Dan Flores
speaker
4,468 appearances
23 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Aug
Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But by 1970, Ron Nowak, another Louisianan who eventually became Fish and Wildlife's endangered species guru, figured that from Texas eastward, there were at most only 300 red wolves left.
After blessedly rejecting a dog fence hundreds of miles long, reminiscent of the dingo fence across Australia for keeping migrating hybrids and coyotes away from red wolves, in 1973, biologist Curtis Carley, the field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Team, tried another approach to save red wolves.
Carly came up with a template using skeletal morphology and recorded howls to try to identify actual red wolves for placement in a captive breeding program.
His method for identifying a true red wolf wasn't exactly rocket science.
But in 1974, the recovery team set up facilities at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, to breed the wolves he'd selected to save the red wolf from extinction.
Carly's team had examined animals believed to be red wolves in 50 different zoos and had identified but a single animal they thought was a pure red wolf.
They then shocked zoo personnel by insisting that every animal they had cataloged as a coyote-red wolf hybrid ought to be destroyed.
Carly's trappers caught another 400 canids in the wild, but of those, only 10% made the cut.
Ultimately, they concluded they had found just 14 animals out of 450 to begin Red Wolf recovery.
All those others, betrayed by the sin of miscegenation and coyote blood, were destroyed.
But Red Wolf recovery was now underway in places far from coyotes.
And in 1987, red wolves were released in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.
Routinely shot and hit by cars, red wolves were soon removed from Great Smoky Mountains Park.
While they're still present on the wildlife refuge in North Carolina, the wild population today has dropped to a mere 25 animals, making America's red wolves the most endangered wolf species on Earth.
Returning them to their original range in the West now seems remote.
Recently, though, researchers have discovered wild canids on the Louisiana-Texas border that still carry as much as 10% red wolf ancestry and infrequently as much as 75%.
These so-called ghost wolves include red wolf genetics not found in the 14 animals that founded the Carolina lines.
It gives me a secret thrill, I'll confess, to know that those long-legged, yellow-eyed hybrids I saw as a teenager are still out there.
With luck, we may be able to add in their genes to create healthier red wolves.
As for Mexican wolves, their recovery commenced in the late 1970s with issues that seemed similarly insurmountable.
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