Where the Wild Things Are

On the isolated island of St. Vincent, red wolves do roam.

by Todd Keith photography
by Beth Maynor Young and Bill Maynor

SweetTea Journal (Spring/Summer 2008) – The briny smell of the oyster beds beyond Indian Pass lingers. Underfoot, the crunch and chink of oyster shells—the native gravel—is a reminder of the link between water and earth here: even on dry land, you stand on a product of Apalachicola Bay.

At 7 a.m. a thick fog hangs like a low ceiling over St. Vincent Island across the bay. During the night, cool breezes blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and met the warm, humid air inland. As the metallic crank of the ferry starts up, a long formation of pelicans veers east. By the time the boat is loaded and making its way from the mainland to the barrier island, the fog burns away, seemingly gone in an instant. For thousands of years, a mere instant in geological time, North America’s red wolves ranged across much of the continent, an important predator species. Then, almost before anyone noticed, Canis rufus was down to seventeen animals by the mid-1970s. Seventeen animals, a whisper away from total extinction. Today there might be five red wolves on this nine-mile-long, four-mile-wide island. Last spring, the mother was “denned up,” as wildlife biologist Thom Lewis puts it, and usually four to six pups are in a wolf litter. With any luck, we will see pups running around this very day.

Verifying the pups’ existence occupies Lewis’ mind as the ferry docks on the island. A biologist with St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge, Lewis spends most of his days here, tracking wolves and monitoring their progress. His other duties include keeping up with nesting loggerhead turtles on the island’s south side. With an area of 12,300 acres, the island sits 9 miles southwest of Apalachicola and attracts hunters of white-tailed deer, feral hogs, and the majestic Sambar deer, a 500-pound native of India introduced when the island was privately owned.

The island is special, both for the local hunters and fishermen, who view it as their own private wilderness retreat, and for the biologists like Lewis who spend more time here than just about anyone. Dissected by dune ridges stretching the length of the island in an east-to-west pattern, St. Vincent offers a visible record of thousands of years of ancient beaches and fluctuating sea levels. From the air, the dunes look like a series of sandy waves crashing toward the mainland. Slash pine forests with palmettos dot the lower ground between ridges, while scrub and live oak habitats dominate the higher areas. Freshwater lakes and sloughs harbor a host of birds, such as nesting bald eagles, wood storks, osprey, peregrine falcons, American oystercatchers, and red knots, a soon-to-be-endangered species that migrates more than 9,300 miles twice a year. Save for sandy roads, a few maintenance buildings, and an old homesite, the island is in its natural state.

An endangered species could do worse.

After checking in on loggerhead nests on the Gulf side of the island, Lewis heads to the interior to begin tracking the pack. Most roads run along an east-west axis, mimicking and taking advantage of the terrain’s ridges, so the drive is a time-consuming pattern of advancing roughly half a mile—the extent of the range of Lewis’ antenna—and then stopping to take a reading. Climbing a low dune, Lewis adjusts the receiver and antenna and puts on his earphones, listening for the telltale beep of each animal’s radio tracking collar as he slowly turns 360 degrees. “Each wolf, like a radio station, has a different frequency, so finding an individual is like tuning for stations,” he explains. “I’m not hearing anything just yet, but I try not to panic until I get to the other side of the island,” he says with a smile.

It’s certainly a wolf ’s life here: hot, muggy, and mosquito ridden— relieved by the occasional fresh gust blowing in from the Gulf. The salt is thick in the air. Even in the hot, direct sunshine, the mosquitoes of St. Vincent Island gleefully gather in droves, thick swarms of insects oblivious to the heat. Sunning itself on a sandy road running between two ponds, a fat nine-foot-long alligator is equally content in this environment. Sullenly sliding into the water, it stays nearby, impudently staring, reluctant to make way. On St. Vincent, the animals rule the roost.

After Creeks and Seminoles sold St. Vincent in 1811, the island was privately owned until The Nature Conservancy purchased it in 1968 for $2.2 million. Later that same year, The Nature Conservancy transferred the deed to the United States Department of the Interior for management by the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. Prior to federal ownership, the island had enjoyed many owners and much litigation regarding the title. Between 1835 and 1907, the year Dr. Ray V. Pierce purchased the land, the title changed at least six times. George Hatch, a banker and former mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, purchased the island in 1868 at auction for $3,000 and used it as his residence. His is the only marked grave on the property, but several Civil War soldiers are buried on the island, too. Although Pierce introduced the Sambar deer in 1908, he often and mistakenly is given credit for all the exotic introductions. Brothers Alfred and Henry Loomis, who owned the island from 1948 until its sale to The Nature Conservancy, brought in zebras, elands, black bucks, Asian jungle fowl, and ring-necked pheasants in the 1960s, imparting to the island an African “flavor” that looms large in local stories.

Today, however, the only imported species remaining is the Sambar deer, but the red wolf, historically the top predator throughout the southeastern United States, retains a whiff of the exotic: with a little more than 120 animals in the wild and 200 kept in breeding locations across the country, it is among the most endangered species in the world. A lethal combination of intensive predator-control programs and loss of habitat had left only a tattered number of red wolves roaming the Gulf coasts of Texas and Louisiana by the 1960s. The population of the red wolf, one of the initial predators on the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, had dipped close to the single digits by the time the first efforts to save the species had begun.

Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern North Carolina is ground zero for that effort, with around 120 red wolves roaming its landscapes. A 1.7 million–acre region made up of four national wildlife refuges and numerous private lands, Alligator River is part of a red wolf recovery plan that’s aimed at preventing the species’ extinction and restoring the ecosystems in which the wolves previously thrived. A second recovery program established in the 1990s in Great Smoky Mountains National Park failed after low prey densities there forced the wolves to feed beyond the park. Although the animals once ranged throughout the Southeast, as far north as Pennsylvania and as far west as Texas, Alligator River is the last stronghold, other than a few zoos, parks, and museums—and St. Vincent Island.

“St. Vincent is important to the overall recovery plan since the island supports a family group that can grow up and learn wild survival skills before being released in Alligator River,” says Bud Fazio, team leader of the Red Wolf Recovery Program located at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. “For instance, we want our red wolf pups to be wary of alligators, and in that regard, St. Vincent is perfect habitat. These animals represent new gene flow into our populations.”

Between 1974 and 1980, after the Endangered Species Act had become federal law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trapped, examined, and evaluated more than 400 canines along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, but of those, only seventeen met the species requirements for the red wolf, and only fourteen produced offspring in the captive breeding program. For this species to recover, genetic considerations are paramount, especially because red wolves had interbred with coyotes and other canines by the time the seventeen red wolves were isolated. Scientists have many questions to ponder. Is the red wolf a stand-alone species, or is it a subspecies of the gray wolf? Fazio explains that some biologists say the red wolf is closely related to the Algonquin wolf of eastern Canada and that red wolves should be part of a greater grouping.

Beyond such scientific questions, a more basic moral imperative drives the effort to prevent extinction of this animal. “It’s part of our natural heritage, the only true wolf of the southeastern states, and it goes back to before this country was settled,” Fazio muses. “As a top predator, the red wolf established a balance in the ecosystem that worked for thousands of years. Now, some of this is ethical, and some of it is aesthetic, but frankly we are the reason the red wolf nearly disappeared, so it is our responsibility to bring them back.”

The red wolves in the live display at the Tallahassee Museum give force to that ethical argument. Weighing between forty-five and eighty pounds and standing about twenty-six inches at the shoulder, the red wolf is a beautiful creature. An adult is around four feet long from nose to tail, smaller than the gray wolf but larger than the coyote. First described by William Bartram in 1791, (for more on Bartram’s travels in Florida, see page 32) the wolf is named for the reddish color of the fur behind its ears and along its neck and legs. A typical pack contains five to eight animals—a breeding pair plus offspring—and feeds on raccoons, rabbits, feral hogs, palmetto berries, white-tailed deer, and—on St. Vincent Island—the occasional Sambar deer. “When they get together as a pack, they have taken down a fully grown Sambar,” Lewis says. The wolves are reclusive in the extreme. In the past year he has spotted only the adult female among the dunes and scrub oaks of the island—for just a fleeting moment. Trying to track down five animals on a small island in 100 degree heat makes the red wolf ’s elusive nature all the more frustratingly evident.

Lewis isn’t positive, but he thinks he may have a lone red wolf on his hands. “Mama is smart and wise to the ways of the island,” Lewis says about the alpha female of the pack. As soon as her pups (from the 2006 litter) were able to manage on their own, she was gone, wandering the island on her own. After he has spent a couple of hours taking a reading, driving the antenna’s half-mile range, stopping to listen, and then repeating the process several times, Lewis has accounted for all the wolves but the young female of the litter. Like a teenager who just got keys to the family car, the daughter is now the lone wolf, confounding an amused Lewis all the while. Like mother, like daughter.

“Little sister doesn’t seem to hang with the family much,” he laughs. “She’s a tomboy.”

If it’s hard being a modern girl, it’s not any easier being a young male with no romantic prospects. In August 2006, a two-year-old male, apparently tired of the island life, made a brave swim to the mainland. A hunter on St. Vincent spotted him heading in the direction of Port St. Joe, a few miles to the west of the island. Immediately, Monica Harris, the refuge manager, and Lewis scrambled in response. Although it took three days to get a plane outfitted to track the wolf, after forty-five minutes in the air, they located him. “We took off from Apalachicola, and as soon as we were in the air, we got his signal twelve miles away,” Lewis explains. After that, the wolf was trapped within a few hours. Like all the wolves in residence at St. Vincent, he was radio-collared. “We were able to wonderfully demonstrate that we could quickly and efficiently track and trap an animal,” he continues.

And that’s important, not only for the safety of the animals themselves, but also for the larger public relations considerations of any large predator recovery program. Red wolves may be a symbolic personification of the wild, untamed nature that is rapidly disappearing, but to many they are more like a close cousin to the sneak that gave Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother so much trouble: they are the competition, albeit now for recreational hunters rather than for subsistence settlers trying to make a living on the southern frontier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While some in the community may be concerned that red wolves might compete with hunters for deer and hogs, most residents of Apalachicola and surrounding areas see the red wolves as just another element of St. Vincent’s allure.

Chris Robinson, a partner with his brother, Tommy, in a fishing-guide business in Apalachicola, hunts the island regularly and is quick to extol its virtues. “It’s a little piece of paradise, St. Vincent,” he remarks. “The deer aren’t too skittish, and there’s a lot of game to hunt, whether it’s with bow or muzzleloader. It’s like our own private preserve. I’ve never seen a red wolf, but it’s the perfect place for them. They’ve got it made there.”

“I think overall, the big picture people see is that it is just St. Vincent Island,” Harris says. “The wolves are over there, and it’s no big deal. The tourists who come through the refuge just want to experience them, to be near them. You should see kids light up when we do our howling presentation here at the center.” As for howling, sadly that is a territorial response, one that only happens on a pack-to-pack basis. With only one pack on the island, the only howling is of the human-to-wolf variety, an activity that Lewis sometimes indulges in.

Turning off his truck engine and looking about, Lewis spots a nice dune to climb. “Let me turn up the gain to get a better range,” he says. “Whoa! That hurt my ears! The brother is close ... and his brother is with him. And, yep, there’s dad, not too far away either.” Just beyond the scrub oaks and pine trees, two red wolves are within 1,000 feet. They probably paused after picking up the sound of Lewis’ familiar voice and the hum of his truck. There’s little chance of actually spotting one, but still the quick adrenaline rush is there, the potential encounter of human and wolf echoing in our prehistoric genetic makeup. Flight or fight. Today, though, it’s neither.

After a couple hours of searching, Lewis has covered most of the island, save for the northeast marshes, without a sign of the tomboy wolf, and the ferry is set to return across Indian Pass shortly, at sunset. He probably will make a return trip tomorrow to locate her. Discussing the habits of the pack here on St. Vincent, Lewis displays an undisguised sense of wonder and fascination, mixed with the acute realization that this animal is that much more valuable for its rarity. “Historically, we know so little about this species,” he laments. “They nearly went extinct before we began to study them.”As the ferry engine roars into gear, backing out of its mooring on St. Vincent Island, it is difficult not to anthropomorphize: somewhere out there the daughter either is having a fine time exploring on her own or is achingly lonely, seeking a mate where none can be found, until she is relocated to Alligator River in the fall.

A few weeks later, Lewis phones from his office at Scipio Creek in Apalachicola, the excitement and emotion clear in his voice. He has good news to share. On his return to the island, he found the telltale signs that a new litter had arrived on the island. “We’ve got pups,” he says. “I don’t know how many just yet, but we’ve got pups.”