Mexican wolf © Jay Pierstorff
Joel Jurgens, a staff member of the Nature Conservancy (TNC), lives with his wife and two sons in the forested mountains west of Flagstaff, Arizona, less than a mile from Chimney Springs at Coconino National Forest, where TNC has just completed a forest restoration project. Chimney Springs is a popular place for hiking, cycling and recreation.
One early morning in mid-February, Joel's wife, Nicky, and her dog, Belle, crossed the chimney springs for morning workouts. About 6 miles later, Nicky stopped for a moment to rest and look up at the scenery, when her eyes fell on a canine animal near the trail.
At first, Nicky thought it was a coyote. She didn't know how to get around it, so she turned and jogged home. The "coyote" followed, keeping a distance of about 40 feet to follow Nicky (or Belle, Nikki's bitch). It followed Nicky along the path, and neither shouted nor picked up a branch to "scare" it, and couldn't let it go.
Soon, Nikki meets another runner who warns her that there is "a big coyote" behind her. A friend of Nicky, who has been jogging nearby for 20 years, took one look at it and said, "That's not a coyote wolf, that's a Mexican wolf (scientific name Canis lupus baileyi.") The suspicious-looking Mexican wolf followed until they reached a lumberjack camp and turned to leave.
When Nikki returns home, she excitedly calls her husband Joel, but Joel doesn't take it seriously at first, and only uses "yeah, yeah" to perfunctory his wife. It wasn't until two days later, just 20 miles west of Chimney Springs, that an image of a large, monodactal male canine was actually captured.
There are wolves
TNC's Hart Prairie Reserve, not far from the chimney spring where Mexican wolves are found. © Tana Kappel/TNC
The consensus is that a lone Mexican wolf was walking hundreds of miles from the White Mountains, arizona' border with New Mexico, where its ancestors were reintroduced in 1998.
Now, the number of wild Mexican wolves has reached its highest level since its reintroduction. The latest survey shows at least 163 in New Mexico and Arizona, a nearly 25 percent increase from the previous year.
Young, single male wolves often wander around in search of mates elsewhere. They will go where they can find their prey. As carnivores, wolves feed on elk, deer, rabbits, and many other small animals. Wolves also benefit many other wildlife, such as ravens, coyotes, eagles and other animals that can also eat leftover remains of wolves.
When forests are healthier and more resilient, they tend to attract a wide variety of wildlife — including those at the top of the food chain.
Leopold's past with wolves
West of the Chimney Springs area is a restoration site called Parks West. © Joel Jurgens/TNC
Mexican wolves were once active in large areas of the southwestern United States, and by the 20th century, they were nearly extinct by human predation. In 1998, Mexican wolves were first introduced to the Blue Range in east-central Arizona to help them recover and thrive in this traditional habitat where they had previously lived.
Before making many contributions to environmental protection, Aldo Leopold, an internationally renowned scientist and environmentalist in the United States, was a government-employed hunter who hunted dozens of wolves in the area. During one hunt, instead of doing what hunters call "clean and neat killing," he let the hunted wolves die painfully and slowly, and he began to regret his work.
"We came to the old wolf, and we had time to watch the furious green flame in her eyes extinguish little by little," Leopold wrote in his memoir, A Sand County Almanac, "when I was young, my heart was full of desire to pull the trigger: I thought that a few wolves meant more deer, and no wolf meant a hunter's paradise." But having seen the extinguishing of the green flame, I felt that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. ”
After that, he saw the disappearance of wolves, the appearance of trees and mountains after the loss of wolves; and the significant implications of the loss of the wolf species on the ecosystem.
Mexican Wolf © Jim Clark / USFWS via Flickr