Preparing American Red Wolves for Release
- Emily Evans
- Jun 6, 2024
- 3 min read
By Judah Jamison, Lead Animal Care Specialist & SAFE American Red Wolf Liaison
In October 2023, M2191 (Finch), a seven-year-old American Red Wolf born at Wolf Haven, was transferred to an acclimation pen on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina. At the annual Saving Animals From Extinction (SAFE) meeting in July 2023, Finch was identified as a potential candidate for release due to his genetics, as well as his shy and human-adverse demeanor. Despite seven years under human care, Finch was only ever monitored by animal care staff from a distance or through remote camera footage.
Most of the American Red Wolves at Wolf Haven are housed out of public view, and we make efforts to keep them unaccustomed to human presence through the placement of temporary or permanent visual barriers. The wolves live in vegetated enclosures and are encouraged to engage in natural behaviors such as caching food and digging dens. We feed them a diet of whole prey including deer, elk, salmon, turkey, and rabbits; and when we learned that Finch could possibly be released into the wild, we added rodents to his diet. The five-county recovery area in North Carolina includes public and private lands that host substantial crop agriculture, drawing in rodents that wild American Red Wolves utilize for food.
Before his transfer, Finch also received a thorough veterinary exam and vaccinations. Animal care staff gathered to capture and crate Finch in the wee hours of the morning for his early flight from Seattle to Raleigh-Durham, where he was picked up by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service staff and taken to the refuge. Upon arrival, he was released into an acclimation pen in the territory of the Milltail pack.
Over the next three months, the pack's breeding female (F2225), along with her four two-year-old’s and four yearlings, visited Finch in the acclimation pen before he was released on the evening of January 26, 2024. By mid-April, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) confirmed that F2225 and M2191 produced their own litter of eight pups! There is little more touching to us than knowing a wolf from our care is now free to roam with a pack of his own.
Finch is the second American Red Wolf from Wolf Haven to be released into the wild in North Carolina, following the release of F2216 (house-named Iris) in 2021. In addition to these pivotal releases, five litters of American Red wolves have been born at Wolf Haven in the past 20 years. Sanctuary Director & SAFE Mexican Wolf Secretary Pamela Maciel Cabañas is continually inspired by the work Wolf Haven is doing to conserve and protect wolves. “To have any of these pups not only get a chance to live their full potential in their natural habitat, but to also potentially contribute to the growth and genetic diversity of the wild population by producing pups of their own, brings the work we do full circle.”
For more information about Wolf Haven's American Red Wolf and Mexican wolf conservation efforts, please visit wolfhaven.org/conservation/SAFE. Updates from USFWS on the wild American Red Wolf population can be found at fws.gov/project/red-wolf-recovery-program, and more news stories about Finch's release can be found on NPR & BBC.
