S3E34: Hope the Mexican Wolf: A Tale of Survival and Loss in Northern Arizona

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out 90 miles from needles.com donate or text the word needles to 53555. Think the deserts are barren wastelands, Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you, Joe. And welcome, listeners, to another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:50 - (Chris): I'm your host, Chris Clarke. And it has been a crazy week outside the desert. Inside the desert, too, but it's usually crazy inside the desert. I have to say, if I was writing a really absurd, dark humor farce kind of movie, I would be afraid of making some of the decisions in that fiction that our current President elect is making in real life as he chooses his cabinet. I would be thinking nobody would ever buy that.

0:01:18 - (Chris): But it's happening in real life, so stay tuned and we will cover when Trump nominates a herd of locusts to be Agriculture Secretary or an iceberg to be head of the Department of Commerce. In any event, we have a really good episode for you this time around, once again involving Mexican wolves. We're talking with Greta Anderson, the Deputy Director of Western Watersheds, which is a really effective group doing amazing work throughout the West.

0:01:44 - (Chris): And Greta will be talking to us about a recent sad fatality well outside the legally prescribed range of Mexican wolves under the Endangered Species Act. This wolf, who had been named Hope by the school children of Flagstaff, lived north of Interstate 40. She got there on her own power with walking with a pack mate. The end of her life is sad, but the fact that she made it there, as Greta points out, is a success story. And it should be something that inspires us, not only because we need inspiration in times like this, but also because, quite honestly, we need to modify our policies to let the Mexican wolves do what they want to do as they tell us where they want to be as they repopulate the Southwest.

0:02:33 - (Chris): I think you're really going to enjoy this interview with Greta Anderson. But first, as always, I want to remind you that it is listeners just like you that pay for this podcast and everything else that the Desert Advocacy Media Network does. We have a new contributor, Michael Wangler, this week. Thank you, Michael. And a longtime contributor, Mike Stillman, has increased the amount he's giving us each month.

0:02:55 - (Chris): Thank you, Mike. It was really good to run into you at the 29 Palms Book Festival. A few other quick notes before we go into our interview. First, if you follow environmental news throughout the desert, you will probably be interested in our free Substack Newsletter desert news@desertnews.substack.com each week, more or less each week we go through upwards of 50 different newspapers, some big, most of them very small and local, even hyper local, and we curate a selection of the environmental news of the past week from the deserts of North America all the way from Northern Nevada to Zacatecas and Big Bend to Los Angeles county. And we bring it to you@desvertnews.substack.com

0:03:44 - (Chris): this newsletter is free to subscribe to, and we're very interested in knowing what you think. Item number two if you're among the many, many people who have decamped one social media realm or another for Bluesky, you can find us there at 90 MFN BSky Social 90 MFN BSky Social say hello. If you follow us. I'd love to hear from you. Item number three, the last one in the series. At 10 o'clock in the morning on November 30th, which is a Saturday, I will be giving a presentation at the Shoshone Museum in scenic and not precisely cosmopolitan Shoshone, California.

0:04:29 - (Chris): If you're anywhere in the neighborhood, it's a nice day trip from Vegas, a much longer day trip from la, but totally worth it even if you don't come to the Shoshone Museum and hear me talk. But if you do, I look forward to seeing you. I think it'll be a good time. And now, without further ado, our interview with Greta Andersen of Western Watersheds about Mexican Wolves and Northern Arizona. Enjoy. We are very lucky to be joined in our virtual studio by Greta Anderson, Deputy Director of Western Watersheds.

0:05:49 - (Chris): Greta, thank you so much for joining us here at 90 miles from Needles.

0:05:53 - (Greta): Happy to be here, Chris. Always happy to talk to you.

0:05:56 - (Chris): Yeah, just full disclosure, Greta and I go way back. There's a lot of people in the general realm of desert protection that I have never met and that I don't even know their names. But there are a lot of people that I've known for a long time and Greta is one of those people. Actually, I think it was about getting close to 15 years ago that you handed me an amazing bottle of Scotch in El Charro in Tucson on my birthday.

0:06:21 - (Greta): Oh, funny. Yeah, I forgot about that. But yes, that's been a while.

0:06:27 - (Chris): It has. We are here to talk about some less than happy news. Not that anybody needs more of that right now, but this is important. Greta, what can you tell us about Mexican wolves in Northern Arizona?

0:06:42 - (Greta): I'm going to back up and say the demise of the Kendrick peak pack, female 2979, who was named Hope by school children. And Flagstaff was some sad news that we all got last week and have been trying to cope with. But ultimately I want to frame Hope's story as a cool success because when Hope was first spotted west of Flagstaff in June with another wolf, that was the first pack of wolves that had been seen north of Interstate 40 since their extirpation in the state during the middle of the last century. So the, the fact that Hope and the wolf shows with who is named mystery, the fact that those two were there was like a remarkable event, a real achievement and a great sign for wolf recovery.

0:07:40 - (Greta): So Hope, I'm not if your listeners know the Mexican wolf recovery program has this really strange rule that wolves are not allowed to run north of Interstate 40 or they get picked up and brought back to the recovery area. And we've had prior to Hope, there were eight collared wolves that we knew had made the journey north of the boundary and been relocated or had died north of the boundary. But they had all been single wolves. And in fact all of the regulation around this is written as if it's single dispersing wolves that cross the boundary.

0:08:18 - (Greta): You go get that wolf and move them back into the bounds of the Mexican wolf experimental population area. So Hopes, Hope and her friend, her partner, her sibling, we don't know who this wolf was in relationship to her. The fact that they were up there was like unexpected and really unprecedented within the recovery. So yay for Hope. There was a lot of advocacy for her throughout the summer. There were the mayor of Flagstaff in her personal capacity, wrote an op ed welcoming her to the area.

0:08:53 - (Greta): There were scientists who talked about how this is exactly what wolves should be doing. This is what wolves need. This is a great place for wolves to be. There were hundreds of public comments in support of Hope and her family being allowed to stay put. And the fact that she was up there for six months is itself good news.

0:09:14 - (Chris): And I'm always happy to have my doom scrolling recast as good news. So thank you for that.

0:09:20 - (Greta): The wolf working with wolves is there's rarely happy endings. And we take the incremental progress which is Wolf Hope 2979. She followed in the footsteps of a wolf two years ago whose name was Anubis. He had gone up north, Arizona game of fish went and got him, moved him back south. He immediately turned around and ran north again. Because wolves know where they want to be. Hope pretty much followed exactly his path. She was in some of the same places that he hung out.

0:09:54 - (Greta): We know that there'll be more wolves that do that in the future because that's what wolves are supposed to do. They're supposed to disperse, find new territory, expand their habitat. And those wolves are really valuable parts of the wolf population because they are dispersing for the sake of not breeding with their relatives. And so that instinct is an instinct of survival. And she helped reinforce the path for wolves to get from where they're currently allowed to be down in central and southern Arizona and New Mexico up to the north.

0:10:27 - (Chris): So what happened with Hope this past week?

0:10:34 - (Greta): It's a good question. The news release from the government says that she was found dead and that it's under investigation. They described the location being near Williams, Arizona. We know that there's snow on the ground up there. We know that it was. It's hunting season. We also know that people are allowed to kill coyotes year round. So it's not clear what happened with Hope. And it usually takes a few years for us to be able to figure out what the cause of death was and what the outcome of the investigation is. So we don't know. But I suspect illegal mortality being the leading cause of wolf losses within the recovery program.

0:11:17 - (Greta): I expect that there's a high likelihood that she was shot.

0:11:24 - (Chris): This is, like you said, not a happy ending, at least for Hope. I know that it's been a little bit since I was really immersed in wolf politics, wolves reintroducing themselves or being reintroduced. And I know that there was something called the McKittrick Rule a decade ago that basically was a get out of jail free card for hunters or for anyone who was shooting a wolf. You just say that I thought it was a coyote and you basically get off scot free. But that rule was changed or revoked or modified at some point, wasn't it?

0:11:59 - (Greta): There was a win on that in District of Arizona, but it was reversed at the Ninth Circuit. So the McKittrick policy is still in place. And you're right, it serves as a get out of jail free card. It was adopted with by the Department of Justice. It regards jury instruction. That basically means prosecutors in these cases have to be able to prove that the killer of the endangered species knew that they were killing an endangered species.

0:12:28 - (Greta): So you have to prove the intent, which is very difficult to do. First, if somebody says they thought it was a coyote, it's hard to prove that they didn't. So there's very few prosecutions as a result of that. Prosecutors are not inclined to take cases they're apt to lose. And so even where the Fish and Wildlife Service has completed law enforcement investigations, identified a suspect, got a bunch of evidence, they turned their cases over to the Attorney General's office and the prosecutors declined the cases.

0:13:06 - (Greta): Under the Freedom of Information Act, I've requested all of the investigations into illegal killings of wolves since the inception of the program. And we see time and time again, like these cases are really hard to solve. But even when they solve them, it doesn't go up towards criminal prosecution. And very often they're instead resolved as a civil penalty, which can just be a fine for destroying the wolf's collar or some penalties have been as low as $10 for killing an endangered species. Under this civil crime, the only we see the prosecution are where people admit they knew that they shot a wolf or they self report that they shot a wolf and then there's no penalty. It's just really hard to prove that knew it wasn't a coyote. In Hope's case, and in the case of most of the wolves that we know about as an artifact of the collars themselves, she was wearing a really brightly colored collar.

0:14:07 - (Greta): She had a bright red collar on. And some of my colleagues at the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, some of their volunteers, were actually able to see her in the field, which was so cool. And they got some pictures of her and you can see her collar. So if somebody shot her, if she was shot, which I don't know, but if they shot her and it was an accident, they weren't paying close enough attention to their target because she was very clearly marked as a.

0:14:37 - (Greta): Not a wild coyote.

0:14:39 - (Chris): Yeah. Or a coyote that stole a collar from a wolf.

0:14:43 - (Greta): Right, right. I mean, it's actually frightening. And the McKittrick policy gets invoked for grizzly bears, black bears, whooping cranes, sandhill cranes, there's other species. But with Mexican wolves because. And gray wolves as well, with Mexican wolves, because they're so imperiled and every wolf matters. We actually tried to go around the McKittrick policy by getting coyotes listed under a similarity of appearance provision, which would protect them where they overlap. So people can't kill coyotes either.

0:15:16 - (Greta): But you can imagine that went over like a ton of bricks.

0:15:21 - (Chris): I would have voted for it for sure. I think one of the underappreciated atrocities in the California desert is that the second largest National Park Service holding allows basically unregulated killing of the apex predator in the preserve, Mojave National Preserve. And hunting is allowed there. And I not thrilled with that, but I'm not going to waste my time thinking about quail hunters or deer hunters, whatever, but varmint hunting just seems it's wrong headed and counterproductive and bad.

0:16:00 - (Greta): It certainly is. And there's stories about people leaving gut piles at the end of the road so that they're when their neighbors drive by they can shoot coyotes. And it's, it's a sport in this, in rural places and they, people don't even think anything of it. It's anti scientific like you said. It's counterproductive and it's just really mean spirited and sick. Yeah, we don't let people just willy nilly kill animals, but somehow coyotes are exempt from that. And I agree with you. I don't believe that.

0:16:33 - (Greta): I also don't think that killing coyotes for kicks is a great idea, but I also don't think that is a rational excuse for allowing the killing of wolves by mistake.

0:16:44 - (Chris): Yep. What's the current thinking about continuing presence of the wolves north of I40? I assume hope wasn't the only one there.

0:16:54 - (Greta): She was the only collared one, so she's the only one we know for sure. And typically whenever there's reports of wolves dispersing, the Arizona Game and Fish department or New Mexico department fishing game are keen to go retrieve them and move them back into the mupa. Partly Mexican wolves are listed as a 10 day population which is a classification under the Endangered Species act that allows ranchers to manage wolves, meaning haze and harass them, scare them off, various things that you otherwise would not be allowed to do with a fully protected species.

0:17:33 - (Greta): Once Mexican wolves leave the experimental population area and go north of I40, that flexibility is gone. And so this summer there were a couple instances of predation events that they thought that Hope and her family might have had something to do with. And there were no mechanisms by which for the rancher to do conflict prevention that would have been directed at the wolves. The rancher could have moved their cows, they could have moved carcasses, rendered carcasses inedible, done all kinds of things to prevent conflict, but they wouldn't have been able to harm or harass the wolves.

0:18:12 - (Greta): And so that is the incentive for keeping them back within the experimental population area. Our belief is that wolves should be allowed to go wherever they want. And the wolves are showing us and science predicted that the Grand Canyon eco region and northern New Mexico are both really great areas for wolf habitat and we think that they should be allowed to go there. I think as the population grows of Mexican wolves, right now there's 257 at last year's count. In the wild, as the population grows, we're going to see more and more of this dispersal.

0:18:53 - (Greta): And under a climate change scenario, we're seeing species either go north in latitude or up in elevation. So it makes sense to start thinking about Mexican wolves moving north. Even if their historic range was primarily to the south of there, they should be allowed to adapt. Species have always been moving, and so that's the current thinking is we have to get them to change the rules to allow wolves to go where wolves need to go.

0:19:23 - (Greta): The Biden administration a couple years ago approved a new definition of the Tenje population. It used to be you could only introduce reintroduce species in their historic range. And under this new provision of 10J, they're allowing them to be reintroduced in places that are more suitable because of the changing climate. If wolves were being relisted now under the 10J, that area would be open to them. But it's because they're still considered under the previous rule to recover in their historic range that there's such an emphasis on keeping them south.

0:20:04 - (Greta): And in fact, the state agencies would really like their recovery to happen in Mexico so that they don't have to deal with wolves at all or in a very narrow capacity. So in 2011, there was a team of scientists who developed an idea that to really recover Mexican gray wolves, you needed three connected subpopulations, one where they are now, in the Muppet, the Grand Canyon eco region and northern New Mexico being the three.

0:20:34 - (Greta): Instead, the government changed tax and capitulated to state interests. And there's two wild population, one where they are now and one in Mexico. Unfortunately, the one in Mexico has not really taken off and there are no collared wolves there. Despite multiple dozens of wolves being released, they tend not to survive down there. And so this kind of idea or thinking that we're going to have these two populations is really wishful thinking based on the evidence.

0:21:10 - (Greta): And what we need to do is look at the ways wolves are showing us that they can recover by claiming new places and let them go there.

0:21:19 - (Chris): Yeah. Speaking as a Californian, watching the gray wolves repopulate the state of California after almost 90 years, it was one of my favorite stories that I've ever followed in way too many years as a journalist. It's just really remarkable what animals will do if you just let them.

0:21:39 - (Greta): Yeah, I mean, they are seeking out the places that they feel like they can survive. So why are we as humans second guessing that?

0:21:51 - (Chris): What do you see happening with Mexican wolf Reintroduction and recovery in the next four years is this fray.

0:22:00 - (Greta): Spin to the good news if you can, please. Let me see if I can spin this. I think that wolves and wildlife tend to be incredibly resilient. Wolves are habitat generalists and can make a go of it as long as there's a place where there's enough for them to eat. And I believe that no matter what happens at this point, there are enough wolves on the ground that it won't be zeroed out in the next four years. We have some real challenges right now. All of the wolves in the wild population are as related to each other as siblings.

0:22:41 - (Greta): They all descend from seven founder wolves. So there's a genetic crisis that needs to be addressed. And there are things that should have been done, I believe in the last four years, that could have been done in the last four years that would help, that would have helped mitigate what might be coming. Which is why with Endangered Species Act, I feel like they should be doing everything they can. When you're dealing with a species that's facing extinction, there's no time to compromise.

0:23:15 - (Greta): At that point, we just need to focus on recovery. I don't think that the Trump administration is going to be great an endangered species. I think we know that they're going to try to defund a lot of programs. I think that we have evidence that Trump's family members are exactly the type of people who would like to kill wolves and coyotes. And Don Jr. Is really into his hunting prowess. So I don't know that they have the reverence for wildlife and the ecological, the integrity of the ecosystem that some of us do.

0:23:55 - (Greta): I'm afraid. Of course I'm afraid, but what are our options?

0:24:02 - (Chris): Yeah, yeah, that's as good a way of putting it as I've heard so far. What have I failed to ask you that you think I should have asked you?

0:24:12 - (Greta): I don't know. I feel like I've gone down in the weeds on some of this stuff.

0:24:16 - (Chris): That's what the podcast is for, the weeds.

0:24:20 - (Greta): Okay. I think when I think about wolves like Hope, it's this double edged sword, right? Because we name her, we get to know her, we track her, we look at her on the map, we advocate for her as an individual. And then when she was found dead, it hurts like someone we knew and it's personalized. I think that's a risk of being too close to the work. But I also think that's what kind of makes the work worth doing is these inspiring individuals with these life stories that you can understand, understand and be amazed by and be interested in and captivated by. There's wolves, individual wolves whose stories, like Anubis, the wolf that had ran before her and then they picked him up. He ran right back.

0:25:18 - (Greta): It's, what a cool guy. He's like, self determined. He ran past lots of other wolves to keep going. He had a plan, but it hurts to lose. Yeah, those wolves too. So it's always the. I was talking to a group of school kids on Saturday and I was talking about Leopold's the price of an ecological education as to live alone in a world of wounds. And my only, like, solace sometimes is that we're not really alone. Yeah, there's a lot of us who feel that same wounding and can share it and understand that this is sad.

0:25:58 - (Greta): What humans are doing is really sad.

0:26:01 - (Chris): Yeah, I haven't really thought that way about that quote before, but it's, I think, something that we can be grateful for that Leopold probably was alone in perceiving that world and we have. There are tens of thousands of people who are actively involved now. And I kind of wish for him that he could have seen that.

0:26:23 - (Greta): Yeah, the perspective and the mindset in his time was so different, at least among white conservationists. I'm certain there were people in other cultures that felt the way that we do about wolf's name, but it's certainly his thinking on that. Our sort of evolution as conservation biologists has also allowed us to share that, to have empathy for the individuals, I think. And there's a lot of. We share that in our community, so that's good.

0:26:55 - (Chris): Yeah. Greta Anderson of Western Watersheds Project, thank you for joining us.

0:27:04 - (Greta): Thank you for having me. I wish I could be reporting on the first litter of puppies born north of I40. And maybe next year I'll be able to talk to you about that. We just have to keep moving forward and holding out hope.

0:27:17 - (Chris): Yeah. I expect to hear from you by next year that the jaguars and ocelots and Mexican wolves have all formed a union.

0:27:23 - (Greta): And don't forget the grizzly bears.

0:27:25 - (Chris): Oh, yes, of course. That's a picket line I will not cross.

0:27:31 - (Greta): Me neither.

0:28:43 - (Chris): Well, that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. I want to thank Greta Anderson of Western Watersheds Project for joining us and telling us about the bittersweet story of Hope, the Mexican wolf, and hopefully some family members sprinkled throughout Northern Arizona somewhere. You can find out more about Western Watersheds Project by going to westernwatersheds.org

0:29:08 - (Chris): and thanks again to Michael Wangler for joining our family of contributors, and to Mike Stillman for boosting the amount he donates to us each month. You guys both rock. I would also like to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, who did our wonderful podcast artwork. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is courtesyenvato.com my dear spouse and I went to a film festival the other night. It was an outdoor film festival put on by our friends at the Native American Land Conservancy, and we were sitting wrapped up in a bunch of layers and enjoying some really fantastic short films about Native life and activism and things like that, but just really generally feeling like it was way too cold to be doing this and we finished up and said goodbye and hugged those of our friends that we had run into there and walked to the car, fired up the car and the dashboard thermometer said that it was 58 degrees.

0:30:20 - (Chris): So we are pathetic Southern Californians. Nonetheless, take care when it is cold and windy outside. If you're hiking, it's really a much better time to hike than it is in the summer, but you're going to get almost as dehydrated, so keep that in mind. Take a layer off if you get too warm, stick it in the backpack. You can always put it back on if you get cold. It's really about balance, as are so many other things I will say that I can't bring myself to doom. Scroll for the last week or so, aside from putting out desert news@desertnews.substack.com and I skip by most of the national politics stories to land on things like Phoenix is going to plant 27,000 street trees to combat global warming.

0:31:11 - (Chris): That kind of news doesn't burn me out. We still don't have the details worked out, but second week of December going to be putting together a public forum on what the heck do those of us in the desert protection movement do now and for the next four years. It should be an interesting discussion and look here for details. Once we get that all finalized, we have a couple of really great folks who've already agreed to be on the panel and we will tell you more as we know it.

0:31:40 - (Chris): One other thing, the first week of December there will not be an episode. Going to be up in Seattle spending time with my wife's family as we commemorate the life of my brother in law Greg Oberg, who we miss very much. It is possible that we'll need to extend that short hiatus to two weeks? Hard to say. It's going to be a lot of travel, not a lot of time to put an episode together. But in the meantime, we have episodes coming up on a lot of interesting, different topics, and we look forward to sharing them with you. So, as always, please take care of yourselves. The desert needs you, and so do we.

0:32:22 - (Chris): And I will see you at the next watering hole. Goodbye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.