A Mexican Wolf Pup’s Journey into the Wild | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign [Music] This is what it sounds like to explore New Mexico's Gila Wilderness on horseback. On a recent assignment for National Geographic, I got to venture deep into the Gila with a photographer, podcast producer, and a backcountry guide. The Gila is a magical place filled with endless canyons, towering Ponderosa forest, and ancient cliff dwellings. It's also the nation's first official Wilderness Area. Congress defines a Wilderness as a place where natural ecosystems are left intact, and humans are only temporary visitors. The idea of officially protecting Wilderness can be traced back to a young forest ranger and the death of a wolf.

That story begins in the early 1900s when a young forest ranger named Aldo Leopold arrived in New Mexico to survey the land for the Forest Service. The prevailing philosophy of forestry back then was to manage the land for the benefit of the economy—think farming, logging, mining, and grazing. Part of Leopold's job was to get rid of all the predators, which were considered dangerous nuisances. But one day, after shooting a female wolf, the young forest ranger had a revelation. Aldo Leopold wrote about that experience years later: “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean a hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

That encounter sent Leopold on a mission to change the way people thought about humans and their place in the environment. Thanks to his efforts, in 1924, the Gila became the first officially recognized Wilderness Area. But his efforts weren't enough to save the wolves; eventually, they were hunted out of the entire Southwest, and the Gila was missing a crucial piece of its ecosystem.

Okay, so cut to almost a century later, and here we are, the Nat Geo crew exploring those pristine canyons that Leopold helped preserve. One night, as we were sitting around a fire talking about Aldo Leopold, I swear this is true, we heard an unmistakable sound rise out of the night. The wolves are back!

I'm Peter Gwen, editor at large at National Geographic magazine, and you're listening to Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, how hearing those howls sent me on a path to learn how wolves had made it back to the Gila. And check this out: one of the heroes of this tale used to be the wolves' biggest enemy. That's coming up right after the break.

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Oh [Music] This is the practiced and perfected howl of John Oakley, head of the wolf recovery program with U.S. Fish and Wildlife. One of the tricks he uses to find wild wolves is to howl into the night and see if any wolves howl back. It’s a skill he says takes a lot of practice. “So, myself, I sounded terrible and drove along in a truck by myself and howled along with wild wolves that were on tape and got my howl down where I sounded okay, and I could do it in front of other people. So that’s how it goes.”

“That’s what I need, man. I need some wolf tape so I can practice. That’s definitely what I've been missing.”

“So, tell me, how is a Mexican wolf different from a gray wolf?”

“So, Mexican wolves are a subspecies of gray wolves. They’re the smallest subspecies. They’re also the genetically most distinct subspecies that we can point to. Mexican wolves were the subspecies that adapted to the arid Southwest.”

John estimates that at their apex, there may have been tens of thousands of Mexican wolves living in the U.S. border states in northern Mexico, but by the late 1970s, there were none left in the U.S., and the only ones remaining were struggling to survive in remote mountains south of the border.

“What was the main cause of them going extinct?”

“Yeah, so it’s people. It’s the same major causes of mortality now. Basically, wolves were the villains back in the day. Wolves and ranches don’t mix. Cattle are defenseless against the predators. Wolves especially like going after young calves and heifers; heifers are young female cows and are extremely valuable. They’re basically the future of a ranch because they’ll give birth to the next season’s calves. In extreme cases, one wolf could kill four heifers in a single night. That’s a massive loss for a family-owned ranch. Because of this, ever since people began keeping livestock in the southwest, they’ve been hunting and trapping wolves to protect their livelihoods. By the early 1900s, when Aldo Leopold arrived, the eradication of wolves had become systematic. The U.S. government began a wolf extermination campaign—bounties were put out for wolf hides, and powerful new poisons like strychnine accelerated the process. By the 1960s, a few wolves that were around still killed cattle, and the ranchers wanted them gone. But the wolves had adapted and learned to avoid the smells of humans.”

“That’s where Roy T. McBride enters the story. Roy is kind of a unique figure; most of the wolf folks known for the traps, I grew up with McBride traps. Roy is a legend among people who study the Mexican wolf, partly because he’s considered one of the greatest wolf trackers of all time and partly for the traps he invented that bear his name. But mainly Roy's a legend because he played a critical role in saving the Mexican wolf from extinction."

"I'd heard about this guy, but I wasn't even sure he was still alive until I managed to get him on the phone. One of my first names is Joy, and then Thomas is my middle name. McBride is my last name.”

Although he’s 86 years old, Roy T. McBride still runs a cattle ranch in West Texas. We reached him on a landline telephone in a town nearby. Roy had a reputation as a trapper who could catch predators that no one else could—not just in Texas; a lot of places—in South America, leopards in Mongolia—and yeah, so of all the animals that you’ve caught, all the different species, which one was the hardest to catch?

“A wolf.”

In one famous story, Roy was contacted by the owners of a large ranch in Mexico called Las Margaritas. They wanted him to track down a wolf that had been devastating their cattle. The footprints this wolf left behind were easy to identify because one paw was missing two toes from a close encounter with a trap. That close call also taught the wolf to be extremely careful around human smells. Because none of Roy’s normal traps worked, he boiled them in oak leaves and put traps on remote game trails where he knew the Las Margaritas wolf had passed before, but she never seemed to take the same path twice and wasn't fooled by his attempts to camouflage the scent.

Roy tracked the Las Margaritas wolf across Mexico for 11 months as it went from ranch to ranch, eating cattle along the way. It killed 96 heifers in 11 months.

“Wow, one wolf? This Margaritas wolf killed 96 heifers?”

“Yeah, eventually he noticed Las Margaritas prints near campfires, as if the wolf might be scavenging. That gave him an idea: he set a trap and burned a campfire on top of it and then put a piece of dried roadkill skunk on it—boom! Wolf caught. And word spread that Roy T. McBride had caught the uncatchable wolf.”

Over the years, ranchers continued to hire Roy and other trappers to exterminate wolves, but slowly attitudes began to change. In 1973, Congress passed The Endangered Species Act, which protected the Mexican wolf. U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists knew the subspecies was close to extinction and realized the last chance to save the creatures was to start a breeding program. But it needed someone who could catch some of these rare wolves and bring them back alive. So they called Roy.

“And by the end, it was really hard to find them. There were hardly any of them left, but I got them enough to get their breeding thing started.”

“It seems interesting that you kind of went from the guy that could get rid of wolves to the guy to save him. Did that seem kind of like a strange turn of events to you when the government asked you, could you catch them and keep them alive?”

“Yeah, I could see they were gonna be kind of extinct, so I was glad that I got to do that. After two years of searching south of the border, Roy estimated that there were probably only 50 wild Mexican wolves left on the planet. He managed to trap six, including a pregnant female. Between these wolves, there was enough genetic diversity to breed healthy new generations. The DNA of Roy's wolves also helped biologists confirm that other captive wolves were pure Mexican wolves and not some other subspecies. In the end, U.S. Fish and Wildlife had seven genetically distinct wolves—four males and three females. Let’s call them the Adam and Eves to reboot Mexican wolves."

“Okay, so you start with seven. How do you restore wolves to this whole region of the country with just seven individuals?”

“Yeah, that’s a great success story. If you breed and you very carefully say, ‘Okay, I’ve read these two; now I gotta do for genetics, I gotta breed this one and breed it back,’ and so you're actually want to make sure you have genetic redundancy in captivity before you start ever reintroducing them in the wild. And so that’s what we did—we started reintroducing in 1998.”

“In other words, I spent 20 years carefully breeding the wolves in captivity, building up the numbers so that the wolves that were finally ready to be reintroduced into the wild were the great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of those first Adam and Eve wolves.”

John Oakley was there to see those first wolves released into New Mexico. At first, it didn’t go well.

“The first releases we did in 1998 were largely unsuccessful. They almost died or, you know, stuff happened with them. And so then they brought them back in, a few back in, and paired them up again and released them again. Ever seen that reality show Naked and Afraid where people are dropped off in the middle of nowhere, naked, and need to figure out how to survive? That’s basically what was happening with those first wolves. Instincts can only carry you so far. They get killing elk; they don’t get avoiding, maybe, people very well. And so that was the hard part of it because they’re raised around people and they’re sort of more familiar. That’s why, well, it’s just, I guess they just don’t have that...like, they haven’t had people shoot at them. There’s no reason to be fearful of people. They haven’t had a... In captivity, we try to avoid any positive association with things, but you still have to feed them. You know, you still have to go in there every three days, and...and that’s how you start a population. It was hard, hard work in the early days.”

Once a wild population has started, John explained that there is a much higher success rate with introducing wolves into the wild as pups. If a pup is successfully attached to a foster family, its new parents can teach it how to be a wild wolf.

“But how do you get a wild wolf mother to adopt a captive-born pup?”

That’s coming up after the break.

Okay, it’s 4:30 in the morning, and I’m driving on a dirt road Wilderness Reserve owned by the state of New Mexico. You see some wolf pups today. Last spring, I met up with biologists from U.S. Fish and Wildlife to watch the process of cross-fostering—that is, placing a captive-born pup into the den of a wild mother. Most wild Mexican wolves are born in the wild, but because the population is so small, a few times a year Fish and Wildlife introduces some captive-bred pups to wild packs to make sure the gene pool stays healthy.

“All right, Melissa’s 776 grams. So tiny, I know.”

Susan Dix, a veterinarian with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, removed them from a den inside a chain link enclosure at the captive breeding facility. “They’re little fluff balls of dark brown fur—incredibly cute. Their eyes aren’t open yet.”

Susan weighed and examined them for birth defects. There were none. And then we drove for several hours right to the edge of the Gila Wilderness. “The switch needs to happen within several hours to give the pups the best chance to survive, so the clock is ticking.”

“Hello, you look like you’re doing fine! All right, and I’m right-handed, so I open their mouths. They have no teeth. I feed it along the top of the mouth.”

“The little one is feisty. This is a big one—you’re gonna need help!”

Once we got there, Susan showed a couple of her colleagues and me how to feed the pups, so they’re topped off with one last meal. We were waiting to get the all-clear from a scouting team who was already at the wild den.

“Can you take any loss? Sorry about my teeth—need a little hold?”

“We can clean up our messes.”

“Two boys?”

“Yeah, that’s one spicier than the other.”

“Yeah, the big one is mellow; the little one is feisty.”

“How many days?”

“It’s eight.”

“Yeah, we were wrong—eight days.”

Once we got the all-clear from the team at the den, the pups were wrapped in towels and carefully placed in a backpack. That’s where Nick Risso comes in. He’s a biologist with New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, and he’s the guy who’s going to carry the pups to their new home. He shoulders the pack with our wolf cargo, and off we head into the wilderness.

We hiked along a steep ridgeline that offered a stunning vista of mountain valleys stretching to the horizon. There had been a wildfire here; the ground was still charred, but new green shoots were coming up, and there were lots of elk droppings—plenty of food for a wolf pack.

Finally, we reached the den, which was a large hole near a big stump where a wild mother had given birth a little more than a week before. The advanced team had already pulled out the wild pups and was examining each of them.

“How did the female react when you came?”

“So, she wasn’t here when we got here, which is pretty typical. She heard us or yes or something, right? She flushed, so we kind of heard her last going over the ridge this way, so she actually wasn’t here. It took us longer than we wanted to find the den because this isn’t a pretty typical den; usually, it’s under a root ball or something like that. This one’s just a hole in the ground.”

“How many cubs are in the den?”

“So in here, we had six pups.”

“Oh wow—and we’re adding two? Adding two to get to eight total, which is more than a normal litter would be.”

Nick explained that wolves can’t really count, so the mother wouldn’t know the difference between six and eight cubs on site, but she knew exactly how they smelled. That’s why the most important step in the foster process is to put together some wolf cub camouflage.

“This is where it gets a little gross. I got a bag of their pee. Lovely!”

“So we’ll do that when the golden shower happens to keep their dens clean.”

Wolf pups have evolved to urinate when prompted by their mother. She’ll carry her young outside and lick their abdomens to trigger the pee and poop reflex. This is lucky for the biologists because they need plenty of bodily fluids for their wolf cub camo. They used damp cotton swabs to get things flowing. Then the biologists gathered the pups into a pile and made sure they all were completely covered in each other’s smells.

“How’s that for an introduction to life in the wild?”

“Set your roots down and grab one more, and that should be one for each of us—two for each of us?”

“Okay, we ready? And yeah, we’re going to really reach in here, but okay, things are happening.”

Once the pups were all smelling the same, the team put them back inside the den. There was nothing left to do but leave and wait for the mother to come back—hopefully unaware of the two stowaways.

I just had to ask John Oakley what the heck is going on inside the mother’s head.

“But so here’s the thing though: okay, so like, the mother wolf is at the den, and she comes back. Instead of having six babies, she’s got eight and, like, just kind of rolls with that. It’s like, ‘Oh, okay?’ You know, I mean, wolf life is tough, and then the mom’s like, ‘Ah, I’m raising six puppies—eight, it doesn’t matter.’”

“Yeah, I think it’s—uh, but she doesn’t believe that. She’s not like—I mean, I guess the thing that I was struck by was just that, like, you know, she just seems to roll with it—is what you’re describing or not? What do you guys understand biologically? Do you have any sense of why they do that?”

“Yeah, I think it’s—they’re heavy on hormones, and so the mother just very much wants to raise pups. And so you could put in more, and she’s gonna try to raise all the pups that are in front of her. You just gotta get those mothering instincts going. And yeah, and wolves are good mothers.”

I interviewed John about a year after I helped bring those pups to their foster home in the wild, and he had an update for me.

“I was in the helicopter this winter, and we caught one of the cross-fostered pups that you helped put into the den. That animal just left its pack and went all the way up to, like, North like Pinetop, Arizona, from where you were.”

“Your kids are not Pinetop.”

“Sorry, Flagstaff, Arizona. That tiny wolf pup, just one year after leaving it in the wild den, made a round trip of more than 400 miles. Kind of incredible to think how fast that little furball had matured into a top-of-the-food-chain predator.”

“When you see it come to fruition and all this work pays off, it’s an awesome, awesome thing.”

“Are wolves now safe from extinction, or are they on the road to being safe from extinction? So where are we?”

“So one of the populations in the United States is at 240. It’s nowhere close to the thousands that used to live here, but they’re no longer on the verge of extinction. They’re in a much better spot. I have faith that wolves will be around well into the future.”

A century after Aldo Leopold had a change of heart about killing wolves, I think he’d be glad to know that we’re making a comeback.

[Music] If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to NatGeo.com/ExploreMore to subscribe to read more of my reporting in the Gila. Check out this month’s cover story on Wilderness. We’ve included a link in our show notes—they’re right there on your podcast app.

This week’s episode is produced by senior producer Brian Gutierrez. Our other senior producer is Jacob Pinter. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our manager of audio is Carlo Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Devar Artalon. Our photo editors are Julie Howe and Ted Woods. Sound design this episode—and Hans Dale Sue composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling. Nathan Lump is National Geographic’s editor-in-chief. And I’m Peter Gwen. Thanks for listening, and see y’all next time.

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