Dan Flores

It turns out there are still canids in that part of the world carrying red wolf ancestry, often 10% or more.

Occasionally, an animal has turned up whose red wolf genes approach 75%.

Even more startling, some of these wild coyotes possess red wolf alleles entirely distinctive from the makeup of the North Carolina red wolf populations, whose complete genome had suffered when we attempted to rebuild their numbers from such a small group of founders.

So not only are these mixed coyote-red wolf animals I saw as a teenager still out there, all along they've preserved wolf genetics that, with the assistance of modern science, can diversify red wolves and help save them.

Colossal Biosciences, the famed de-extinction company that in 2025 genetically engineered direwolves, simultaneously announced that it had birthed four cloned red wolf puppies from the lost wolf genetics preserved by these deep south hybrid coyotes.

Hope, or Nekakida, her Karankawa name, is the sole female of the four.

Blaze, Concern, and Cinder are the three males.

The odds of saving red wolves, and a more healthy and complete version of them, have suddenly gone up dramatically.

Paying attention to coyotes has taught me one final valuable lesson about them and us.

Since the beginnings of wildlife management, we humans, all committed individualists ourselves, have thought of other animals almost entirely in terms of species, a lumpen aggregate of like creatures.

Naturalists such as Seton tried to redirect that thinking with articles like Tito, only to have no less than a president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, castigate him as a nature faker.

Yet when famed ecologist Adolph Murie studied the wolves of Mount McKinley Park 40 years later, he found the gray wolves there to be very distinct individuals.

Murie even gave his study animals names, Dandy, Robber Mask, Grandpa, and Wags.

It strikes me as a myopic disconnect that we humans have no trouble understanding our companion animals as individuals, yet can still insist that Walt Disney was anthropomorphizing deer when he gave one a personality and called him Bambi.

That longstanding recourse to a species focus in wildlife management is still there, but the world of 21st century human-wildlife coexistence is shifting despite it.

The evidence is everywhere.

The New York Times actually ran an obituary of the female Yellowstone wolf biologist had named 06 when she was killed by a Montana hunter.

Park naturalist Rick McIntyre is even now publishing biographical books about individual wolves in Yellowstone.

The Hollywood Hills Griffith Park Cougar, known as P-22, became a celebrity lion in celebrity-filled Los Angeles.

On the opposite side of the country, for several decades now, Manhattanites have recognized Central Park's red-tailed hawks, barred owls, and yes, coyotes, with individual names, like Romeo and Juliet, the mated pair in Central Park in 2025.