The Secret World of Red Wolves Quotes

“While species like black bears and foxes can migrate inland, red wolves face a continent’s worth of coyotes to their west, north, and south. Red wolves that stay on the peninsula will be squeezed within the recovery area as the coastal habitat around them degrades. They will have nowhere left to run. Since it is unlikely that red wolves will evolve blowholes or fins by the century’s close, they will need additional reintroduction sites in the coming decades.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Riggs and three colleagues have recently published The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast (2011), which contains summaries from decades of their coastal research. He sees it as a resource for laypeople to understand not just future sea-level rise in North Carolina but also the ways that changing shorelines have shaped the state in the past. “We’re frequently asked, ‘How well do you know what you say you know in this book?’” Riggs says. “And the answer is: ‘We know it damn well.’” He practically growls the last part at me, a marked contrast to his otherwise grandfatherly and professorial persona.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Graham is also one of the few living products of artificial insemination experiments in red wolves, a technique that Will wants to further hone. Artificial insemination may be useful to the program in the future in case the captive breeding efforts to create matched pairs based on mean kinship falls short of reproductive goals. In some cases, the captive female wolves were so aggressive to males that they were paired with that breeding never took place. Artificial insemination and securing red wolf sperm from all of the founding lines of the captive breeding program were identified in the 1990 Red Wolf Recovery/Species Survival Plan. Not long after, workers began collecting red wolf sperm. According to Will, there happened to be a fellow outside of Portland who had an international canid semen bank. The captive breeding program contracted him to help explore the viability of using electroejaculation on wolves. In the 1990s, Will helped develop protocols for immobilizing, catheterizing, and stimulating the wolves they sampled. They went through the captive population and methodically collected and evaluated sperm from male red wolves. If the sperm met certain criteria, it was processed and frozen. Eventually, the cryopreserved red wolf semen bank held samples from sixty individuals, which collectively represented thirteen of the fourteen founding lines. The work died down when a grant ran out and one of the main reproductive physiologists switched jobs.
Today, the early efforts to cryopreserve red wolf sperm and artificially inseminate females have proven their value - not just through Graham and his antics at the exhibit, but because a wolf named Stubs, one of the last living representatives from one of the fourteen founding lines, died in 1998. With Stubs’s death, the unique diversity of his founding lineage died within the captive population. However, his semen was collected and banked before he died. Will would like nothing more than to resurrect Stubs’s line. The only challenge, he says, is that the previous two cases of artificial insemination, in 1992 and 2003, were done using fresh sperm. In the first case, a six-year-old red wolf birthed two females and one male. Graham was born into a different litter of five.
“Clearly, we know artificial insemination using cryopreserved sperm works. It’s been done in other animals,” Will says. “We just need to pick this research up again and see where it might lead.” If male red wolves experience a decrease in sperm quality, or if females are behaviorally uncooperative with their male counterparts, then artificial insemination may move from the realm of research to that of necessity. It’s always nice to have a backup plan.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We walk around to the lower vantage point, where two man-made streams empty into a small pool.
“Let’s see if Graham recognizes you,” Sue giggles. Graham is the nickname of a male wolf from the Graham facility that Sue tells me is most atypical.
“Why would Graham recognize Will?” I ask.
“When Will walks by, often Graham will run up to the fence and jump around,” Sue says. “He’s boisterous. Crowds like him. He’ll get up on that rock and strike poses for them.” She points at a rocky outcrop jutting up about twenty feet from the water pool. As we approach, a lanky wolf walks slowly along the outcrop’s rim. A breeze picks up and carries our scent right to his nose. Though he’s not even looking in our direction, Graham tenses. He turns his head, faces the three of us, and sniffs the air. Without breaking his gaze, he leaps down the rock face and runs a well-worn trail through the grass. He catapults across the stream and bucks his hind legs with a flourish in midair. He stops below the translucent barrier, glares up at us, and whines. The whine devolves into a throaty growl. He stamps the grass, leaps and jumps, tears at the earth and lands ankle deep in the water. He glares directly at Will.
“Oh yeah, he sees you all right,” Sue laughs. “That wolf wants a bite out of your rump.”
Passerby have stopped to watch Graham’s antics. A small crowd forms. He runs across the rocky outcrop again, back over the stream, and down to the pool, then tears at the grass again with broad paws. He runs this loop repetitively and stops each time to stand off against Will. One of the visitors jokes that he must smell the barbecue at a nearby lunch truck, but they misunderstand his body language. He isn’t hungry. He is agitated.
“I think it’s just misplaced aggression,” Will says when I ask if Graham is exhibiting excitement or anger. “Usually when he sees me, I’m restraining him or helping to examine him. The wolves can’t do much when they are restrained, so he acts out later.”
Safe in the exhibit, Graham stares at Will. Without breaking eye contact, he walks to a bush and gnaws on its thick branches. It’s as if he’s saying, “Check out my canines. See how big they are?” There was nothing overtly threatening about his behavior, but it was a change from the docile nature I’d seen in other penned red wolves. Sue is right: he is definitely atypical, charismatic even.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“The first few months after releasing the wolves, the red wolf team fielded hundreds of phone calls about red wolf sightings. Lucash regretted that some of the wolves “acted like abandoned dogs.” They loped up and down the main highways; some even chased cars and trucks. This was the naïve behavior of animals reared by human hands. Red wolf sightings were reported by motorists a total of seventy-four times in the first eleven months. The wolves, it seemed, didn’t like traveling through the briers any more than people did. Lucash later recalled that they showed a preference for using the paved and unpaved roads as travel corridors. Most worrisome, when a vehicle approached a wolf from behind, many wolves would continue to lope down the midline. When the vehicle got close, the animals would cut to the shoulder and wait for the car or truck to pass, as if they were common pedestrians. The biologists set their hopes on the wild-born wolves growing up more woods wary than their zoo-reared parents.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“The moment everyone had been anticipating finally came when, at a quarter past nine in the morning on Monday, September 14, 1987, Parker walked up the trail to the pen at the South Lake location where Lucash had been station. In contrast to the media frenzy surrounding the wolves’ arrival in North Carolina, only Parker and four others - Roland Smith, from the Point Defiance Zoo; John Taylor, the Alligator River refuge director; Michael Phillips; and Chris Lucash - were there to witness the release. According to DeBlieu’s writings and Phillips’s field notes, Taylor and Parker walked up the sodden trail to the pen where the wolves sloshed through mud puddles against the far fence. Parker tossed some deer meat into the enclosure, as if it were any other regular feeding. Then he did something entirely different: he secured the gate wide open with a heavy chain. He and Taylor turned and walked back down the trail to rejoin the others at the Boston whaler that had ferried them to the remote spot. Phillips noted that “Parker uttered, ‘We did it. We let them go.’” Parker would reminisce of the moment later in his life that he couldn’t believe he had “scratched something out of the dirt, and it worked.”
But after securing the pen door open, and once Parker’s tension dissipated, it was an anticlimactic moment. The wolves did not sense freedom and rush out. Rather, they stayed in their pen for several days, perhaps wary of the open gate. On the fourth morning, the female wandered out and traveled two miles. It took the male a week to move beyond the safe vicinity of the enclosure that had been his small but secure territory. The first two red wolves to be released back to the wild were free. But what would they choose to do with their freedom?”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“The FWS arranged for Parker to be trained in the field under David Mech, a North American wolf biologist based in Minnesota. Under Mech’s guidance for a few months, Parker learned how wolves hunt and raise their young, how they communicate through howls and scent mark their territories. He learned how to track them by ground and by plane and how to fit telemetry collars, as well as the basics of their captive management. After his time in Minnesota, Parker returned home bursting with knowledge about red wolves. All he needed was a place to put some. Parker knew he couldn’t kick-start the very first wolf reintroduction in the United States with a lawsuit, a fired state wildlife agency director, and hostile neighbors who resented the federal government to the core.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“John proved more trap-wise, though, and it took two months longer to catch him. He was smart enough to drag trap-baited carcasses away, thereby avoiding the stinging metal dug around them. Carley finally rented another Bell JetRanger helicopter and, after a fifteen-minute pursuit, the chopper flushed John into a tidal marsh. As the helicopter chased, John took off running over the beach at low tide. Carley snapped a picture from the chopper as the wolf sprinted at full hilt, his back legs stretching forward of his forelegs, then pushing off. The sun’s glare on the half inch or so of water gave the appearance that John raced over the ocean’s surface. “The wolf that ran on water,” Carley later chuckled over the photo.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“The team repeated the prerelease protocol with John and Judy, but this time, they held the pair in an acclimation pen for six months. They also built a fixed-position telemetry antenna receiver on a 110-foot-high fire tower on the island. This freed them from needing to use the jeep to tail the wolves, which Carley feared may have proved too intrusive. The fixed-position antenna held a ten-mile range. Carley attached a portable telemetry antenna to an eighteen-foot speed boat in case they needed to pursue the animals across the inlets or open water - a possibility that Margie had proven likely. As a joke, Carley also posed by John and Judy’s kennel box with a long sheet of paper, from which he read aloud while a colleague snapped photos. “Since the animals seem to understand more than they let on, we did another thing differently” the second time around, Carley quipped while showing the photo in a public presentation. “We read them The Plan.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“The next morning, Carley was nervous about both wolves encountering people. He made the decision to recapture them and place them back in their pens. The men shot cracker shells at Margie, hoping to push her back across the marsh to Bulls Island, but she hunkered down in the woods under deep leafy cover. The team set traps, hoping to catch her quickly, but their activity pushed her closer to U.S. Highway 17, which she crossed and moved to the northwest. It appeared she was on a beeline for the Francis Marion National Forest. On December 22, Carley decided to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart. If that didn’t work out, he’d just plain shoot her the next day. Luckily, a gunner in a Bell JetRanger helicopter lodged a dart in Margie’s back end by 1:00 P.M., saving Carley from having to make a fatal decision. By 3:00 P.M., she was back in her pen on Bulls Island, groggy but alive. The incident marked the first time in the lower forty-eight states that a live wolf was shot with a tranquilizer dart from a helicopter. (It worked so well that Carley began renting helicopters to flush and dart wild canids in the inaccessible marshes and swamps that neither horses nor boats could help his team penetrate in Louisiana and Texas.)
The next afternoon, they caught Buddy, too. He had returned to Bulls Island, likely in search of Margie. With both wolves safely in their pen, Carley quipped to his team that the wolves were in better shape than their keepers. He and Dorsett were flat tuckered out. Though everyone laughed at his joke, Carley felt they all looked at him askance. They knew he had been prepared to shoot Margie. “Although it was ‘we’ who decided the statements [to shoot escaped wolves] should be made and adhered to,” Carley wrote in a field report on the incident, “in looking around after the recapture of the wolves, I had the distinct uncomfortable feeling of abandonment, and that ‘we’ had suddenly narrowed to ‘I.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“In 1975 Carley sent a fake X-ray of a red wolf skull to the FWS’s Southeast regional director, who was toying with the idea of using his region for red wolf reintroduction if captive breeding succeeded. Where the animal’s brain should have been, Carley placed gears and keys. In typical veiled humor, he wrote: “On the basis of the attached X-ray, we feel we are rapidly approaching the time when we can say, without fear of contradiction, that we truly understand what makes these wolves tick!”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Carley received countless unsolicited proposals from scientists wishing to study the red wolf. He joked to his wife that if he fulfilled all of the requests for teeth, bones, and tissue samples, they’d have nothing left of the red wolf but a tuft of fur.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Folklore from New England tells of a woman and an Indian who, on separate occasions, fell into pit traps already occupied by a wolf. When the woman and the wolf were discovered, it is said they were cowering on opposite sides of the trap, neither wanting anything to do with the other, according to Coleman.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Environmental historian Valeria Fogleman wrote that perhaps the early Christian colonists saw themselves figuratively as the wolves’ prey based on the New Testament’s anecdote of Jesus sending his followers out as sheep among wolves. Their antipathy and fear toward wolves was a physical manifestation of their spiritual protectiveness, she wrote, for “wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.” Wolves were also viewed through a religious and cultural lens as animals that made pacts with the devil, thereby garnering them the stigma of being full of trickery and evil. Livestock damages may have been the rational argument for clearing wolves from the woods around settlements, but wolves likely also symbolized a potent religious threat in the minds of some early colonists.
The Native Americans did not view wolves so negatively, and some even tattooed images of wolves - along with moose, deer, bears, and birds - on their cheeks and arms, according to William Wood, writing about New England in 1634, described the “ravenous howling Wolfe: Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe” in a passage that imparts the belief that wolves consumed more prey than was necessary. Wood wished that all the wolves of the country could be replaced by bears, but only on the condition that the wolves were banished completely, because he believed wolves hunted and ate black bears. He also lamented that “common devourer,” the wolf, preying upon moose and deer. No doubt, the colonists wanted the bears, moose, and deer for their own meat and hide supplies. Yet Wood also observed the wolves of New England to be different from wolves in other countries. He wrote that they were not known to attack people, and that they did not attack horses or cows but went after pigs, goats, and red calves. The colonists seemed to believe the wolves mistook calves that were more coppery colored for deer, so much so that a red-colored calf sold for much less than a black one.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“William Bartram was camped near Lake George in Florida in 1774 when he strung his day’s fish catch upon a tree branch and made his bed below them. That night, he awoke to the “heavy tread” of a departing animal. It dove into the thickets before Bartram could see it, but then he noticed the night thief had absconded with his fish stash. While Bartram never saw a wolf, he clearly believed the thief to have been a wolf - and one from whose jaws he felt he’d narrowly escaped. As the incident sunk in, he reasoned that having a “rapacious wolf” steal “my fish from over my head” was much better than having a wolf leap upon his breast in the dead of night to tear out his throat, “which would have instantly deprived me of my life.” He imagined that the wolf might have gutted his stomach and dragged his body off to satiate its pack mates. While Bartram embellished the danger to himself, he also marveled at the cunning that the animal had shown in plundering Bartram’s meat but not awakening him until the deed was done.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“One night, when camping at the head of one of its branches, they heard a chorus of howls emanate from the surrounding woods. “When we were all asleep,” Lawson wrote,

in the Beginning of the Night, we were awaken’d with the dismall’st and most hideous Noise that ever pierc’d my Ears: This sudden Surprizal incapacitated us of guessing what this threatening Noise might proceed from; but our Indian Pilot, (who knew these parts well) acquainted us that it was customary to hear such Musick along the Swamp-Side, there being endless Numbers of Panthers, Tygers, Wolves, and other Beasts of Prey, which take this Swamp for their abode in the Day, coming in whole Droves to hunt the Deer in the Night, making their frightful Ditty ’til Day appears, then all is still in other Places.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Was there a diminutive southeastern wolf that evolved in North America independently from gray wolves? Do red and eastern wolves share an evolutionary lineage with coyotes? We know without a doubt that when Europeans arrived in the New World, the eastern woods held howling, chorusing wolves. But the not-so-simple question remains: what were they?”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Despite years of inquiry, the origins of Canis rufus remain elusive. According to Fain and his coauthors, although hybridization has influenced gray wolves around the Great Lakes, eastern wolves, and red wolves, it is the red wolf that has been the most deeply affected by it. In addition, its extreme population bottleneck, and the artificial process of selecting the founders for the captive-breeding program based on morphology, further altered its genetic makeup. The lack of consensus over what a red wolf is versus what it once may have been exacerbates its conservation “purgatory” of being officially listed as an endangered species but perpetually accused of being unworthy. Was there a diminutive southeastern wolf that evolved in North America independently from gray wolves? Do red and eastern wolves share an evolutionary lineage with coyotes? We know without a doubt that when Europeans arrived in the New World, the eastern woods held howling, chorusing wolves. But the not-so-simple question remains: what were they?”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“In the late summer of 2010, I visit Nowak at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He is soft-spoken, slightly built, and a little stooped with age. Nowak has a cerebral demeanor, and in a Louisiana accent that softens his r’s, he might tell you he was born in the “fawties.” We sit in his living room, which is decorated with tiny statues of forest animals. Every few minutes, he darts down the hall to his desk - above which hangs a famous photo of a black-phase red wolf from the Tensas River - to retrieve books, graphs, and papers for reference. More than a decade after his retirement, Nowak remains engrossed by discussions of red wolf origins. Deep in conversation about carnassial teeth, he dives to grab his wife’s shitzsu, Tommy, to show me what they look like, then he thinks better of it. (Tommy had eyed him warily.) He hands me a copy of his most recent publication, a 2002 paper from Southeastern Naturalist.
“When I wrote this, I threw everything I had at the red wolf problem,” he says. “This was my best shot.” He thumps an extra copy onto the coffee table between us. After a very long pause, he gazes at it and adds: “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.”
This is hard to accept, considering everything he has invested in learning about the red wolf: few people have devoted more time to understanding red wolves than the man sitting across the coffee table from me, absentmindedly stroking his wife’s dog.
Nowak grew up in New Orleans, and as an undergraduate at Tulane University in 1962, he became interested in endangered birds. While reading a book on the last ivory-billed woodpeckers in the swamps along the Tensas River, his eyes widened when he found references to wolves.
“Wolves in Louisiana! My goodness, I thought wolves lived up on the tundra, in the north woods, going around chasing moose and people,” Nowak recalls. “I did not know a thing about them. But when I learned there were wolves in my home state, it got me excited.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“When we first started working with this wolf, he was ninety-nine miles down a one-hundred-mile-long road to extinction. We now have him identified, and we feel we have him turned around the other way. It will be a long uphill push to save him; I don’t know if we can do it. If we do decide that it is feasible, we need you to help pull; we are sure going to push.

Curtis J. Carley, first Red Wolf Recovery Project field coordinator, Fish and Wildlife Service, at a public outreach presentation (1977)”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Written by Dr. Stephen Fritts, a scientist in the FWS: “Ultimately, the wolf exists in the eye of the beholder. There is the wolf as science can describe it, but there is also the wolf that is the product of the human mind, a cultural construct - sometimes called the ‘symbolic wolf’ - colored by our individual, cultural, or social conditioning.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We drive the captured animals to the red wolf health-care facility for processing and treatment. Inside, a large cage with metal bars holds a seventy-pound male red wolf in the workshop area. He lies stretched out against the back wall, his head resting on straw. No matter how nonchalant he poses, no matter the disinterest he feigns, he keeps tabs on the exact movement of each person in the room. He’s easily the largest red wolf I’ve yet seen, and if I happened upon him in the woods, there is no chance I’d mistake him for a needle-nosed coyote.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We arrive at Sandy Ridge, and Chris drives the truck through the gate of the double-fenced perimeter. We meet the caretaker, a new intern named Janet. She’s just received a degree from the University of California, Davis. She carts a wheelbarrow to the truck, and Chris hauls the kennel, wolf and all, into it. They tuck a large five-gallon water jug next to the kennel, and then we set off pulling the male down the main thoroughfare that divides the pens of Sandy Ridge. It has rained heavily this fall, and everything from mushrooms to few-days-old kibbles is coated in mold. Chris pauses for a moment and points into the trees at regularly spaced depressions in the ground.
“Did you know that this used to be a cemetery?” he asks.
We shake our heads.
“This is the highest land around,” he says. “It’s a natural ridge, so it was used for graves. There are a few unmarked ones right there.” He points at the depressions where soil has settled and compacted lower than the surrounding areas. “That’s why we don’t have any wolf pens right there.” High land, in the peninsula, usually means an elevation of a few feet above sea level. The unmarked depressions seem a poignant reminder of how man and wolf share the same spaces in this area, whether knowingly or not.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“One morning last week, he pulled up to find a bear cub stuck in one of his traps set on the edge of a tree line. He approached the juvenile, which struggled frantically then gave up, sat on its butt, and whimpered. Two dozen yards back in the trees, a smallish mother bear paced. She too emitted a whiney wheezy sound, one Ryan had never heard a black bear utter. He returned to his truck and pulled it up close to the cub, but he left the door open in case the mom got nasty. He used a catchpole to secure the cub’s head and then stepped on the lifters to open the trap’s jaws. The cub’s foot slipped out unharmed. He released it from the noose and it scampered off in a beeline for the she bear.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“It is never certain for her that the wolves will answer each Wednesday. I wonder for a moment why they do. Surely they know that these are just a bunch of humans trying to speak wolf. Surely they smell us, a group of sixty people cloaked in lotions, colognes, insecticides, and deodorant - announcing our odiferous presence to an animal whose world is ordered by scent - standing in the woods a mere few hundred yards away. Surely they heard our engines as we arrived. Surely they could hear that our pitch is off, that we are an imitation. Yet they accept this and play along. Why?
Wolves, it turns out, will howl to a variety of stimuli, including the sirens of emergency responder vehicles. In the late 1960s, when researchers discovered that the red wolf was nose-diving into extinction, they played electronic sirens in southeastern Texas coastal marshes and plains to elicit howls from wild canids. From the howls, they made probable identifications of red wolves and possible hybrids. Coyote vocalizations often have a series of broken yips and barns and emanate at a comparatively higher frequency, whereas red wolves will howl at lower frequencies that start “deep and mournful” but may break off into yapping like a coyote, according to a report authored in 1972 by two trappers, Glynn Riley and Roy McBride, who were employed by the federal government. Early surveyors noted, too, that the red wolves were more likely to howl in good weather and less likely to respond in rainy or overcast weather.
Confined to their facility, perhaps the red wolves of Sandy Ridge howl to humans because it gives them a way to communicate with living beings outside their fence. Who knows: maybe they are simply telling us to bugger off and go away. Or, as frightened as they are of seeing a human, perhaps howling to a group of them on a dark night is more palatable since they do not have to look at us or be gawked at in turn. Perhaps howling is a way of reaching out on their own terms, in their own language, through which they can proclaim their space and their place on the land - their way of saying, “Even though I’m in here, behind this fence, I own this place.”
Or maybe they just want to remind us that this land had been theirs for millennia before we invaded and claimed it. In the dark of night, I fantasize that their howls are calling out: “All this was ours. This was ours.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“After a minute of steady howling, the wolves’ entwined calls dwindle out to one lone call that seems to pivot between notes before ending in a series of high, broken yips. Kim asks all the kids to come to the front of our bunched group. Children filter forward, wide-eyed in the forested night, clutching flashlights close to their chests. Kim instructs them to howl on the count of three, and they let loose with a careening, loud set of human yowls. A short while later, the wolves answer back again, proclaiming their space and presence in the night. The children grin, entranced by this tenuous connection to a wild and unseen creature. After the kids, it is the adults’ turn.
“Dig deep and howl!” Kim instructs gleefully. “Howling is the best stress reliever in the world. If you are on vacation here, you must howl,” she jokes. We howl on her count, and the wolves answer a third time. Their howls seem to weave in and out of each other as they change pitch and perhaps meaning. Kim is excited that we got three responses from them and also heard the puppy. “We really rocked it tonight!” she exclaims, pumping her fist in the air. Everyone is smiling.
It is never certain for her that the wolves will answer each Wednesday. I wonder for a moment why they do. Surely they know that these are just a bunch of humans trying to speak wolf. Surely they smell us, a group of sixty people cloaked in lotions, colognes, insecticides, and deodorant - announcing our odiferous presence to an animal whose world is ordered by scent - standing in the woods a mere few hundred yards away. Surely they heard our engines as we arrived. Surely they could hear that our pitch is off, that we are an imitation. Yet they accept this and play along. Why?”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We soon arrive at the sandy trail that leads to the caretaker’s cabin, and the red wolf intern directs people to the parking area. People file out of their cars silently and gather around Kim. She waits till everyone is there and then explains that she is going to walk about a quarter of a mile down the trail to Sandy Ridge, where she’ll howl at the wolves inside. She tells us that sometimes it takes a few howls to get them interested, but we should hold tight and hope that they’ll howl back. Last week, she says, people heard one of the pups howl back. She sets off down the dark path with her flashlight aimed at the ground so as not to spook the wolves. We stand in a pool of weak, wobbly light cast from people’s flashlights and head lamps. The forest darkness encircles us. A few minutes later, we hear Kim’s call pierce the night air. The buzz and drone of insects create a background of uneven noise that I strain to filter out. I hear Kim howl again, and everyone around me seems to be holding their breath and trying not to move. We listen and wait for an answer.
Nothing.
Kim tries again.
No response.
I wonder what the people in the crowd are thinking. Is this all just a sham? Just another tourist attraction?
Kim makes a fourth howl, and then it starts. A lone howl rises, forlorn and low. It meanders through a few octaves and claws higher and higher. It trails into a thin high-pitched note, and then a second and a third howl pick up at lower pitches. People in the crowd gasp, some lean forward straining to hear. Within thirty seconds, a parade of howls sings loudly from the dark woods. It is hard to believe the wolves are a few hundred yards away. They sound much closer, perhaps less than a hundred feet.
Kim walks back to the crowd, flashlight downturned on the ground. Howls waft from somewhere behind her, persistent but not aggressive. The wolves sing. They sing to each other as much as they sing to us. One pitch stands out from the others, higher, thinner, and much lighter. It must be the pup. I imagine him standing next to his parents, watching them throw their heads back and open their jaws wide, letting loose with a call that says, “Here we are! Where are you? Here we are!” And the pup joins in, calling, “I’m here too! I’m here too!” I don’t know exactly what these wolves are saying, of course, but it is difficult to imagine the howling being anything other than a communication to locate other packs or individuals, a way to call out to the night and exclaim: I am here, and I know how to take care of myself so well that I’m going to let you know that I’m here! And my mate is here, and my kids are here. We are all here together in this place that is ours.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“Historically, wolf trappers staked traps in the earth so that a trapped animal was stuck at a single location. This made it easier for the trapper to find his quarry, but it caused a great deal of stress for the animal. Stake-trapped animals often struggle so violently against the metal clinching their legs that they severely injure themselves. By not staking their traps, and by adding features like a drag with a coil spring and swivel - which reduces the strain from the pointed prongs when it’s being dragged - the red wolf program allows a trapped animal to continue moving and to seek refuge. In theory, this makes the trapping experience less stressful, both physically and mentally, for the animals. It can also make them harder to locate.
“Please take it off,” I blurted. The sight of the metal trap biting Ryan’s hand shot adrenaline up and down my spine. Even though he claimed it didn’t hurt, I still expected geysers of blood to spout at any second. Ryan paused, clearly taken aback. Then he grinned like a jester and doubled over in laughter at me. When he freed himself and slipped off the glove, a faint purple pressure mark wrapped around his fingers. He often demonstrated this to groups sans glove.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We walk south across the black soil and toward the trucks, glad to have finally found the Swindell pack’s well-hidden puppies. One more den is checked off their list. The morning’s rain has softened the muck, and our boot prints mingle with the prints of raccoons, bobcats, deer, and wolves. Seeing the mixed prints, I am struck by the thought that man is as much a part of this landscape as the red wolf is.
It is clear from the short time that I’d shadowed Ryan and Chris that much of their time is spent doing muddy-boots wildlife management - literally tracking their quarry. Finding pups always gave Ryan’s mood a boost. He was happy when things seemed to be okay, because this wasn’t always the case.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf

“We walk south across the black soil and toward the trucks, glad to have finally found the Swindell pack’s well-hidden puppies. One more den is checked off their list. The morning’s rain has softened the muck, and our boot prints mingle with the prints of raccoons, bobcats, deer, and wolves. Seeing the mixed prints, I am struck by the thought that man is as much a part of this landscape as the red wolf is.”
― T. DeLene Beeland, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf