The stars aligned for the pups from El Paso three days before their flight. So far, the agency says, at least 13 have done so. The agency recently set a “genetic objective” of at least 22 cross-fostered pups surviving in the wild to breeding age, or 2 years old. Dens are identified by GPS and radio telemetry data, which is available because about half of wild Mexican wolves wear radio collars. The agency’s main approach today is flying zoo pups - with their more varied genetics - to the high desert within two weeks of their birth, driving them into the mountains, hiking them to a wild den, placing them in a litter born within 10 days of the zoo babies and hoping the wild mother “fosters” them. In 2018, a federal court ordered Fish and Wildlife to better manage the wolves’ dire genetic state, which threatens their health, reproduction and long-term viability. Every Mexican wolf alive today is a descendant of those seven wolves.Ībout 380 Mexican wolves live in zoos and other facilities in the United States and Mexico, and they are inbred and, in scientific parlance, “genetically depressed.” The 200 or so in the “experimental population area” where the federal program’s rules allow the wolves to roam, straddling Arizona and New Mexico, are even more so - on average, as related as siblings. Later, two other captive wolves would be determined to have distinct genetic lineages.
The last wild wolves, five straggling survivors, were captured in Mexico and taken into captivity in the late 1970s. Across the Southwest, they were hunted and trapped in campaigns often aided by the government. But settlers’ livestock provided a new option, one that nearly doomed the canines.
They are smaller and browner than their Northern Rockies relatives, although scientists say it is likely they intermingled when wolves roamed the continent, before European settlement.ĭeer may have been Mexican wolves’ main food source back then. Mexican wolves are North America’s rarest subspecies of gray wolves. TOP: An adult Mexican wolf is seen in an enclosure at El Paso Zoo, as workers prepare to retrieve pups for the cross-fostering program. Its feet, studded with petite claws, stuck straight out. “We’re going to see if anybody has to potty,” Milne said, rubbing a cotton ball soaked in warm water between one pup’s hind legs. For the next several hours, these wolves were between mothers - their birth mother in El Paso and their wild foster mother in New Mexico - so Milne would have to do it herself. Newborn wolves do not urinate and defecate on their own their mother licks them to stimulate the processes. Soon, she was pulling on rubber gloves and reaching into the carrier. “Rarely is conservation so hands-on,” said Vikki Milne, the zoo veterinarian, over the blast of the plane’s air conditioning. So, for now, the agency has placed much of its hope on the tiny, furred shoulders of “cross-foster” pups like the trio on the plane. Fish and Wildlife Service, which spent $2.8 million managing it in 2021, stopped introducing adult wolves, which ranchers and some officials say are more likely to be habituated to humans and be aggressive. The recovery program is contentious enough that the U.S. And humans remain an enormous threat - poaching, cars and encounters with cattle have caused the deaths of nearly as many Mexican wolves as the number roaming the wild today. Ranchers argue that wolves ruin rural livelihoods. Risks to the pups abounded in the rolling peaks below, and doubts about whether all the effort was worth it flourished far beyond.Ĭonservationists have sued the government over its Mexican-wolf management, which they and researchers say ignores science and sets the animals up for failure. Their destination was the den of a wild wolf pack in the New Mexico mountains, where it was hoped the pups would be adopted into the pack, their genes bolstering an inbred population and helping to restore an apex predator and perhaps eventually providing a link in a chain of wolf populations stretching from Canada to Mexico. The pups had been whisked from their birthplace, El Paso Zoo, two hours before. They were flanked by a veterinarian and a zookeeper, chaperones for this leg of a precisely choreographed operation. The pups were protected by a soft pet carrier and kept toasty - 78 degrees, an attached thermometer indicated - by hand warmers wrapped in a towel. Their worth, as some of the newest members of a critically endangered species, was immeasurable.
Their weight was less than three pounds each, their 10-day-old eyes still screwed shut.
In a private plane soaring 26,000 feet over pine-swathed mountains, three tawny Mexican wolf pups slept.
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