Why the red wolf ‘baby boom’ is no accident

By Maggie Miles | Outer Banks Voice on August 28, 2026

The science behind restoring the endangered species in NC

By Maggie Miles | Outer Banks Voice

Update: The Red Wolf Recovery Program has reported the sad news that the breeding female for the Milltail Family Group was killed after being struck by a car on Highway 264 in the middle of the night on July 30. She had 2 litters totaling 14 pups over the last two years.

Five years ago, just seven known wild red wolves remained in the 1.7-million-acre recovery area spanning five counties on North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula—the only place on earth where the critically endangered species lives in the wild. In the spring of this year, 23 pups were born from four breeding families; 15 of those pups survived.

For Joe Madison, the North Carolina program manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, the 15 surviving pups are proof that years of rebuilding relationships, refining recovery techniques and patiently restoring the population are beginning to pay off.

“We’re definitely on an upward trajectory. But I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all goodness and light and clear sailing, because there’s a lot of challenges,” he said.

Madison says the spring baby boom is tied to the way they’re managing wolves now, including the work with the SAFE program (Saving Animals From Extinction) under the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The American Red Wolf SAFE program consists of 53 partner facilities across the country, which together have a population of 295 red wolves.

According to Madison, the long-term success of the program depends on building enough genetic diversity and increasing the number of breeding pairs. He notes that the fact that the pups born this year came from four different family groups is just as significant as the number of pups born.

He added that it’s critical that these pups, and every litter that follows, become building blocks for the gene pool of the population needed to eventually reach the program’s goal of a self-sustaining population of at least 180 wild red wolves. He added that all of the red wolves alive today—which includes 37 in the wild, and 295 in captivity—came from 12 original founders. After 40 years of the red wolf recovery efforts, they are almost in the 90% range of genetic diversity.

“The higher the genetic diversity, the more resistant the population is to disease and other problems,” he said. “You don’t want the red wolves to be too interrelated — just like you don’t want any species, including humans, to be too interrelated.”

Chris Lasher is the population manager for the American Red Wolf SAFE population. He oversees the population at the 53 partner facilities, with the goal of growing the SAFE population and maintaining and increasing its genetic diversity, and in turn contributing to the genetic diversity of the population in the wild.

He explained that an important way the SAFE program achieves this is by providing pups for fostering with red wolves in the wild.

Another practice is cross‑fostering, which means swapping pups both ways — a wild pup goes to a SAFE facility and the pup from that facility goes to a litter in the wild. Lasher participated in the first ever red wolf-cross fostering in 2002 while working at the North Carolina Zoo.

For cross-fostering, the ages of the SAFE pups and the wild litter are matched as closely as possible so that no pup is so much larger that it outcompetes the others for milk and resources.

“That’s one of the things that’s amazing about these animals is how maternal the mothers are,” said Lasher. “We always say ‘Can you imagine going out for groceries and coming back and you have two more mouths to feed?”

Another way SAFE works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is by identifying and preparing wolves between one and two years old to be paired with a wolf in the wild. The SAFE wolves are released into acclimation pens in the wild with their paired mate.

If the pair acclimate to each other and have a litter of pups in the pen, they are released into the wild after six weeks. If they don’t acclimate to the wild, the wolf from the SAFE is returned there.

To mitigate this, Lasher explained that the SAFE population is managed as if every wolf could one day go back to the wild. Wolves are kept in large, naturalistic habitats, in family groups and on more natural diets, with strict policies to minimize human contact so they retain a healthy fear of people.

“And if we pair a safe animal with a wild wolf, and that wild wolf can teach that safe animal how to kind of be wild and the tricks and the trade of living out there, and how to stay away from people,” he added.

Lasher says that ultimately, the SAFE population exists to grow and diversify the wild population, and the spring baby boom was a result of a larger number of successful breeding pairs.

“We’re the assurance population, so that if anything does happen, like it did with the Red Wolves in the [mid-2010s] where the population just absolutely plummeted, there is an assurance population that is readily available to help bring that back,” he said.

In addition to the 50% mortality rate for pups in the wild in their first year of life, Madison and Lasher say red wolves face a number of natural and human-related threats, such as disease, vehicle strikes, gunfire and the uncertainty of life in the wild. According to Madison, wolves that survive and die of natural causes in this population live to about 9 years old on average, but when you factor in human‑caused mortality, the average drops to around 4 years old.

In order to maintain and grow the population in the wild, biologists have had to win over private landowners across the five‑county recovery area in North Carolina. They offer technical and financial help through programs like their Prey for the Pack program, use bright orange collars to help landowners and hunters distinguish red wolves from coyotes, and run a large‑scale coyote sterilization program.

Breeding between red wolves and coyotes has adversely affected the red wolf population, so biologists capture coyotes, give them vasectomies or tubal ligations, and release them back as non-breeding “placeholders” that hold territory but don’t produce pups, making it easier for red wolves to reclaim those areas.

To mitigate vehicle strikes, the program, working with NCDOT and the Wildlife Resources Commission, secured a $25 million federal grant to build wildlife underpasses along a deadly stretch of U.S. 64 just west of Buffalo City Road. They’ve added reflective material to wolves’ orange collars so drivers can see them at night, deployed portable electronic “Red Wolf Crossing” signs, and are testing deterrent systems designed to scare wolves away from highways.

Another cause for optimism, Madison said, is the strong working relationship with the state wildlife agency, something that wasn’t always the case. Today, the Red Wolf Recovery Program operates under a memorandum of understanding with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and works jointly with the state on red wolf and coyote management across the five‑county recovery area.

Ultimately, Madison says, the spring baby boom should be seen as a stepping stone to reach that goal of 180 wild red wolves in Eastern North Carolina and the addition of two other wild red wolf sites in other parts of the country.

“I don’t take anything for granted,” he said. “Yes, it bodes well for the future. But there’s a lot more that has to happen between now and then for it to come to fruition. We can’t let up.”