Red Wolf Rising

Red Wolves in North Carolina...

NOTE: this article was originally published to Garden & Gun's Apple News channel. It was written by Lindsey Liles.

On a swampy peninsula in Eastern North Carolina rove the planet’s last wild red wolves, their presence and survival here historically fraught. Now, for the first time in a long while, the impassioned team of scientists and advocates defending them against extinction see cause for hope

Every twenty-four to fifty hours, a set of coordinates pings out from each of the orange radio collars fastened around the necks of seventeen tawny-hued canines roaming the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, in North Carolina. The latitudes and longitudes transmit to wildlife biologist Joe Madison’s cell phone, updating the seventeen lone dots on a map that represent the beating hearts of the only wild red wolves in existence. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) employee evaluates where his subjects are, if each one is alive. Because out here in the sprawling, 1.7-million-acre jumble of wetlands, farmland, and woods that lie just inland from the Outer Banks, survival for the world’s most endangered wolf is no guarantee.

On a late April morning, Madison drives his dirt-spattered field truck down an unpaved road in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, heading for the most recent ping. He cuts a striking figure—tall and burly, with a bushy beard that renders him unmistakable, even at a distance. At first encounter, he is polite but professional, his shrewd blue eyes sizing up the situation and the person. But over time in the field, the exterior thaws. He’s quick to wield sarcasm at his own expense, quick to laugh, and quick to acknowledge that humor helps him cope with the crushing burden of holding the fate of a species in his hands. And he’s always happy to talk red wolves, both because he knows the deeply controversial species needs positive press and, by Madison’s own admission, he talks about little else anyway.

He hangs one hand out the window, holding a radio antenna and receiver that casts about for a signal in a game of hot and cold—the louder the beep, the closer the wolf. Madison stops the truck and scans the landscape with binoculars. There, just visible above the tall grasses, hover a black nose, a long, rust-colored snout, and golden eyes crowned by a giant pair of ears. A male, born last spring, still lanky and youthful. “That red wolf right there represents five percent of the entire wild population,” Madison says.

The canine belongs to the Milltail pack; it and the Pungo are the only two packs in Eastern North Carolina. The section of their territory that lies in the refuge, where cooperative farms grow patches of soy and corn in filter strips, might seem unlikely. But the land’s working status makes it rich with prey like rabbits and rodents, and the surrounding woodlands and wetlands abound with all manner of migratory waterfowl, beavers, deer, and black bears.

Here, for the past four decades, a battle for the survival of the South’s only wolf has played out across the peninsula’s five counties. It is the site of one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s greatest triumphs, and one of its greatest failures. Now, for the first time in a long while, Madison—who has spent the past eight years as the manager of the North Carolina Red Wolf Recovery Program—sees hope emerging for the species. As a large sign in his office in Manteo reminds him: ENDANGERED MEANS THERE’S STILL TIME.

For thousands of years, when night fell, howls echoed through the eastern half of the country, a sound known and welcome to Native peoples: the voice of the red wolf. The Tuscarora of North Carolina’s coastal plains considered the animal sacred, a symbol of one of their seven clans. The Cherokee of the Appalachian Mountains called the wolf red grandfather, keeper of balance in the natural world.

Science supports that bit of ancient wisdom: As one of the region’s four apex predators, the red wolf helped control deer and small mammal populations, which in turn influenced plant communities in a cascade of effects that literally shaped landscapes and waterways. Every Southern state was forged alongside the red wolf, and yet humans have long feared, hated, and perhaps worst of all, forgotten this misunderstood species.

Red wolves are smaller and leaner than their better-known relative, the gray wolf. They lope on long, elegant legs built for covering distance. Telltale reddish fur tinges their muzzles, behind their ears, and the backs of their legs, but up close, their coats feature a kaleidoscope of earthy hues—tawny browns, blacks, tans, creams—that allow them to melt into almost any terrain.

Early settlers, on their conquering march across the continent, found no beauty in the wolf, red or gray—they heard only a spine-tingling howl and saw a threatening killer that would compete with them for deer and steal livestock. A mythical fear swirled, one personified in folklore, fairy tales, and eventually films. Western media has largely portrayed wolves as snarling beasts ever poised to chase, attack, and devour.

That characterization couldn’t be further from the truth. A red wolf is instead shy and retreating, deeply afraid of humans and the areas they occupy. If a human, for instance, walks into an enclosure with a fully grown red wolf—as Madison and caretakers at U.S. zoos do regularly—it will flee as far as possible across the pen.

In the wild, a red wolf pack is a family of between five and eight anchored by a breeding pair, bonded for life, and including their adolescent offspring and sometimes aunts, uncles, or grandmothers. They work together to hunt prey like rabbits, raccoons, and deer, picking off the sick and weak and, in so doing, improving herd health. All answer to the breeding mother, who presides as matriarch. She and her mate dole out affection and discipline, communicating with yaps, barks, snarls, and howls coupled with body language. Each spring, the family raises a litter together. Young pups yip, nip, and tumble over one another in play; they lick, nuzzle, and groom. After all, this is the highly intelligent creature that, many thousands of years ago, begot our most loyal companions—dogs.

The federal government didn’t see wolves that way. Alongside widespread habitat loss in the first half of the twentieth century, official bounties encouraged canine extermination nationwide. They were grimly effective: Gray, Mexican, and red wolves alike were shot, trapped, and poisoned almost to the point of extinction. In 1967, during a growing wave of environmentalism, the red wolf was listed as endangered, but the protection arrived late. The species was already mostly gone, and coyotes, once confined to the Central Plains states, were colonizing the wolves’ erstwhile range.

Coyotes are scrappy, opportunistic, and adaptable, and their proliferation is the price paid for red wolf eradication. Unlike wolves, coyotes, Madison points out, “are people-adapted, comfortable coming close to homes and farms.” And because red wolves have larger home ranges—a pack averages thirty square miles—in their absence, the same area of land might host three to four times as many coyote territories. “So here’s the real question,” Madison says. “Would you rather have red wolves or coyotes?”

Our predecessors inadvertently chose the latter. Once the species had functionally disappeared, the few red wolves that remained began to hybridize with coyotes in an instinctual last gasp to pass on their genes. Only one pocket of fourteen true red wolves endured, in swampy Texas and Louisiana wetlands, and in the late 1970s, the USFWS made the unprecedented decision to pull them from the wild and start a captive-breeding program.

That move saved the species and set the stage for the ensuing recovery effort in Eastern North Carolina—the USFWS’s first attempt to restore a large carnivore. In 1987, biologists released four pairs of red wolves at Alligator River. The program’s innovative tactics—including sterilizing coyotes to prevent hybrids and the fostering of captive pups by wild mothers—proved so effective that by 2012, some 120 red wolves were living in packs on the peninsula. Replicating the model out West led to the comeback of gray and Mexican wolves, too.

The field biologists watched decades of work crumble: The species they had worked so hard to save was being illegally shot and poisoned, and hit by cars. At the lowest point, only seven wild red wolves remained

Then the situation in North Carolina took a turn. By 2014, a vocal and politically active group of private landowners had decided it was wrong that a federal agency had introduced a large carnivore out onto the landscape and that they didn’t have the right to control it—or kill it—on their own land. USFWS leadership bowed to the pressure, issuing a lethal take permit to a landowner that year for a six-year-old female red wolf with no history of disturbing humans or property. Her death created a firestorm and sparked a lawsuit that the USFWS lost to environmental groups. But the damage was done: The agency suspended captive red wolf reintroductions into the wild.

Hamstrung, the USFWS field biologists watched decades of work crumble: The species they had worked so hard to save was being illegally shot and poisoned, and hit by cars. The population plummeted. At its lowest point, only seven wild red wolves remained.

Joe Madison, who had previously worked on gray wolf and bear management, joined the North Carolina red wolf program as manager in 2017, just after a longtime and beloved red wolf biologist, Chris Lucash, died following a battle with ALS. The team was reeling, both from his death and from the state of the program, but Madison accepted the position anyway. “I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess,” he says. “I knew it would be hard.”

He pauses. “But I didn’t know it would be this hard.”

On an average day, Madison’s phone dings so often that it would be comical if it weren’t so important that he answer. Any call or text could bring news of a red wolf in trouble or on private property. “People often think that they are just on the refuges out here,” he explains. But of course, red wolves don’t recognize borderlines. “They are in all five counties at any given time.”

Madison has worked hard to mend the agency’s relationships with landowners. As soon as he learns that a red wolf is spending time on private land, he calls the owner to answer questions and address concerns upfront—and to let him or her know that Madison is keyed into the animal’s whereabouts. Some are amenable; some are indifferent. Others hate red wolves, and Madison, and verbally abuse him at town hall meetings or on chance encounters. No matter the case, he strives to be patient and professional. “But,” he says with a note of steel, “I will not stand by and let fabricated lies about this species take hold.”

He pushes back against misconceptions: No, red wolves don’t compete with hunters for the best deer. No, they are not a coyote mongrel. No, they don’t kill livestock with abandon: Since reintroduction almost forty years ago, there have been eleven documented instances of red wolf livestock predation—mainly chickens.

Madison sets boundaries with supporters of the species, too. He asks that wildlife photographers keep their distance to avoid changing a red wolf ’s behavior. He’s careful never to slow his work with the animals to take photos—they are not props. He dislikes when the public names wolves or anthropomorphizes their behavior, because it makes them seem like pets and diminishes the wild, majestic animals they are. “Once, people started calling one of the male juveniles Airplane Ears,” he says. “They called another one Pam. I don’t know which is worse.” The field team sticks to the animal’s stud book number—each red wolf since the beginning of captive breeding has been numbered consecutively.

Still, he admits, “we get invested in them, all right, to our own detriment.” He and his small team—consisting of three bio techs and his two right hands, wildlife biologists Ryan Nordsven and Morgan Lewis—put every shred of energy into the wild population’s survival and growth. Together, they dream of the day the red wolves can live without human management, but until then, every detail of those seventeen lives remains very much their business. Each season brings its own chance of furthering that dream, rendering devastation, or usually, delivering a dose of both.

Spring mornings find Madison waiting for coordinates so he can start tracking—if all has gone well, he’ll have pregnant females on the landscape, and when one chooses a den site, the biologists need to know. Once she gives birth, the biologists have a mission: to record data, to microchip the pups, and, if the stars align, to slip in a close-in-age pup or two from captivity. This strategy—called pup fostering—has an extremely high success rate and gets more red wolves into the wild, while also introducing genetic diversity.

Handling the wild pups is an event colored by both reverence and urgency. “Even if they are damn cute,” Madison stresses, they are not to be coddled. “We’re in and out as fast as possible.” The procedure also underscores red wolf behavior for skeptics. “If ever there were a time for a red wolf to attack a person…a mother runs off while we literally crawl in a den and take her pups out one by one,” Madison says. “That ought to tell you just how scared red wolves are of humans.”

In the spring of 2024, thirteen new pups arrived in two litters, one to the Milltail pack and another to a human-orchestrated pairing of a wild female and a captive-born male.

Every summer since captive reintroductions restarted—thanks to a successful 2020 lawsuit environmental groups brought against the USFWS that cleared the red tape for Madison—everyone who works on red wolf recovery convenes to strategize about such matchmaking. Some call that meeting the big red wolf dating game, with the 270 red wolves living in captivity at fifty partner institutions as the contestants. Chris Lasher, the soft-spoken captive-population manager for the Saving Animals from Extinction (SAFE) American Red Wolf Program, ensures that all those charges are healthy and have remained as wild as possible. Because when Madison needs a red wolf, be it a pup for fostering or an adult for mating, Lasher needs to have one ready.

“Someday, I want people to walk Southeastern forests and hear a red wolf howl,” Lasher says of his motivation. “I want them to stop, listen, and take pride in this magnificent wolf that is uniquely ours.” When selecting red wolves, he engages in a careful genetic dance. Every individual alive today descends from those original red wolves the USFWS used to start the recovery program, so biologists must still account for inbreeding. Lasher and Madison consider such factors as behavior and genes, and then introduce the best candidates to the wild via a large outdoor acclimation pen in the territory they hope the animals will occupy. But “once the door to that pen opens,” Madison says, “all bets are off.”

“Someday, I want people to walk Southeastern forests and hear a red wolf howl,” says Chris Lasher, the captive-population manager. “I want them to stop, listen, and take pride in this magnificent wolf that is uniquely ours”

On June 5, the collar of 2444, a captive-born male red wolf, sends out a dreaded email notification. He is in mortality mode. Madison’s heart sinks: 2444 fathered one of the year’s new litters. Nordsven, closest to the coordinates, drives over to find 2444’s crumpled body on the side of Highway 64. After the death, for whatever reason, 2444’s mate—a first-time mother—never returns to the litter again. To make matters worse, the year’s other litter of eight pups, in the Milltail pack, disappear from the trail cameras out of the blue, too. The team presumes all thirteen of the newcomers dead.

In September, Madison gives one of his periodic public updates on the program. Partway through, he pauses suddenly. “I get told I don’t smile enough in these presentations, and I don’t think I’ve smiled once,” he says, forcing a chuckle. He apologizes and then explains the year’s agonizing losses in great detail. After floods of questions implying that he and his team did not do enough to save the pups, Madison chokes up while enumerating their limitations (if you drop food to pups, it can draw a bear; six weeks old is too late to foster them with another wild mother). By the end, he’s blown past his allotted time by nearly an hour.

“People don’t understand how we agonize over every call we make,” he says later. “At the end of the day, it’s us scraping red wolves off the side of the highway.”

Despite the summer's disappointment, Madison and the team forge ahead into October, the beginning of their busiest period: trapping season. Red wolf courtship begins in early winter, when the team mastermind matches by placing potential partners together in acclimation pens. But for that to happen, the canine in question has to be caught -no small feat.

"To catch a red wolf, you have to think like a red wolf," Madison says. Some-times, they'll hit the roadkill freezer - exactly what it sounds like - for a haunch of deer, and surround it with metal leghold traps that humanely ensnare the animal's foot. But previously caught red wolves are wise to their ways; some even dig up the traps. To combat that, Madison has left one out as though it's already been exposed, and then buried another beside it. He's planted traps next to old farm equipment on the refuge to camouflage the traps' suspicious smell of metal. He's set one on a remote footbridge, pinpointing the two-inch diameter where a crossing red wolf will step.

After weeks of rising before dawn to check the traps and finding nothing, on a cold, clear December day, Nordsven texts the group to announce a catch. A few hours later, everyone assembles at the Red Shed-the unofficial field headquar-ters-to process a young female red wolf. Nordsven sets the kennel down verti-cally, and she huddles fearfully in the bottom. He gently holds her with a Y pole-a long pole with a padded, Y-shaped end -and Lewis administers anesthesia.

Madison shushes a brewing buzz of chatter so their patient can slip out of consciousness calmly.

Once she's outfitted with muzzle and eye cover and laid on the table-a heated blanket beneath her-there's a flurry of motion. One team member takes a hair clipping and blood sample; another gives flea and tick medication, a rabies vaccine, and a heartworm preventative. Another measures her. Lewis gently opens the mouth and checks her teeth. Throughout, they monitor her vitals.

No one knows when-or if-this red wolf will ever be caught again. This is their chance to collect data and tend to health issues, plus change out the all-important reflective orange collar with her identifying number. "Hunter orange is a universal safety color," Madison explains. "Orange means don't shoot." Now, 2503 is ready for her fitting, a delicate matter since the collar must account for her growth without being loose enough to slip off.

The team cannot afford to cut a single corner or lose concentration for a second. "A processing must be successful," Madison emphasizes. As 2503 lies on the table, her musky scent fills the air. Lewis administers the reversal drug and carries her to a fresh, clean kennel. In less than ten minutes, she'll be awake and Madison, Lewis, and Nordsven will take her to a holding pen, mulling over whether she's ready, at just a year old, to pair with a mate.

Madison feels the tide of public animosity ebbing.

While the question of whether the South has what it takes to tolerate a large predator still hangs in the air, the captive and wild red wolf numbers are growing

Important as red wolf matchmaking is, preventing coyote and red wolf interbreeding is equally crucial. So the team traps coyotes as well. On a Thursday in December, two days after 2503's processing, veterinarian Christian Ford's phone lights up with a text from Madison: "We've got a female coyote, about a year old. Any chance you can work her in for tomorrow? Twenty-nine pounds."

As he usually does, Ford accepts.

The next day, Madison and Lewis make the hour-long drive with the coyote to Ford's vet clinic in Edenton for sterilization- a big investment of both time and money, but one that pays off. Euthanizing coyotes would be fruitless because more would just move in, and spaying or neutering causes behavioral changes. A sterile coyote, though, will continue its hormone cycles and mating (without reproducing), all while defending its territory from other coyotes until red wolves move in and displace it. This is called placeholder theory, Madison explains, and it works: Sterilization has led to a dramatic drop in litters of coy-ote-wolf hybrids, which must be euthanized to preserve genetic purity.

Over seventeen years, Ford has conducted hundreds of sterilizations, providing medicines and equipment at cost and donating his time. "We see ourselves as part of this team," he says. In the first half of 2025, he and Madison hope to ramp up sterilizations by working with a nonprofit that will train Ford and Madison's group to conduct such operations en masse.

In March, when trapping ends, Madison and his team turn their attention to monitoring the breeding pairs. Things are looking favorable for four matches: one in the Milltail pack, one in the Pungo pack, one from the pairing of a wild female with a male from captivity, and one that's especially exciting because it happened naturally-a young male from Alligator River dispersed into Pungo territory and has been keeping company with a young female. "We're going to let that play out," Madison says. "It would be the first match of two wild red wolves without us helping in nearly a decade."

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."

Despite the current administration's ambitions to slash federal funding, in

terms of the program itself, Madison has never felt more hopeful-in part because of the many program partners like Wheeler's. The Red Wolf Coalition conducts education and outreach, pays landowners for any livestock fatalities wolves cause, and bankrolls coyote sterilizations. Last year, when Madison called Wheeler about a new $30,000 acclimation pen, she found the money. At the state level, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission has formally recognized the red wolf as a species, and will reengage in recovery efforts.

Other important projects await on the horizon. To address car strikes, the leading cause of death over the past decade, a newly acquired $25 million grant will fund the construction of underpasses on Highway 64. The USFWS's relationship with landowners continues to improve, too, thanks to Prey for the Pack, a program that helps owners reach their management goals in return for their tolerance of red wolves. Back in the heat of the controversy, the plan wouldn't have stood a chance. Now Madison has about a dozen participants, including two recent additions that unlocked twelve thousand acres of prime habitat.

Some tension lingers, but Madison feels the tide of public animosity ebbing.

While the question of whether, ultimately, the South has what it takes to tolerate a large predator on the landscape still hangs in the air, the captive and wild red wolf numbers are growing. "I know seventeen wild red wolves doesn't sound like a lot," he says, but the methodology is there for recovery. "We brought them back once. We can do it again." And when the time is right, a new plan outlines how biologists can look to the next site. "But there is nowhere in this country where we can do this on federal land alone," Madison says. "It's going to take private lands, and public support."

To that end, he’s particularly proud of the Red Wolf Center, on the peninsula’s Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, a collaboration between the USFWS, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, and the Red Wolf Coalition. The building serves as a field hub where the team can process red wolves, but it welcomes the public, too. Madison and the nonprofit Champions for Wildlife worked with an acclaimed muralist and local artists to create a striking mural of two red wolves and two pups on the front. “We need the community to feel pride in this animal, and to have some ownership of it,” he says. There’s an exhibition on the species inside, and outside, an enclosure for two captive red wolves, a chance for citizens to connect with the animals in the flesh. This year, for the first time, a male-female pair is living there, which means the prospect of pups. “A red wolf pup can thaw anybody’s heart,” Madison says.

So too could a howl. One night, Madison was on the refuge checking traps, and the red wolves of the Milltail pack started howling back and forth to one another. “That sound—long, drawn out, distinctive—there’s something emotional about it,” he remembers. “To hear them communicating, telling each other things you don’t understand…that is the sound of the wild. It’s sacred.”