As the newest member of the Oregon Wild team, this is my official introduction to the Oregon Wild community. Although I’ve been active on our Facebook page, posting Friday Photos and Monday Musings, it’s all been under the shroud of anonymity.

So, here I am, Kiki Contreras, Oregon Wild’s Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation Intern, to be exact. I won’t bore you with a detailed memoir, but here’s a little bit of background on where I come from and what I’m about.

A Seattle native, I was a conservationist before I really knew it. As a kid, I spent my days mucking around in tidepools and petting (yes, petting) the bumble bees that frequented my mom’s lavender bushes. As I got older, I realized nature loving and conservation was something I could make a life of. Two years ago, I pulled up my Northwest roots, though not permanently, and set up camp in Durham, North Carolina. I was to be one of the 1,716 students of the class of 2012 at Duke University, the newest generation of blue and white painted, basketball crazy Blue Devils.

The decision to study biology at Duke came naturally to me, as did choosing a concentration in ecology. My interest in this field helped lead me to a summer internship at Oregon Wild. As most of you know, Oregon Wild has been doing all it can to help protect Oregon’s fledgling wolf packs, and this summer I dove into the cause head first. The recovery of gray wolves is a pressing issue here in the West, but on the East Coast, its all about the red wolf.

I first heard about North Carolina’s population of red wolves fall semester of my sophomore year, during a lecture about predator ecology in my Environmental Science class. Since then, I’d heard whisperings of packs of “wolves” seen skulking about in the Duke Forest in the wee hours of the morning. It turns out those really were just rumors, but there is in fact a growing population—the world’s only wild one—of the threatened canid in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, NC.

In light of Oregon Wild’s efforts to protect gray wolves in Oregon, and my personal connection to North Carolina, I thought I’d do a little research on the history of gray wolves’ East Coast cousins.

The story of the red wolf begins much the same as that of the gray wolf. At once stigmatized and revered from centuries of folklore, children’s stories and proverbs, stigma unfortunately beat out reverence in the United States. Though their range once covered the entirety of the East Coast and ran westward to Texas, increasing human populations in the region led to fragmented habitat, and also to an intensive predator control program.

Already deficient in genetic diversity from a lack of habitat corridors connecting different populations, the extermination programs in place throughout the 19th and 20th centuries proved to be more than the fragile species could handle. With the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 they were listed as endangered, and by 1980 the wolves had been declared extinct in the wild.

Fortunately for Canis rufus, wildlife biologists had the foresight to begin collecting wild red wolves, and by the time they were declared extinct, there was already a captive breeding program underway at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. In reality there were still 17 wild wolves present in Texas at the time of their extinction, but the decision was made to relocate them to captivity, as that was the species’ best chance at survival.

In 1987 four pairs of wolves were released into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina and became the world’s only wild population of red wolves, and the first U.S. species to be successfully reintroduced after extinction in the wild. Once a population had been established, their numbers slowly increased to the current 100+ wolves that now call over 1.5 million acres of public and private land in North Carolina their home.

While habitat fragmentation is still a problem for red wolves, one of the biggest threats facing their recovery is interbreeding with coyotes, an exotic invasive species in North Carolina. Introduction of coyote heritage into this small, recovering population pollutes the already restricted gene pool, and makes a full come-back of purebred red wolves more difficult.

Despite the myriad difficulties facing wolves in a world where social and political interests vie for dominance over wildlife conservation, the red wolf’s situation is a promising one. Red wolves are slowly but surely nearing the recovery goal of 330 captive and 220 wild wolves. They’re about half way, with a little more than 100 wild individuals and 200 in captive breeding programs around the country. Constant, intensive management and conservation efforts by the Fish and Wildlife Services are both reducing hybridization threats from coyotes and increasing genetic diversity by periodically introducing genetically distinct wolves into the wild.

Although the gray wolf’s and red wolf’s recovery stories have much in common, there are many differences too that have lead to varying results. A major obstacle in red wolf reintroduction that was not an issue in the west was the captive lifestyle the red wolves had led prior to release. It took a rigorous acclimation program to get the reintroduction candidates used to the variation in prey availability they would soon experience and to teach them how to live and hunt as a pack in the wild. Several attempts at reintroduction were unsuccessful because of this factor.

Red wolves, however, have the benefit of inhabiting an area that is relatively devoid of human activities—the coastal swamps of North Carolina are ideal habitat for wolves, and provide limited opportunities for agriculture or livestock production. In this regard, red wolves have largely avoided the human conflicts that have proved very problematic for their western relatives.

While an entire country lies between these two species of wolves, and they face different threats and advantages for survival, the story of the red wolf is one that hits very close to home. It all comes down to humans coexisting with wild animals, and the importance of apex predators such as wolves, gray or red, in natural ecosystems. Hopefully, one day, wolves of both varieties will be able to roam freely in wild places, coast to coast.