By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
The Mexican gray wolf is clawing its way back from the brink of extinction.
Brady McGee, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Mexican wolf recovery coordinator, works with state wildlife officials from New Mexico and Arizona on the recovery effort.
McGee will discuss the progress of the wolf recovery at the June Wildlife Wednesday event put on by the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. The free event starts at 5:30 p.m., June 14, at Marble Brewery’s Northeast Heights Taproom, at 9904 Montgomery Blvd NE, Albuquerque.
“I came into this position in 2018, and there were a minimum of 111 wolves on the ground at that time,” McGee said. “Since then, in the last five years, the number has more than doubled. We have a minimum as of last year’s count of 241. We are making strides within the recovery part of the program.”
Of those 241, McGee said 136 are in New Mexico and 105 in Arizona. He said there’s another small population in Mexico, a couple of hundred miles south of the border.
“At the same time, with more wolves on the ground, there are going to be more issues to have to deal with,” McGee said
The 2022 population estimate represents a 23-percent increase from the minimum of 196 wolves in 2021. This year’s results mark the seventh consecutive year of population growth and a more than doubling of population since 2017.
“This milestone has been 25 years in the making,” McGee stated in a recent agency release. “To go from zero wild Mexican wolves at the start to 241 today is truly remarkable. In 2022, we recorded more packs, more breeding pairs, and a growing occupied range, proving we are on the path to recovery. These achievements are a testament to partner-driven conservation in the West.”
Mexican Gray Wolves were completely gone in the wild by the mid-1900s, McGee said. All the wolves alive today come from a base population of only seven animals.
“There were two in a zoo, and there were rumors of some in Mexico,” he said. “And in 1976, the Fish and WIldlife Service sent a guy to Mexico to see if he could find some down there, and he actually found five in the wild. He captured everything he could find. He actually brought those back. And those were the last five in the wild. We started mixing them with the two that were already in the zoos and that’s where the seven came from.”
Dealing with such a limited original gene pool makes breeding decisions critical.
“We have a captive population of about 60 zoos and captive facilities that breed wolves, and we have about 350 Mexican wolves in those 60 facilities,” McGee said. “And because of those facilities, we can play god and say who breeds who and produces what offspring. There’s a computer model that we plug the genetics into and it spits out who would produce the best genetics,”
The control over captive breeding means the captive population has better genetics than wolves in the wild, McGee said.
“We’ve identified genetics as being a threat under the recovery plan and we’ve also identified that we need to do an initial release of at least 22 wolves from captivity that will survive to breeding age and get their genetics in the wild in order to boost the wild genetics,” McGee said. “And so we are taking puppies from captivity, putting them in wild dens and mixing them, and letting the wild parents raise those puppies to be wild.”
Past efforts to release captive adult wolves into the wild haven’t worked, McGee said.
“When we released those, they literally showed up on people’s back porches eating their dog food to not being scared to humans, to causing all sorts of problems, to not knowing how to kill and survive,” McGee said. “And so by taking puppies and mixing them, we’re getting the genetics out there but we’re also, the wild parents are teaching them how to be wild, so we don’t have those sort of issues that we have when we’re releasing adult wolves.”
Mexican Gray Wolves are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. South of I-40 in New Mexico, in their designated home range, they can be discouraged from molesting livestock through the use of rubber bullets, noise-makers and, in rare cases, even killing a wolf that won’t stop killing livestock. North of I-40, they’re fully protected as endangered species, and the federal law prevents anyone from interfering with them.
McGee said his agency tracks the wolves and commonly catches them if they try to disburse north of I-40 and takes them back to the home range.
Government programs reimburse ranchers for the value of lost livestock if federal investigators confirm that wolves are responsible for losses. Even so, McGee said the presence of wolves remains a highly charged issue in areas of southwestern New Mexico.
“Wolves are super, super contentions, super, super polarizing,” McGee said. “And always under some litigation, whether it’s grays or Mexican grays.”
The political pressure can sometimes reach biologists in the field, McGee said.
“I can give examples of times where there was a depredation situation occurring in New Mexico and I had U.S. Rep. Yvette Harrell calling me and telling me to kill that wolf,” McGee said. “At the same time, I had U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich calling me and saying, ‘leave that wolf alone.’”
Herrell, a Republican, lost her reelection bid last fall to U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., a staunch conservationist. Vasquez in April announced he was introducing the “Wolf and Livestock Fairness” or WOLF Act, together with Rep. Greg Stantono, D-Ariz., to compensate ranchers fully for the loss of livestock killed by wolves.
McGee said livestock depredations have been fairly steady over the past three years even as the wolf population has increased.
McGee said he intends to address some of the persistent myths about wolves in his presentation.
“They used to put up, and there’s still a few of them down there, like bus stop cages in Catron County, to protect their kids from being eaten by wolves,” McGee said. “They’ve taken some of those down, but they still have some of those up. There are a lot of myths out there. Wolves don’t eat people. You’re more likely to die from a bee sting than you are from being attacked and killed by a wolf. They don’t go after kids or people or anything like that.”
Nonetheless, McGee said there is still plenty of hatred for wolves in certain areas. “There are a number of folks out there on the landscape who have realized that not everything is true. They’ve learned to tolerate them a little bit more and maybe they’re not as big and bad and scary as what they were first made out to be. But then there are still a lot of folks out there that still hate wolves with everything they’ve got, and will make all sorts of claims, true or not, about wolves.”
The recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf maps out requirements that must be met before ultimately turning management of the animals over to the New Mexico and Arizona state governments.
“The goal within the US, in Arizona and New Mexico is to establish a population of 320 wolves on average, for four years,” McGee said. “And if we do that, and identify that the threats are minimal, we can downlist to threatened.”
At that point, the federal government could turn over some wolf management authority to the states. “To delist, and get them completely off the endangered species list, we need 320 wolves on average over an eight-year period in the US, as well as a separate population in Mexico of 200 wolves.”
The Mexico population component may ultimately present the greatest challenge.
“There is a population of wolves down in Mexico, about 200 miles south of the Arizona and New Mexico borders, that they try to work closely with Mexico on,” McGee said. “Last population count, there was between 15 and 30 wolves down there. They started their reintroduction effort in 2011, and we started ours in 1998. And they also have a series of other threats down there that we don’t have here, including illegal poisoning, and so there’s a different set of challenges that are happening down there.”
McGee said his job allows him to make a meaningful contribution to a place he holds sacred.
“For me, one of the reasons I took this job is that I’m a big bow hunter, I love being outside,” McGee said. “I spent a lot of time out in the Gila National Forest, running around, on my own time, camping, fishing, hunting, and I”ve had a lot of experiences down there with wolves. To me, that is my church, my spiritual place, and I wanted to do something that made a difference.”
In addition, McGee said he grew up on a ranch in central Texas and said his entire family is still in the ranching business. “And so I know what it’s like to make a living off of the land, as well as what it’s like to ranch in a harsh landscape like Southwest New Mexico,” he said. “So, one of the things about this program I’m trying to do is offset impacts to ranchers in the area as well.”