Book Review: The Secret World of Red Wolves

There are very few animals on earth as famous/infamous as the wolf.  Everyone knows - or at least thinks they know - about wolves: howling at the moon, running in packs, etc.  In many ways, the saga of the gray wolf is an allegory for our relationship with all of nature: first peaceful coexistence, then competition, then wars of eradication, and now a chance for redemption.  The return of the wolf to Yellowstone National Park is one of the most spectacular conservation stories in American history.  The current struggle to define the legal status of gray wolves in the continental US still makes headlines and produces strong opinions.

What makes all of this remarkable, however, is that very few people seem to remember that there are, in fact, two wolf species native to this country.

"The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf" is the subtitle T. DeLene Beeland gives to her newly released The Secret World of Red Wolves.  For the first time ever, an author has gathered up all available information about Canis rufus, the forgotten red wolf, and brought it together in one volume, easily accessible for all audiences.  In sections titled "Today", "Yesterday", and "Tomorrow", Beeland introduces North America's most endangered wild dog and explains how it came to be in its precarious position.  She takes us back to the first days of European colonization to see wolves as they appeared through the eyes and pens of the earliest explorers.  She describes the decline of the species - once roaming the entire southeast United States, it was eventually driven to extinction in the wild.  She takes us through the woods and swamps of North Carolina with the biologists who are struggling to reestablish the red wolf into the wild, where it belongs.

Beeland also takes readers to the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, where she explains how the AZA's partnership with Fish and Wildlife has helped snatch the wolf back from the brink of extinction.  Her chapter on red wolf ex situ recovery offers an insight into how zoos have participated (and continue to participate) in breeding endangered species for reintroduction into the wild.  It's a success that we've had with only a relative handful of species, but one which we should be very proud of nonetheless.

In her final and (for me) most thought-provoking chapter, Beeland discusses what may, in the future, be the greatest threat to red wolves.  Not guns or cars... not genetic swamping and hybridization with coyotes... but global climate change.  Red wolves are found only in one place in the world, which happens to be a) very flat and b) right against the ocean.  Should sea levels rise, the wolves could find themselves flooded out of house and home.  The species which so many people have worked so hard to save could be lost once more... unless we manage to establish more than one wild population.

If the world of the red wolf is a secret one, we have only ourselves to blame.  Zoos helped save this beautiful, unique canine from extinction through captive breeding.  Only by alerting an unaware world to its fate can we keep it safe.  Beeland's book offers this overlooked animal the publicity it so desperately needs.

The Secret World of Red Wolves at Amazon.com