An Intern's Perspective

The following blog is a personal reflection of Red Wolf Recovery Program intern, Ford Willis. Ford recently graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He conducted his internship from September 7, 2011 to November 21, 2011 while studying at UNC's Albemarle Ecological Field Site (AEFS).

Before my semester started in Manteo, I met with faculty members from the AEFS to discuss my interests in environmental issues on the coast. I told them that I am an avid animal lover (based on my father owning a pet store as I grew up), and that I was extremely interested in working with animal conservation/protection of any kind. It was a perfect fit when they decided to place me with the Fish and Wildlife Service Red Wolf Recovery Program. To be completely honest, I did not even know the recovery program existed and knew little to nothing about red wolves in general. However, I was excited about the opportunity to work with an endangered species and help out in any way I can. I was pleasantly surprised when my internship mentor, David Rabon, presented me with the task of working to create a Red Wolf Recovery Business Plan.

The founding idea behind the plan was to create something that modeled current operations of the Red Wolf Recovery Program so that a specific and concise plan might be used to create recovery sites in other areas of North Carolina or across the southeastern United States. In the past, red wolf populations extended much further west than they do now so the prospect of a recovery program being established in another state is promising. I must admit I was intimidated and a little overwhelmed when I first began understanding the project I would be working on. As mentioned earlier, I knew almost nothing about red wolves and, if possible, knew even less about how to construct a business plan. Needless to say, the beginning stages were slow going as I researched the many facets of the Red Wolf Recovery Program and traditional business plans. My first objective was to adapt a traditional business plan to fit the operations of a recovery program by identifying the aspects that were the same between both plans and those that were specific to a recovery site. I found this both interesting and challenging as my research helped me to gain a wealth of knowledge in business and conservation. It was a true emersion experience. I was thrown into a completely unfamiliar world but came out with a greater understanding of the recovery program as a whole and a strong comprehension of how beneficial a business plan can be for the recovery program. Once completed, this plan has the potential to expand red wolf populations, putting the FWS ever closer to achieving the ultimate goal of restoring red wolves to healthy numbers.

Outside of my work with the business plan, I was given the exciting opportunity to accompany some of the biologists in the field. This entailed setting traps and tracking specific wolf populations and gave me a much deeper understanding of how the program works. I was even given the chance to observe and participate when the veterinarian came to do work ups on the captive wolves. Working in the office and in the field are drastically different, yet equally important to the success of the recovery program. This duel experience was vital to my overall understanding of program operations and the multitude of aspects that will need to be included in the business plan. Furthermore, it led me to realize that while this business plan will be extremely useful to a future propagation site, there is a certain aspect of “local knowledge” involved with the current program. The members of the program understand things that cannot be taught or translated into a business plan. It must be learned through experience. This is not to take away from the business plan, but simply to point out that any future site will surely require that same understanding of “local knowledge” in order to function successfully. While the business plan is still very much in its infancy, I am proud of my contributions and excited to someday see a finished product. It would be truly inspiring to one day see a recovery site established in another state based on the plan I was given the opportunity to work on.

Overall, this internship was an extremely positive and educational experience for me. I have had multiple internships in the past where I have spent most of my time trying to look busy rather than actually accomplishing anything. This is not because I was lazy but because I was never given enough work to do. I was never challenged in the way I was with this internship. For the first time, I feel I have a solid understanding of at least one possible career path in the environmental field. My environmental studies degree is broad and wide ranging, which gives me the chance to explore multiple fields when deciding the direction I want to take my career. I was skeptical about working for the government but found it to be an enjoyable experience with a functioning work environment filled with welcoming individuals. Everyone was willing to do their part in helping me get the most out of my internship as possible. I want to thank everyone for helping make this the most positive internship experience I have had. I realize how busy you all are and appreciate the time you took out of your day. I hope that I can return over the coming years to see the program thriving and expanding in new ways. I may have come in knowing nothing about red wolves, but I can guarantee this has been an experience I will never forget.

[Photo: Ford Willis]

Earth Day 2012

To honor our planet and celebrate Earth Day 2012, Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge and the Red Wolf Recovery Program are hosting a very special Earth Day howling on Saturday, April 21st. The free event starts at 7:00 pm at the Creef Cut Wildlife Trail parking lot. No registration is required, but space is limited. Visit us on Facebook for more information.

Gunshot Mortality of Red Wolves

The following blog entry about gunshot mortality of red wolves is excerpted from a chapter in the forthcoming book entitled "The Secret World of Red Wolves: A True Story of North America's other Wolf," by T. DeLene Beeland (University of North Carolina Press, coming early 2013), and is reproduced here with the permission of the author. CAUTION: Images included in this blog may be disturbing to some readers.

Since 2004, an average of 6.5 red wolves die each year from gunshot wounds. Studying years past, it is easy to see an emerging trend: between 1987 and 2003, twenty-eight red wolves were shot. But between 2004 and 2010, the number of gunshot red wolves rose to forty-five confirmed cases. By the end of 2011, the total number of gunshot wolves have increased to fifty-two. In other words, 65 percent of the known gunshot red wolves occurred in the most recent eight years of the twenty-five-year-long program. Six were shot in 2004; five were shot in 2005; four were shot in 2006; nine were shot in 2007; six were shot in 2008 (plus two confirmed poisonings); seven were shot in 2009; eight were shot in 2010; and another seven were shot in 2011. The killings are akin to death by a thousand slices to the population as a whole.

[Number of red wolves killed by gunshot, 1987-2011]

Unfortunately, the breeders are hit disproportionately according to the red wolf team. Since 2004, the biologists calculate that breeding individuals compose 73 percent of the wolves shot illegally. Losing a breeder busts up packs which in turn leads to single wolves becoming vulnerable to intraspecific aggression. The loss of a breeder can also equate to pups or pre-dispersing age juveniles losing parental protection. Most worrisome to the red wolf field team, losing a breeder puts that pack's territory at risk: they had too often observed fertile coyotes move into territories shortly after the disruption of a breeding pair.

[Red Wolf on left; Coyote on right. Photo credit: red wolf, Crawford/USFWS; coyote, USFWS]
A study published in 2011 in PLoS-ONE by Dennis Murray and Amanda Sparkman from Trent University, and Lisette Waits from the University of Idaho, was the first to address the issue of how anthropogenic killings affect the red wolf population. The researchers tested two ecological theories: one proposed that human-caused killings have an “additive” effect which reduces a population’s overall survival rates, while the second proposed that human-caused killings trigger a “compensatory” effect which makes up for unnatural losses, possibly by reducing the natural mortality rate which then balances the overall survival rate.

The researchers divided the red wolf population growth into two major time periods, from 1990-1998 and 1999 to 2006, and classified the first timeframe as having a low population density (when the reintroduced population was still growing) and the second as having a high population density (when the recovery area began to approach being full). They found that at low population densities, the red wolf population experienced a strong additive effect from human-caused killings. But at higher densities, they found evidence for both additive and compensatory effects. They hypothesized that as stable red wolf packs dissolved due to human-caused killings, it freed the surplus breeding-age red wolves to either begin breeding with the surviving mate, or to take over the territory of a dissolved pack and form an entirely new breeding pair...

[Red Wolf. Photo credit: Nordsven/USFWS]

...A second study with insight to how anthropogenic killings affects red wolves took the form of a dissertation under the tutelage of Lisette Waits, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Idaho. (Waits is also the person responsible for testing the blood samples of the red wolves for the genetic markers that qualify them as true red wolves.) Waits and her then-student, Justin Bohling, examined characteristics of individual red wolves that were involved in hybridization events verified to have occurred. They discovered that the majority of the red wolves that crossed with coyotes did so under similar circumstances.

“A high proportion of these hybridization events were occurring after the disruption of a stable breeding pair,” Waits said. “Particularly, it’s been a problem associated with gunshot mortality during the hunting season, and the hunting season precedes the breeding season.”

[Red Wolf. Photo credit: Nordsven/USFWS]
Waits and Bohling pored over breeding records and the individual life histories of red wolves known to have been involved in hybridization events between 2001 and 2009. They studied twenty-one hybrid litters and ninety-one red wolf litters and examined them for correlations with age and breeding experience, if the animal had a mixed red wolf/coyote ancestry, birthing location within the red wolf recovery area, and whether pack disruption was a factor leading to future interspecies crosses. They found that the hybrid litters clustered toward the western side of the Albemarle peninsula, and that the average age of female breeders who birthed hybrid litters was slightly less, at 4.2 years old, than the average age of female breeders who birthed red wolf litters at about 5.4 years old. But perhaps the most interesting result was that thirteen of the twenty-one [62%] hybrid litters were produced after a stable breeding pair of red wolves were broken apart. Seven of these dissolutions [54%] occurred because a breeder had been shot and killed, while two more involved the death of a breeder from poison or trap injuries—in all, nine of the thirteen [69%] broken pairs were attributed to human actions.

[Percent mortality of red wolves, 1999-2011]
In the eyes of the red wolf field team, Murray's study described the past but they felt the spike in gunshot mortality they had observed since 2004 significantly altered the possibility that the compensatory effects would continue to balance the additive effects. They also countered that the study failed to capture the level of management effort that the team had to invest in fostering new red wolf pairs each time a pair dissolved; not to mention their efforts to trap, sterilize and monitor new coyotes that moved into a former pack's territory. They had increased their management effort in step with the uptick in illegal killings since 2004 and they felt that Murray's conclusions, that the additive and compensatory effects would continue to balance each other out at high population densities, omitted how an increased rate of killings stretched their management workload to the point of bursting. They believed Waits and Bohling's study accurately described the scenarios they had witnessed time and time again when a pack dissolved largely due to human-caused reasons and hybridization often followed.

The red wolf recovery program hinges upon successful field work, and in order to grow the population the biologists believe their breeders need to maintain stable territories and stable packs that regularly produce puppies each spring. But the illegal killings, whether accidental or not, are possibly curtailing the program’s success including the field staff’s ability to control hybridization issues by using coyote sterilization as a management tool.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the suspected illegal take of several red wolves found dead in the Red Wolf Recovery Area (Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell, Washington, and Beaufort Counties, NC). Contributions from various organizations and individuals have resulted in a reward of up to $15,000 for information directly leading to an arrest, a criminal conviction, a civil penalty assessment, or forfeiture of property on the subject or subjects responsible for the suspected unlawful take of these red wolves. The red wolf is protected under the Endangered Species Act. The maximum criminal penalties for the unlawful taking of a red wolf are one year imprisonment and $100,000 fine per individual. Anyone with information on the deaths of red wolves is urged to contact Special Agent Sandra Allred at (919) 856-4786 or North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Officer Robert Wayne at (252) 216-8225.

Return of the Blog

It’s been nearly nine months since our last post. Have you missed us? Maybe you've wondered why we've been quiet on our blog. Well, it hasn't been for a lack of stuff to blog about. So much has happened in the Red Wolf Recovery Program in the last nine months -- we have experienced fires, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and even plague... but thankfully not the bubonic kind.

[Photo credit: Donnie Harris/USFWS]
It all started in early May of last year with a lightning strike in the Pain’s Bay region of the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. The Pain’s Bay Fire, as it was called, spread over more than 45,000 acres, and had all of us revising our contingency plans with each new acre burned. Some of our biologists even donned their firefighting PPE (personal protective equipment) to fight the blaze.

[Photo credit: NASA NOAA GOES Project]
The fire burned for nearly four months. In fact, the fire wasn’t fully extinguished until Hurricane Irene made landfall on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on the morning of August 27. Hurricane Irene had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane, with winds of 85 mph (140 km/h), just before it made landfall, so the damage from wind was minimal. But the hurricane tracked over eastern North Carolina and the Red Wolf Recovery Area for about ten hours before re-emerging into the Atlantic near the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. And ten hours of rain left substantial portions of the area severely flooded.

[Photo credit: John Bazemore/AP]
Of course, all the rain from Hurricane Irene and the subsequent flooding made for perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes. And when the mosquitoes hatched, they hatched in force! A plague of mosquitoes had local officials mounting multiple aerial assaults on the blood-sucking pests.

[Shown "nearly" actual size -- Photo credit: Tim McGill/CLTV]
But that’s not all. Less than a week before Hurricane Irene hit, on August 23rd to be exact, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Red Wolf Recovery Area. Although the epicenter of the quake was near Richmond, Virginia, the effects were felt throughout the eastern U.S. And several aftershocks, ranging up to 4.5 in magnitude, occurred after the main tremor. The 5.8 earthquake was the largest to have occurred in the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains since the earthquake of 1897 in western Virginia.

[Photo credit: USGS]
And as if a fire, a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake, and swarming mosquitoes weren’t enough, the Red Wolf Recovery Program lost several breeding wolves and managed coyotes to gunshot during the fall hunting season (we’ll have more on that in the near future, so stay tuned). But we’ve hit the ground running in 2012. And now whelping season -- when red wolf pups are born -- is just around the corner. So, be on the lookout for more blogs. I promise it won’t be nine months before you can enjoy our next rambling.

There’s More Than One Way To Catch a Wolf!

The first attempt at finding a den this year offered the Red Wolf Recovery Program biologists a new challenge. Finding this particular den was going to be easy….it already had been spotted from the air during a telemetry flight. The challenge in this case was that we wanted to get our hands on the mother as well as the pups.

[Red wolf den. Photo credit: D. Rabon/USFWS]
Female wolf 1686F was wearing a radio-collar that was near the end of its battery life. We needed to change her collar to prevent losing radio contact with her. The conventional method for catching a wolf to change its collar is to set modified leg-hold traps. For a mother with young pups, however, that’s not an option because there is always some risk involved (albeit small given the design of the trap). Instead, we decided our best option would be to sneak up to her den without being detected and capture her in a net as she exited. As you can see from the photo every once in a while a plan comes together!

[Red wolf captured. Photo credit: A. Johnson/USFWS]
Once her collar was replaced, we processed her pups, placed the pups back in the den, followed by mom, and moved on to our next den search.

[Replacing a radio-telemetry collar. Photo credit: A. Johnson/USFWS]

2011: A Good Year for Red Wolf Recruitment

As the 2011 denning season winds down for the Red Wolf Recovery Program, the tally of red wolf pups born in the wild appears to be 46. This was an unexpectedly strong year for recruitment in the wild population. The number of mortalities of breeding wolves in recent years presented a challenge in optimism going into this year's denning season. Fortunately, 11 pairs of breeding wolves, including seven newly formed pairs and first time breeders, gave us a lot to be optimistic about.

[Red wolf pups. Photo credit: R. Nordsven/USFWS]

Celebrate Endangered Species Day 2011

On 20 May 2011 the Red Wolf Recovery Program and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will observe Endangered Species Day.

Endangered Species Day is an opportunity for people young and old to learn about the importance of protecting endangered species and everyday actions that people can take to help protect our nation’s disappearing wildlife and last remaining open space. Protecting America’s wildlife and plants today is a legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren, so that all Americans can experience the rich variety of native species that help to define our nation.

Started by the United States Senate, Endangered Species Day is the third Friday in May. Every year, thousands of people throughout the country celebrate Endangered Species Day at parks, wildlife refuges, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, schools and community centers. You can participate in festivals, field trips, park tours, community clean-ups, film showings, classroom presentations, and many other fun and educational activities.

In partnership with the Endangered Species Coalition and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, events will be scheduled throughout the country. Go to www.endangeredspeciesday.org for more information on Endangered Species Day events near you!