Beasts of the Southern Wild: Recovery With The Last Remaining Southern Red Wolves

The South is no longer known for it's savagery.. it's a kind of gentlemanly thing now, modernized.. a bit red neck, a bit hillbilly, a bit yuppie, and a bit kind of 'fat bald guy in a pick up with his Oakley's on' kind of 'Atlanta NASCAR Military Suburban', the kind of guy you might feel like you would agree with about nothing,

 but he's got a sense of humor, and you deep down inside kind of appreciate he is your countryman.

this is St Louis! It's what you expect from the true South, but they are mostly past it!

 'The New South' they somewhat euphemistically and affectionately call it. I used to live in The New South, been all over it, walked a lot of it, trains, hitch hiked it, cruised some of it's cities in a classic car, and I kind of love it.. the South don't apologize, and it's aspiration, the Old South's aspiration at least, is to be itself.. its got a bad rap in the north for being backwards, but the South has faced a lot more of it's problems than the rest of the world gives it credit for, despite it's old cranky Uncle Alabama always embarrassing it, much of it functions pleasantly, and with a lot of culture that you dreamed would be there, still very much there..

But that wildness, the pre-cotton South, the pre-railroad South, the south that De Soto, Thomas Walker, Daniel Boone, Cabeza de Vaca, and La Salle knew,
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/history/us/enc/explorers.shtml
the Primordial South, is just hanging on in the recesses, and up in the Smokies, and along the Mississippi River between the levees in the Batture where it's considered risky to farm, but it almost lost it's crown, it's crown species, that is.. the Southern Red Wolf...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_wolf
I remember when the talked about the failed Red Wolf reintroduction to Great Smokey Mountain National Park, but it had never ocurred to me to dig any deeper.. to me a Wolf was a Grey Wolf, the Wolf of Hansel and Gretel, and of the Northern Wilds, where, along with the jungle, our modern imaginations assume are the only places that wilderness still lives..
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/13/news/mn-53449
http://redwolfssp.org/
The first time I thought of them as an adult was due to a book I was reading while hanging out in Charleston once, a book to give me some insight into the low country culture, one bad guy at a time. It was the memoirs of a local Game Warden named Ben Moise:

In his book, there was an aside about how he once spent a night on patrol for either illegal fishing or poaching, which one I forget, because you need a boat to hunt or fish in the Tidewater South, but in it he mentioned being moored up next to a barrier island that was part of a USFWS program or conservation area, maybe he was stranded by high tide which happened a few times in the book, and he talked about the pleasure of hearing a pack of wolves that had been placed on the island to breed, and to incidentally cull down the deer population, howl through the night, as he swatted flies and looked for his endlessly endearing quarry.. it was a passing reference, but it got me curious... Wolves in South Carolina.. what the heck are they doing 'there'? I think of wolves and I think of Boreal Forests,Tundra, or the wild west...
Little did I know, that in the world before John Smith and Pocahontas, they were all over 'there'.
As you might have read in the Wikipedia entry above, the wolves of the south were there well before either John Smith or Pocahontas's relatives showed up, and appear to be a hybrid of Wolves and Coyotes..which wolf, the Mexican, the Grey, or maybe some other extinct predecessor species I am not sure yet, but I kind of love their existence! I dream of seeing them in some personal version of The Last of the Mohicans, since even though the book takes place in the areas of western New York, the movie was filmed in the Asheville area, and that area being substantially wilder than western New York these days (Adirondack's aside!), I can't help but have many of my east coast wilderness ideas occur there, in what must be the largest wilderness area in the south.. but not to ignore the wilds of eastern North Carolina (and South Carolina for that matter) where this story is about to go.
The Recovery Plan drafted by the US Department of Fish and Wildlife, the lead agency for endangered species, decided that this area, rather than the Atchafalaya where the wolves made their last stand prior to being captured, was the best spot to re-release them... one issue that drove them so far north was that Coyotes, which can breed with Red Wolves, had moved into the vacuum left by the absence of wolves and were populating those areas, making interbreeding inevitable..  and are the reason the population of 400 originally captured from the remaining wild population in the 70's was reduced ( I was gonna use the word culled, but that means something pretty specific in Animal management!) down to 43 proven wolves, then 17 for true purebreds after even closer examination, and of them only 14 could breed... so the 200 something we have now are descended from only 14 wolves rounded up back then from the wilds of SE Texas and Southern Louisiana.
As has become the fetish of this blog, they actually keep a tally on the wild population.. the Wild Population you say?.. yes, the wild population... despite my lauding of the wilds of western North Carolina, and I will admit, eastern Tennessee, as much as I hate cutting Tennesseans any breaks, there is sufficient wild land in Eastern North Carolina, the lands behind the outer banks, the lands of pine tree logging and Camp Lejeune, and a smattering of red necks, former slaves, and maybe even a hippie or two, Pamlico Sound and Wilmington, the old estuarine haunts of Black Beard and the citizens of Beaufort, that they thought they might actually be able to release a wild population which now numbers about 130 individuals.. never heard of it? ..few have.. all the acrimony from Idaho and Wyoming ranchers (Montanan's are taking it in much better stride) from the Yellowstone Reintroduction (successful Yellowstone Reintroduction I might add..) and even the controversy over the Smokies reintroduction have kind of overshadowed these humble beasts who are happily loping around a literal backwater you will have to look up on a map no doubt, Alligator National Wildlife Refuge and it's 5 country environs... close to Raleigh and Virginia Beach I might add, two places you likely have heard of, and they have been there for years, since 1987 to be exact..

they keep tabs on the wild population and report quarterly:
http://www.fws.gov/redwolf/
https://www.fws.gov/redwolf/Images/Mortalitytable.pdf
if the above link doesn't work, you can usually find that report linked on the right of the first one, click on the numbers, or here:
http://redwolves.com/wp/?page_id=197
and here:
http://www.fws.gov/redwolf/documents.html
Just about as many as they thought they could risk were put there to run wild while another two hundred or so breed in blissful captivity, in a bit of an east coast parallel to the California Condor story. They keep the Ben Moise's of the world and their criminal counterparts busy, as every once in a while a cranky or adventuresome local takes a crack at one or two, someone runs into one with a car by accident or on purpose, but in general they are running around happily expanding their range, making one part of the south a little wilder and perhaps a little healthier.. I kind of think of them as an animal counterpart to the Blackwater Compound which is also nearby just north, wild, controversial, but keeping quiet for the meantime.. but perhaps hoping to get another crack at those delicious elk being reintroduced all over their former range again..

don't let the innocent look fool you.. he thinks with his stomach...someday perhaps, when his numbers are high enough, maybe we can let him roam the Appalachians again, and any other wild spot we can find for him like the Atchafalaya or some of the large tracts of Paper company land in the south.... for now we know that they are being allowed to roam free in part, their numbers are steady even though there are some tough knocks in the risks taken to get there.. but their wisdom is growing, and that gives me hope..

here is the latest big article:

http://stories.weather.com/story/8795

there is trouble in Mudville, but the population as a whole seems safe...