Dan Flores

Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals who can take on situations like big cities or jungles with a calm conviction of purpose.

Adventurous ones may be hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar, but just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some are without question pushing through Darien Park to Columbia as I write this.

When they succeed, they will almost certainly spread across all of South America.

For coyotes, this may well be their version of a planet B, of a Mars perhaps.

Given their candid version of a human-like self-confidence, coyotes have a certain penchant for making the news.

Colonizing another continent is a story that's hard to top, but there are other candidates.

Not many other animals are participating in the rescue of a fellow mammal from extinction.

But a particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and biologists have now named ghost wolves, has attracted attention from geneticists for doing exactly that.

The species they're helping to rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on the planet.

There's a true irony in this particular story.

Since a half century ago, biologists believed the primary threat to red wolf survival was interbreeding with migrating coyotes who were swamping red wolf genetics.

I was a young teenager in Louisiana just when these hybridization events were happening.

Among the coyotes I was seeing back then, I twice came face to face with strapping leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes that sure looked like wolfy coyotes.

If these were coyote-red wolf hybrids, and they almost certainly were, that mixture made for gorgeous animals.

But for the next several decades, the recovery program for saving red wolves under the Endangered Species Act largely meant destroying hybrid animals and sequestering pure red wolves away from coyotes.

So how delicious is it now that unlike gray wolves in the West, red wolves, having been particularly difficult to pull back from the brink, have a new chance.

With a rescued population in 1980 of a mere 14 founding animals, red wolves for half a century have suffered from a sharply constrained genetic diversity.

On the pair of North Carolina National Wildlife Refuges where we've tried to save them, the wild population of red wolves right now has dropped to a mere 25.

Meanwhile, though, local residents in Galveston, Texas, have for several years been noticing that some of the coyotes on their island are at the least unusual looking.

Starting in 2018, genetic analysis of coyotes there and in nearby Louisiana revealed something that, in retrospect, shouldn't have surprised us.