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Pure wolves will likely never return to Maine

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2 months ago

May 30, 2024

Pure wolves will likely never return to Maine

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As anybody who spends any time within the Maine woods is aware of, our coyote populations are plentiful and thriving regardless of leisure and programmed efforts to regulate these extremely environment friendly predators.

And apparently, there have been no coyotes in Maine at one time. However what about wolves in Maine?

Retired U.S Fish and Wildlife biologist Mark McCollough, a Hampden resident, was very near this difficulty, having spent many hours professionally serving to USFWS reply the query: Are there wolves in Maine in the present day?

McCollough writes, “Two wolves have been killed in Maine within the Nineties, however they doubtless spent a while in captivity. An 86-pound wild wolf was killed in northern New Brunswick in 2013. Within the fall of 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wished to definitively reply this query earlier than proposing to take away the wolf from the federal Endangered Species listing within the Northeast. I used to be tasked to work with the Nationwide Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife and Maine (Division of) Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to reply that seemingly easy query. It’s nonetheless unsettled.”

DNA testing revealed that these Maine wolves had been on a weight loss plan of economic pet food and have been almost certainly domesticated wolves earlier than they have been launched. McCollough says that the New Brunswick wolf, then again, was the true deal.

Wolves have been commonplace when settlers first got here to Maine. Naturalists assert that there have been two species of wolves, the smaller “deer wolf” that preyed on deer in coastal Maine and a bigger species of grey wolf that preyed on moose and caribou in northern Maine.

A “predator” void was left when these wolves have been killed off across the flip of the century. In time, our current day coyote migrated eastward and stuffed the area of interest.

Our coyotes, not like the smaller Western “coydog,” are extra genetically sophisticated.

“The wolf query is elusive, advanced and hinges on our understanding of what canid lived right here traditionally, and the newest genetic understanding of canids in jap North America,” McCollough wrote.

Scientists and biologists consider that our Maine coyote got here right here through Ontario already “hybridized” with the smaller jap wolf. And that is the case in the present day. The Maine coyote is a genetic combine, half coyote and half wolf, which explains why they’re usually bigger than the Western coydog.

And what about repeated efforts by activists to get grey wolves launched to Maine, as they have been within the West? McCollough says that within the West a wolf is a wolf and a coyote is a coyote. There isn’t a hybridization. Wolves won’t tolerate coyotes and can steadily kill them.

Maine, with its genetically distinctive coyotes, is a distinct scenario altogether.

If a Canadian jap wolf, or perhaps a larger grey wolf, migrated to Maine by way of St. Pamphile, Quebec, or wherever, or if U.S. Fish and Wildlife launched grey wolves to the state, McCollough mentioned proof means that “if an jap wolf from Ontario or Quebec finds its option to northern New York, Maine or New Brunswick, it’s going to discover itself in a sea of jap coyotes. Any dispersing jap wolf would readily hybridize with jap coyotes, and the offspring could be assimilated into an jap coyote inhabitants that already has a genetic legacy of wolf genes.”

McCollough’s logic, in addition to his credentials, make for a compelling thesis, which appears to say {that a} wolf reintroduction initiative in Maine simply wouldn’t work, even when it have been fascinating.

John Glowa, spokesperson for the Maine Wolf Coalition, has, alongside together with his group, lobbied intensely for a wolf reintroduction program for Maine. “The principle difficulty is that wolves have been right here earlier than and should be right here once more,” he mentioned.

Nonetheless honest and well-intentioned Glowa and his group could also be, and it doesn’t matter what the wolf deserves, the science means that the pure genetic pressure of grey wolf that after inhabited Maine’s North Woods is all a part of historical past, to not return.

V. Paul Reynolds is the editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He’s additionally a Maine Information and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outside” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine Information-Discuss Community.