The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing nine red wolves for release into the world’s only wild population of the critically endangered species — an act that will boost the total wild red wolf population by about 60%. The nine wolves include a family group and two breeding pairs that will play a critical role in population recovery. 

Christopher Lile, 23, was just months away from graduating to begin a career in wildlife conservation when he first learned that North Carolina has a native wolf population. He was sitting in a senior-year class at Gardner-Webb University, and a Defenders of Wildlife representative was speaking about the red wolf. 

Studying the red wolf fiasco taking place in eastern North Carolina takes me far away in time and distance — back to northeastern Louisiana in December 1969. 

I was 18 years old, sitting in a deer stand on the last day of season. It was a cold morning with a light breeze blowing a wispy fog around. My view would be clear one moment then shrouded in fog the next. It was a melancholy kind of morning as I looked out across a bulldozed clearcut to a small 800-acre patch of woods thinking this patch and a few more like it were all that was left of hundreds of square miles of wilderness that was once Beouf River swamp.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife (F&W) held a public meeting regarding proposed rule changes to its Red Wolf Recovery Plan. According to Defenders of Wildlife’s Ben Prater, this public meeting echoed most of the other polls and/or comment periods regarding the recovery plan.

“Of the 22 people who spoke only two were opposed to the red wolf program,” Prater noted.