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
The problem was that we'd been too effective in wiping them out.
There were almost no Mexican wolves left, certainly no packs that might be captured and transplanted.
The best guess was that maybe five wild Mexican wolves remained alive on either side of the border in the 1970s.
But between 1978 and 1980, a federal predator hunter named Roy McBride, working in Mexico, managed to capture three males and in a wild stroke of luck, a 10-year-old pregnant female he named Nina.
Eventually, the breeding program acquired two more wolf lines from captive animals, the Ghost Ranch and Aragon lineages.
But Mexican wolf recovery faced the hurdle of a genetic bottleneck of only three lines of animals.
So trappers scoured nearby Mexico for a few more animals to try to diversify this small gene pool.
When Fish and Wildlife released its recovery plan in 1982, a new problem surfaced.
No one in the Southwest knew
seemed to want the animals.
The Reagan administration actually told target states they could say no, and at least one state did so.
Big Bend National Park was a prime release site, but Texas leaped at a chance to make wolves forever unwelcome in the Lone Star State.
The best New Mexico could do was to offer up the military bombing range north of White Sands National Monument.
or at least it did so until stock interests persuaded the state to withdraw even that possibility.
But after first equivocating, Arizona eventually proffered the Blue Range, a large national forest primitive area east of Phoenix that merged into the famous Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, a wild locale that satisfied both southwestern states.
A key move in releasing Mexican wolves into the wild was labeling the population experimental and non-essential, meaning the wolves would not have full endangered species protections.
Another key move came when Hank Fisher of Defenders of Wildlife
told Southwestern stockmen that his group would pay market compensation for any livestock wolves killed.
So the nearly unbelievable moment came in March of 1998 when released Pandoras high in the Blue Mountains opened and 11 Mexican wolves loped off to be wild wolves once more.
Amidst all the sound and fury, at least wolves were finally back
Showing 1821–1840 of 4,468 · page 92 of 224
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