By Rene Romo / Journal South Reporter
LAS CRUCES – The death of a female member of the Dark Canyon wolf pack is under investigation by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement, officials said Tuesday.
The body of the wolf, which was found last month, has been sent to a forensic lab in Ashland, Ore., for a necropsy to determine the cause of death, said Tom Buckley, a Service spokesman in Albuquerque.
Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife continues to monitor the Whitewater-Baldy Fire, which has burned more than 259,000 acres mainly in the Gila Wilderness, for potential threats to two packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves, including the Dark Canyon pack. The other pack in the path of the sprawling wildfire sparked by lightning on May 16 was identified as the Middle Fork pack.
Sherry Barrett, the Mexican wolf recovery coordinator, said that the containment lines firefighters dug out on the northern and eastern edges of the fire “are holding” and the blaze has not yet reached the two packs.
Both the Middle Fork and Dark Canyon packs are denning, Barrett said, “but we don’t know if they have pups.”
If the two packs are denning pups, every day the fire is kept away improves the chances the pups grow mobile enough to move to safety, Barrett said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service counted 58 wolves in the forests of southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico at the end of last year, an increase from 2010 but still below the 100 wolves federal officials projected would be roaming wild by the end of 2006.
Federal officials on March 27 near Alpine, Ariz., found the carcass of a wolf pup that was shot to death. That case is also under investigation.
The illegal shooting of Mexican gray wolves accounted for nearly half of all the documented causes of wolf mortalities – 43 of 88 – in the wild between the start of the recovery effort in 1998 and the end of 2011.
State, federal and nongovernment organizations have offered a total of $57,000, depending on the information provided, for information leading to the conviction of an individual responsible for the illegal killing of a Mexican gray wolf.
The Dark Canyon pack, which now consists of two alpha wolves and a younger female wolf, generally roams the west-central portion of the Gila National Forest. The Middle Fork pack, consisting of two alpha wolves, is located in the central portion of the Gila National Forest.