Welcome Ryan, our fall red wolf caretaker intern!

Please help us welcome our most recent addition to the Red Wolf Recovery Program, Ryan!  He will be the red wolf caretaker intern at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) for September through December 2014. 

Ryan was born and raised in Alton, Illinois, which is located just across the Mississippi River in the suburbs of Saint Louis, Missouri. He graduated in May 2013 from Southeast Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Wildlife/Conservation Biology and a minor in Environmental Science. After graduation, he worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation as a fisheries field biologist traveling statewide sampling various fish species and performing water quality surveys in streams and rivers. He also was an intern at The Wilds in Ohio, and participated in their Eastern Hellbender reintroduction program.  At The Wilds, he also assisted with herpetology and carnivore field and research work. Most recently, he has been interning at Pocosin Lakes NWR since April before joining us this month.

Ryan has always enjoyed being outside and seeing what nature has to offer. In his spare time he likes to hike, fish, camp, travel, attend sporting events (especially St. Louis Cardinals baseball), and spend time with family and friends. His goal is to become a wildlife biologist or zookeeper working with carnivores, fish, or herpetology. He hopes to eventually attend graduate school to get his M.Sc. degree and further a career in wildlife research and conservation. He is passionate about working with endangered and threatened species, especially carnivores.

We’re lucky to have Ryan as he brings a wonderful skill set of animal handling skills, knowledge of carnivore biology, and passion to protect and conserved imperiled species to this position. 

Welcome Ryan!

RWSSP of the month—Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park

The Red Wolf Species Survival Plan (RWSSP) is the foundation of the Red Wolf Recovery Program. To let people know what’s happening throughout the program through, we are continuing to feature different RWSSP locations.   

The RWSSP of the month is Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park (Homosassa, Florida). As part of Florida’s State Park System, this area has been attracting people since the early 1900s, when passengers on the train tourists stopped to rest at the spring.  Located just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, it is showcases native Florida wildlife, including manatees, black bears, bobcats, white-tailed deer, American alligators, American crocodiles, and river otters. The new Homosassa River Walk and Manatee Observation area encompasses an elevated boardwalk that starts at the park entrance, surrounds the main spring and continues to the Fish Bowl underwater observatory, where visitors can see one of the four resident manatees.

Resident manatee. Photo: B. Bartel/USFWS.

A new Shorebird Aviary at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park allows visitors to enter the enclosed viewing area for close-up views of the birds and great opportunities for nature photography.

Birds viewable from the Shorebird Aviary. Photos: B. Bartel/USFWS.

Last month at the 2013 RWSSP meeting, we had a wonderful tour of the facilities (thank you Susan and staff!) and also got to see the red wolves. The park is home to three male red wolves, which came from Brevard Zoo (Melbourne, Florida) in November 2008.

Red wolf. Photo: B. Bartel/USFWS.

Please visit their website, Friends group website, or Facebook page for more information! We are grateful to these new partners for their continued role in the Red Wolf Species Survival Plan and send a thank you to all their staff for generously hosting our annual meeting this year.

Please welcome Lizzy, the new Red Wolf Recovery Program intern!

Please help us welcome our most recent addition to the Red Wolf Recovery Program, Lizzy!  She is the red wolf caretaker intern from April through August 2013. 

Lizzy grew up in Herndon, Virginia and attended the University of Delaware, where she double majored in Wildlife Conservation and Agriculture & Natural Resources. Since she was a kid, animals and nature have always been her two biggest passions, due in part of the fact she was in Girl Scouts for 13 years. Lizzy has always known that working with wolves would be her end goal, and she is very happy that she’s received the opportunity to make this dream into reality.

We are very lucky to have her part of the program, as she brings lots of experience from a variety of different wildlife jobs, beginning with teaching hunter education for Vermont Fish & Wildlife, teaching animal education at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado, and husbandry for a wide variety of animals at Plumpton Park Zoo in Maryland. Lizzy began working with wolves at the Wolf Education and Research Center in Idaho, where she cared for wolves and participated in visitor education programs. Now, Lizzy is continuing this path with the Red Wolf Recovery Program.

Photo credit: USFWS/R. Nordsven

Long term, Lizzy’s goal is to continue working with wolves and become a wolf biologist. Living out a childhood dream has already been an incredible experience for her, and she’s sure it can only get better from here. She is still figuring out the next role after this position, but we’re excited to have her here now, and you can guarantee her future will have something to do with animals and improving their world.

Welcome Lizzy!

Red Wolf Species Survival Plan

What is a Species Survival Plan (SSP?). The American SSP program was developed in 1981 by the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The mission of an AZA SSP Program is to cooperatively manage specific, and typically threatened or endangered, species population within AZA-accredited Zoos and Aquariums, and other AZA conservation partners including Certified Related Facilities, and Approved Non-Member Participants.

SSP programs focus on animals that are in danger of extinction in the wild, these captive breeding programs may be their only chance to survive; these programs also help maintain healthy and genetically diverse animal populations within the zoo community. SSP programs significantly contribute to field conservation efforts, species recovery, veterinary care for wildlife disease issues, and establishment of assurance populations. There are currently more than 300 SSP Programs, each managed by their corresponding Taxon Advisory Groups, within AZA. For each species, a comprehensive population Studbook and a Breeding and Transfer Plan are developed which identifies population management goals and recommendations to ensure the sustainability of a healthy, genetically diverse, and demographically varied AZA population.

Red Wolves were nearing extinction in the wild when the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington established a captive-breeding program in association with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The Point Defiance Zoo developed husbandry techniques, recruited four additional cooperating institutions to house wolves in the captive program and received AZA approval for a Red Wolf SSP program in 1984. By 1984, the captive population numbered 63 individuals and was growing, largely through the coordinated efforts of the Point Defiance Zoo and Red Wolf SSP cooperators.  These efforts made the release of red wolves into the first reintroduction site at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in 1987 possible.  Today, there are 43 SSP facilities participating in the Red Wolf SSP program (use this link for map and websites of all SSP cooperators), with ~190 red wolves.  The Red Wolf SSP is the foundation of the recovery program. Without its collective expertise and resources, the future of the red wolf would be uncertain. The contributions of the RWSSP include: (1) managing populations, (2) training field personnel on techniques for proper capture and restraint, (3) applying captive research to the field and (4) reintroducing captive born red wolves.

 Red wolf SSP locations. 

Successful conservation programs are often developed through partnerships. The Red Wolf Recovery Program is a great example of organizations working together to benefit a species. Zoos can play a significant role in red wolf recovery by informing visitors about the value of wolves in ecosystems and inspiring the public to support the wolf's reestablishment in the wild.  We encourage you to check out the websites of the Red Wolf SSP program participants.  There are a lot of photos, videos, and educational resources available on red wolves! Most of them also have Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter, and You Tube accounts as well.

Here’s just a few you can explore the resources of:

Chattanooga Nature Center (Chattanooga, TN)

Endangered Wolf Center (Eureka, MO)

Fort Worth Zoological Park (Fort Worth, TX)

Lincoln Park Zoological Gardens (Chicago, IL)

North Carolina Museum of Life & Science (Durham, NC)

Wildlife Science Center (Forest Lake, MN)

Wolf Conservation Center of New York  (South Salem, NY)

Red wolf cam video at Wolf Conservation Center of New York

Meet Chelsea, our red wolf caretaker intern!

 Chelsea with a captive red wolf behind her.

 

Please help us welcome our most recent addition to the Red Wolf Recovery Program, Chelsea!  She is the red wolf caretaker intern from January to April 2013. Chelsea was born in Connecticut, grew up in Florida, and attended Unity College in Maine, receiving her Bachelors of Science in Wildlife Conservation in December 2011. 

Chelsea comes to us with a lot of wildlife conservation experience already under her belt.  Some of her previous work includes volunteering at Busch Wildlife Sanctuary, a wildlife rehab center, and researching piping plover and oystercatchers as an endangered shorebird intern at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague Island. Last summer, she was a seabird researcher for Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge and lived on the remote islands of Metinic and Petit Manan Island surveying and studying many different types of shorebirds including common, arctic terns, and Roseate terns, Atlantic puffins, razorbills, common murrs, common eiders, black guillemots, Leach’s storm-petrels, great black-backed gulls, laughing gulls, and herring gulls. From there, she continued on to the Loki Clan Wolf Refuge in the White mountains of New Hampshire, where she cared for 66 wolf hybrids, and participated in education and outreach.

We are very lucky to have her part of the program as Chelsea’s interests in wildlife conservation and wolves began long ago—she even wrote her first book about wolves when she was four (!) and has been following wolf recovery efforts for years. Her long-term goal is to find a permanent position with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a non-profit, nature center, wildlife rescue, or other facility that will allow her to continue to educate others and conserve wildlife. Together with her family, Chelsea has also created a non-profit organization, Balloons Blow, whose central goal is to bring awareness and educate others about the effects balloon releases and pollution has on the environment and wildlife. On her days off, you can find Chelsea cleaning nearby the beaches and removing washed up debris.

  Chelsea and a captive pair of red wolves.

Welcome, Chelsea!