RED WOLF RISING

On a swampy peninsula in Eastern North Carolina rove the planet’s last wild red wolves, their presence and survival here historically fraught. Now, for the first time in a long while, the impassioned team of scientists and advocates defending them against extinction see cause for hope

By Lindsey Liles

Every twenty-four to fifty hours, a set of coordinates pings out from each of the orange radio collars fastened around the necks of seventeen tawny-hued canines roaming the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, in North Carolina. The latitudes and longitudes transmit to wildlife biologist Joe Madison’s cell phone, updating the seventeen lone dots on a map that represent the beating hearts of the only wild red wolves in existence. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) employee evaluates where his subjects are, if each one is alive. Because out here in the sprawling, 1.7-million-acre jumble of wetlands, farmland, and woods that lie just inland from the Outer Banks, survival for the world’s most endangered wolf is no guarantee. On a late April morning, Madison drives his dirt-spattered field truck down an unpaved road…

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Garden & Gun (Digital) - 1 Issue, April/May 2025

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