One critically endangered species that calls North Carolina home now has five more members. Three male and two female red wolf pups were born this month at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. Red wolves once thrived across the Southeast but now number only about 300 total, in the wild and in captivity. One part of eastern North Carolina is the only confirmed place where the wolves live in the wild. To talk more about red wolves, I’m joined now by Katerina Ramos. She’s the red wolf education and outreach coordinator with the North Carolina Wildlife Federation.
Marshall Terry: The birth of five new pups in a community that numbers only about 300 seems like a pretty big deal. Just how important is it?
Katerina Ramos: It's very important. Any growth in the population that we can get is always going to be a positive thing. The more pups that we get, the more that we can do in the wild, and the more that we can support our SAFE population that exists at zoos and aquariums.
Terry: Five pups died two years ago, right? What were the circumstances there?
Ramos: So the five pups that we're talking about were born to a wild red wolf mother and a SAFE population male. That SAFE population male got hit by a car. The wild mom, as a first-time mom, just ended up abandoning the pups.
Terry: Is this a bit of bounce back from that tragedy?
Ramos: Absolutely. We're talking about pups that were born at the Durham Life and Science Museum, which are our SAFE population wolves. That's the population that is the backbone of red wolf genetics. In the wild, we've definitely bounced back. We had 20 pups born in the 2024-2025 breeding season, and the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn't announced this year, but I can only hope that it's just as amazing. So we're definitely seeing a bounce back.
Terry: What do red wolves look like compared to, say, a coyote, which I imagine many people have probably seen before?
Ramos: Actually, that's one of the issues that red wolves have, which is that it can be a little hard for people to tell the difference between a red wolf and a coyote.
They do have pretty similar faraway glances of how they look. Red wolves are generally bigger, being anywhere between 45 to 85 pounds. Coyotes are really maxing out their weight at 35 pounds. Red wolves have much longer legs. Red wolves have really big feet. Red wolves have a broader face.
Terry: And I imagine maybe the obvious red wolves are red, or I don't think coyotes are red, are they?
Ramos: They can be a wide range of colors. They can be completely black with a white chest, or they can be really, really strawberry blonde and everything in between.
Terry: Red wolves once thrived here. How many are actually left in the wild, and what happened?
Ramos: There is a known population of 26 wolves in the wild, and I say known because that's the population that we're able to track. The biggest struggle for them was that we have a lot of human-based mortality events. We have gunshot mortalities and we have vehicle mortalities.
But we also have a lot of development. We break up these large pieces of habitat that they normally thrive in and put them into smaller pieces. That's why it's so important that we continue to work on habitat connectivity and work on the understanding of what it is to live with wild animals.
Terry: Where exactly in eastern North Carolina are they found in the wild and why is that the only place?
Ramos: In eastern North Carolina, the red wolves are found in a five-county area of Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell, and Washington Counties. So that's about 1.7 million acres. It's only this specific place because this is where we first reintroduced red wolves back in 1987. It was the most ideal location based on a number of factors, the biggest one being that there's a lot of habitat out here and there aren't a lot of people.
The other thing is that there is a lot of land that is owned by the federal government and by the state that is managed for wildlife and habitat. They just haven't been able to expand and we haven't added new populations across the United States.
However, there is a recovery plan in place that states that they do want to add additional release locations for red wolves. You cannot recover a species without a lot of collaboration and understanding from everyone involved, not just the Fish and Wildlife Service or NGOs, but also with the public. It's very heavy on the education and the outreach and the understanding within the communities themselves.
