Bo Petersen
AWENDAW – Wary, the red wolf paces the far fence of the enclosure. She stops to eye the humans on the other side, but paces off when they turn to watch her, as if to distract them. When they turn away, she slinks back.
The “Wolfman” trundles up with a wheelbarrow of horse meat and feed. He has a walrus mustache and shy eyes. He’s not comfortable with attention, and chatters to distraction.
Red wolves are secretive, easily disturbed and difficult to breed in captivity. The female will accept the male or not, and that’s it. If the female is antsy, it’s not going to happen. When Shiloh, a male, was introduced to Lily, she never had mated. She still was edgy enough in her new surroundings she would tear things apart.
The Wolfman would seem unlikely to make it happen.
“Wolfman Rob” Johnson is the retirement-age caretaker of the six wolves now held in enclosures at the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. He’s not a biologist. He’s a former teacher who made a difference with at-risk kids partly by taking them on camping trips into the wild.
He has been keenly interested in wolves from the time he was a child. He’s one of those people who took every chance to read about the species, to volunteer at refuges when he could, to learn everything he could about them. He simply loves wolves.
“It’s their grace, their power, their agility. Their bond as a family; they mirror our society,” he says watching the two females he has come to feed.
After he has set out the food, he’ll sit awhile on a seat in the enclosure with them. Sierra and Haley will pace their rounds past him, curious. Haley sometimes leaps up and down like a deer. Sierra, the alpha, will come closer, but she won’t rub.
“She knows me. She knows my scent. They’re not going to be my friend. You can establish a comfort zone. It’s all about food.”
This is the man who became the matchmaker for Lily and Shiloh.
Playing Cupid
The red wolf is a Lowcountry native, the German shepherd-size cousin of the better known gray wolf. They share that feral grace and an exaggerated reputation as a menace to livestock and wild game. In the past, that led to bounties and wholesale slaughter.
Biologists considered the red wolf extinct in 1980, when only 14 captives were known to exist. Because breeding is so difficult in captivity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1987 started a wild breeding program on Bull’s Island, one of the barrier islands on the outermost ocean stretch of Cape Romain.
It was successful enough that today about 300 wolves are living. Refuge managers came to admire the wolves’ intelligence and loyalty, such as males who took over rearing young when their mate was killed. The public became fascinated with the creature so secretive it seldom was seen.
But in 2005, the wolves were removed from Bull’s, victims of staff and budget cuts. The last wolf to be spotted in the wild on the island before its capture was a male that momentarily made a stand on the road as his pup scrambled for cover behind him.
Today, Cape Romain operates one of a number of remote captive sites, helping to maintain a genetically healthy population for an ongoing wild-and-captive program at the Alligator River refuge in North Carolina, the only real wild population left. Always roaming, the wolves are now being shot in the country around the refuge.
Kids named Johnson “Wolfman Rob” during one of the lectures and public feedings he holds twice a week at the Sewee Visitor and Environmental Education Center, sessions where he occasionally lets out with a howl that might have come from the wolves themselves. Except it didn’t. Red wolves don’t howl like that; gray wolves do. Johnson learned on TV.
But the wolves come. They recognize his voice.
If Lily and Shiloh were going to mate, first they had to settle down. Johnson cut up hot dogs and spread them around the enclosures for the wolves to sniff out. He put out deer legs. He draped oil-rubbed spaghetti from the trees and sprayed herb and fruit oils around the trunks. Wolves, he tells you, are all about scent.
He was enriching their surroundings, one of those things he learned, giving them something to do so they felt more at home. The coolest thing might have been the meat he set out in hollowed out gourds. The wolves easily could have crushed the gourds, but didn’t. They began to scoop out the meat. They were calming down.
Johnson was the first to notice the swell in Lily’s belly last winter. When the spring deluge came, he built a foyer addition to her flooded den with a higher dirt floor. But the pregnant Lily wouldn’t use it. She wouldn’t stay in the den. She had run off Shiloh. She was as wary as a wolf can get.
‘Make a difference’
Johnson went in the sopped enclosure in April and movement in a dug-out crater caught his eye: a squirming mound of newborn pups.
Of Lily’s four surviving pups, two females were shipped to Alligator River. Two males remain at Cape Romain, under the foster care of the Wolfman.
A pup at 10 weeks has four-toed feet so well formed they might just as well be hands as paws, he says. “They can hold a bone. They can open a door knob.”
The 300 wolves alive now are still so low a number that the species is critically endangered; every wolf is considered vital to its survival. The wolf program is currently under review at fish and wildlife, amid worries it will be curtailed.
The shootings at Alligator River, the costs, the difficulty of finding a secondary wild refuge big and remote enough, are among the factors that might reduce the wolf to a captive animal, little more than a zoo exhibit. A decision is expected in January.
Wolves, Johnson will tell you, are very protective of their territory.
“I get it,” he says about the difficulties with the wolf program. “But they’re part of our ecosystem and they’re a vital part of it. They’re an alpha species.” In other words, they belong. “The staff here at Cape Romain, all we ever want to do in our lives is make a difference. I’m just trying to do what I can.”