Minnesota Zoo gets ready for litter of rare wolves
An endangered species wolf is about to give birth at the Minnesota Zoo.
The Mexican gray wolf is the most critically endangered of all gray wolves. International wolf experts rate the recovery of this species as the highest priority among all gray wolf recovery programs in the world, zoo officials said Monday.
The Minnesota Zoo acquired two of the wolves from Michigan’s Belle Isle Zoo, which is now closed. The wolves arrived in September 2002 and were placed on exhibit in early October after undergoing quarantine.
They mated in mid-March. The duration of pregnancy is about two months.
The pair has bred before — the female has produced two litters, one of which was with the current male.
The female wolf was born in 1998 at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado, and the male was born at the Albuquerque Biological Park in New Mexico.
The Minnesota Zoo previously had two Mexican gray wolves from 1995 to 2001, but breeding attempts were unsuccessful.
As of 1999, there were about 200 Mexican gray wolves in the world, most of which were part of a captive breeding program in 40 zoos and wildlife sanctuaries in the United States and Mexico.
Mexican gray wolves are buff, gray, rust and black and are about 5 1/2 feet in length, about the size of a German shepherd. They weigh between 50 and 80 pounds, compared with gray wolves in Minnesota that are 70 to 100 pounds.
The Mexican wolf was declared an endangered species in 1976 and has remained so ever since.
In the late 1990s, the first 11 Mexican wolves from captive stock were reintroduced into the wild in the Apache National Forest in southeastern Arizona under a program to reestablish the subspecies to an area where it was once found. The objective is to reestablish a wild population of at least 100 Mexican gray wolves.