Red Rover, Red Rover, Please Send the Red Wolf on Over

May 3, 2013 11:19 AM

The Red Wolf Recovery Program is the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's attempt to save the Red Wolf from extinction. Once the apex hunter of most of the Southeastern United States, now only 100 to 120 red wolves remain in the wild, and as of March 14, 4 wolves are known to have been killed(PDF) so far this year.

The Red Wolf Recovery Program offers a variety of ways to learn about it and the wolves it's set out to save:

• Track the Pack - Flickr page full of photographs of wolves and pups - Some are intimate, others capture the moment a wolf is released in the wild, and some are just adorable pups.
• The Track the Pack blog - a blog run by the program detailing what the program does, as well offering information on red wolves from literature to video clips.
• and Track the Pack on Youtube - with three videos about red wolves.

Video of Red Wolves Via the Wolf Conservation Center in New York's Youtube page

• Red Wolf Pack Howling
• Red Wolf Pups and Parents Playing
• Red Wolf Pup vs Gravity - What it says on the box.

posted by Atreides (6 comments total)

And, here in Michigan, our idiot legislators just passed a law making it legal to hunt wolves, regardless of the fact that the majority of the citizens in the state oppose it. We're waiting for our idiot governor to sign it.
posted by HuronBob at 12:23 PM on May 3, 2013

Thank goodness I work from home, as the noises I was making while looking at the pictures in that Flicker stream were neither dignified nor professional. This one may be my favorite.

Thanks for posting this, Atreides - that blog in particular looks interesting, I'm looking forward to reading through it more. And of course all those videos are just ridiculously marvelous.

Who's a good ittle wolfy-wolfy-puppy-face? Is it you? Yes it is! Yes it is!
posted by DingoMutt at 1:17 PM on May 3, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 2:05 PM on May 3, 2013

Incidentally, the Fish and Wildlife Service is now in the process of taking grey wolves off the endangered species list (it's already happened in most of the Northern Rockies and Cascades states).
posted by lunasol at 2:08 PM on May 3, 2013

Excellent post, thanks! I'm familiar with their work, but I didn't know about the Flickr page. In addition to the picture DingoMutt mentioned, I really like this one. It's interesting that the puppies are born with such dark coats. Maybe that's adaptive while they're in the den?

I'm not sure what the wild red wolf's future will look like. There's also the fact that allowing night hunting of coyotes endangers the remaining red wolf population because there's a lot of genetic intermixing and it can be very difficult to tell them apart.
posted by quiet earth at 6:58 PM on May 3, 2013

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
posted by homunculus at 10:31 AM on May 12, 2013