species Day. A day to honor our wild, interwoven family and come to know who is here so we can work to protect the vulnerable before they become nothing but memories. I imagine that endangered or threatened species like red wolves (pictured here) would not want us to despair too long about their dwindling numbers, but instead to remember and feel the beauty of our interconnection.
Red wolves once ranged across the southeastern United States, but years of hunting and habitat loss drove this small wolf species to the brink of extinction. There were only fourteen left in the wild by 1970. In order to save the species from extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured the fourteen remaining red wolves in the wild and initiated an ambitious captive-breeding program to keep them alive. Those original wolves are the ancestors of the wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center, a wildlife organization I’ve worked in partnership with for the last eight years.
The center’s mission is “to protect and preserve wolves in North America through science-based education, advocacy, and participation in the federal recovery and release programs for two critically endangered wolf species— the Mexican gray wolf and the red wolf.” Wolves live in large, wild enclosures on the Wolf Conservation Center’s twenty-eight acres. The center’s setup isn’t ideal — wolves shouldn’t have to be in enclosures at all — and at first, it seriously depressed me. But we’ve brought ourselves and our environment to a place where we have to intervene and reserve protected spaces for species to survive.
Red Wolves are the first animals to be successfully reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild, however, all but one of the wolves released by the Wolf Conservation Center into their “protected” habitat in the Albemarle Peninsula in North Carolina were killed by poachers. Once a growing population of over one hundred, the red wolves in the wild are now down to a population of about twenty-four.
When I bring groups to the Wolf Conservation Center, we greet all the wolves with a howl to let them know we’re there, sharing their space. When the fifty-one wolves reply, their primal, haunting howls stir the depths of our animal bodies and move most of us to tears. Somewhere inside, we know that these keystone predators are missing from our inner and outer landscapes.
The reality of impermanence can help us cherish the now before it slips away. Life asks us to awaken to the beauty of the moment, but also not to forget who and what we have lost. If we are moved enough by the magic and reality of our coexistence, we might be compelled into action before it’s too late, becoming part of their survival.