Lobos on the rebound? Mexican gray wolf numbers up again in New Mexico

Yahoo

15-03-2025

The eyes may be windows to the soul in humans, but the teeth are the telling feature for the Mexican gray wolf.
Wear and tear on a wolf's sharp canine teeth can be used to track age, trauma and disease, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Checking the teeth is just one part of the health screenings performed on the Mexican gray wolf during an annual population census.
Driven almost to extinction in the mid-20th century, the Mexican gray wolf was reintroduced to the landscape from a founding population of just seven wolves.
The population has now increased for the ninth year in a row, the New Mexico and Arizona game and fish departments announced last week, with at least 286 wild wolves found in the two states.
That's an 11% increase from the minimum count in 2023, when 257 wolves were spotted. In the past decade, the Mexican gray wolf population has almost tripled, from double digits in 2015.
"Once again, the data collected on the recovering Mexican wolf population show progress,' said Stewart Liley, chief of wildlife for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. 'Each year, the wild Mexican wolf population numbers increase, and the areas they occupy expands."
He said the wolf population now approaches goals in the current recovery plan.
But conservation groups worry about the future of the Mexican gray wolf amid continuing human-wolf encounters and the species' own genetic crisis.
Population generally healthy
Each year, staff from state and federal agencies join forces to capture and count Mexican gray wolves. Those who participate are passionate about the work, said Elin Crockett, a wildlife veterinarian for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish who works with animals from elk to bears.
"It's definitely a good and kind of inspiring program to work on," Crockett said.
More than half the 286 wild wolves counted in the most recent census were found in the Land of Enchantment. The 37 packs identified in New Mexico are generally concentrated in the western portions of the state.
Wolves are typically captured on the ground or darted from a helicopter. From there, they can be transitioned to processing sites, where vets like Crockett can evaluate their health and administer vaccines. Females are checked to see if they're of breeding status; some injuries and infections like abscesses are treated.
Wolves are given fluids and pain medication to ease the stress of capture.
Crockett said the wolves evaluated at the end of last year generally appeared healthy. The team of veterinarians take blood samples and survey them for exposure to certain diseases like parvovirus or distemper.
"We do see those diseases in their populations just kind of simmering at low levels," Crockett said, but she hasn't seen major die-offs.
Living with wolves
The reintroduction program has been controversial, especially among livestock owners.
On Wednesday, while debating a bill on reforming the New Mexico State Game Commission, Rep. Stefani Lord, R-Sandia Park, described seeing calves killed by wolves. Driving wolves off her property is a partial solution, Lord said — there's no guarantee they won't head straight to a neighboring property.
"I will live with the wolves, but I don't want my neighbors to," Lord said.
In 2023, New Mexico ranchers were paid approximately $62,000 in direct compensation for lost livestock, according to the annual Fish and Wildlife wolf reports. The federal government provided $3 million to hire range riders, put up fencing and dispose of livestock carcasses in an effort to make ranches less appealing to hungry wolves.
Confirmed Mexican gray wolf kills spiked in 2019, and the following year, livestock owners in the state were paid $186,000 to make up for losses.
Since the peak in 2019, the rate of fatal attacks on livestock and other animals, known as depredation, has been falling. Despite an increasing wolf population, confirmed kills decreased almost 50% over those four years.
In August 2023, Wildlife Services — the federal agency charged with investigating depredation reports — raised the evidentiary bar to confirm a Mexican gray wolf kill. Some groups said that prevented over-attributing deaths to wolf attacks. One of the major changes was requiring evidence that an animal was alive when it crossed paths with a wolf.
At a New Mexico Game Commission meeting last fall, ranchers shared their frustration over delayed compensation and a lack of information about the whereabouts of the wolves — many of which are tracked through collars but whose movements aren't monitored or released in real time to deter poachers and maintain battery life in the collars.
Humans and wolves might cross paths in ways other than livestock attacks. In 2023, four Mexican gray wolves were killed by cars and 11 were illegally killed. Those numbers are well above the average for the approximately quarter-century reintroduction program.
Chris Smith, wildlife program director for WildEarth Guardians, said despite a growing population, the risks to the Mexican gray wolf are still high. There are methods to reduce human and wolf clashes, including "hazing" wolves away from human areas, but they only go so far.
"I'm not sure that we'll ever get down to zero conflict," Smith said. "I wish we could."
Some of those efforts are supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service. Wildlife technicians for the service track and monitor the wolf populations and work to reduce livestock conflicts. But as federal priorities shift with a new presidential administration, Smith said he's not sure how much effort will be devoted to the Mexican gray wolf program in the future.
"I think it kind of depends on what we see from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the federal government, in terms of to what extend they abandon funding and staffing the recovery program," Smith said.
Recovery ready?
A genetically homogeneous population is more susceptible to disease, less fertile and more likely to see the impacts of inbreeding.
Mexican gray wolves were once released as family units. That changed in 2006. From then until 2015, only a handful of "unbonded" adult wolves were released.
In 2015, the program switched to placing captive-born wolf pups into wild dens, hoping they would be fostered by wild wolves. Since then, 126 pups "carefully selected for their genetic value" have been placed in almost 50 dens in the wild. Genetic management from the released pups is "showing results," Liley said.
Some conservationists advocate for going back to family releases, which they say can improve the chances that pups reach breeding age and do, in fact, breed.
As the population grows, the impact of the genetic diversity of one captive-born wolf is diluted.
"If there are 10 wolves on the landscape, and you introduce one new wolf that is genetically different ... [then] 9% of the wolves on the landscape have new genetic information," Smith said. "Whereas now, we have close to 300 wolves. If you introduce one wolf with new genetic information, that's a tiny, tiny little drop in the bucket of the gene pool."
The number of wolves is creeping toward the target: downlisting or delisting from the endangered species list. If the rate of increase continues as expected, the U.S. population should hit 320 wolves within just a couple of years — the threshold to consider reducing protections. But downlisting or delisting could still be a long way off.
An average population of 320, or 150 in both the United States and Mexico, would have to be maintained for four years to be downlisted, and there would have to be a demonstration of genetic diversity.
Delisting is an even higher bar. And a full recovery could take even longer.
Smith thinks the target should be more than double the current 320 goal, and that the reintroduction boundaries should be extended.
Some advocates have been pushing for changes to the boundaries of the Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area. Currently Interstate 40 is the northern boundary. Wayward wolves who pass the boundary — like celebrity and perpetually northward-bound wolf Asha, who was found once in Angel Fire, and again in Coyote — can be trapped and relocated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"The population growing is a good sign," Smith said. "True recovery looks like a minimum of 750 wolves in at least three different populations."