Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf

In this piece for Garden&Gun, Lindsey Liles spends time with the team trying to save the red wolf. Only 17 remain, on a peninsula in North Carolina, and trying to keep them alive is an emotionally harrowing experience. Liles lives through the triumphs and sorrows of the people with the “crushing burden of holding the fate of a species in [their] hands”.

The ups and downs of each passing year leave their mark on the biologists. They celebrate the successes—the matriarch of the Milltail pack, who produces pups annually; the reintroduced red wolves that go on to thrive in the wild; the grandmother that died of old age at thirteen. But the setbacks hit harder. Madison still tears up when recalling 2323, a male hit by a car almost two years ago after fathering the first wild-born litters in several years. And the death of 2267 sparks such profound anger he almost can’t speak of it. The team found that red wolf—a captive introduced as a mate for a wild female—shot in a field, dead not from the bullet but from choking on the watery mud he inhaled as he lay where he fell. 

Kim Wheeler, the longtime director of the Red Wolf Coalition, a nonprofit that supports the species, sees up close the emotional toll on the field team. “I have tremendous respect for them,” she says. “Joe Madison has stuck his neck out for these animals when most people would have run in the other direction.”