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How can science ask society to conserve that which it doesn’t fully understand?
When I first began learning about red wolves, this was the question that kept coming back to me. It was intriguing enough that I decided to commit a significant amount of my time to documenting what red wolves are today; exploring how the wild population is managed; and understanding the contradictory concepts of the species’ origins, its past history in the East, and what its main conservation challenges are heading into the future.
The morning after my beach stroll, I set out to meet a red wolf biologist named Ryan Nordsven. He had agreed to show me Sandy Ridge, which is a secure facility where the recovery program holds wild red wolves that are sick or being held for other reasons. A few wolves that are part of the captive breeding program are also kept there permanently. But the facility’s location is somewhat of a secret, and I was supposed to go first to the FWS’s Red Wolf Recovery Program headquarters in the small town of Manteo. Manteo is on Roanoke Island, a low and narrow, kidney-bean-shaped island wedged in the sounds between the Albemarle Peninsula and the Outer Banks. It is smothered in live oaks, and its perimeter is bordered by thick marsh grasses. From Manteo, the red wolf biologists make tracks across the whole peninsula. As I drove through the marsh and into town, my hope was that Ryan or one of the other biologists might let me tag along as they worked with the world’s only population of wild C. rufus. Little did I know then how deep Ryan and the others would ultimately take me into the secret world of red wolves.
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T. DeLene Beeland (The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America's Other Wolf)