According to a study published last month in the scientific journal Animal Conservation, wild red wolves in eastern North Carolina had a significant ecological impact prior to their dramatic decline in recent years. 

A final recovery plan for the red wolf, a document from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that will guide recovery efforts for an imperiled native species, is now complete.

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.