The rustling in the brush was loud, so Brian Christman raised his muzzleloader for the deer he expected to emerge. It was the end of the season in central New York, and Mr. Christman was hoping to take home a buck.
Instead, he saw what looked like a big, white dog staring at him. Suddenly, Mr. Christman felt like the prey. He was wearing a scent that made him smell like a doe in heat. He lined up the animal in his scope and pulled the trigger.
“I thought it was a huge coyote,” Mr. Christman recalled recently.
It wasn’t. And the shot would open a new, uncertain front in the wars over what might be America’s most beloved and reviled predator. Genetic analysis and other testing revealed that the 85-pound animal killed in December 2021 was actually a gray wolf that had eaten a wild diet. By all indications, it was not an escaped captive.
A cluster of passionate conservationists in the region has long claimed the animals are finding their way from Canada or the Great Lakes to the forests of the upper Northeast. To them, the wolf shot near Cooperstown is evidence that government agencies need to do more to seek out and safeguard the animals.
But when it comes to protecting wolves, apex predators that American settlers and their descendants nearly eradicated more than a century ago, controversy is never far.
Brian Christman near Cooperstown in December 2021.Credit…via Brian Christman
From a distance, people often like the idea of a charismatic species like wolves returning to a landscape, said Dan Rosenblatt, who oversees endangered and non-game species at New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. When you’re talking about them in someone’s backyard or where they love to hike, he said, “that level of support tends to go down pretty fast.”
There have been two other confirmed wolves in New York in the last 25 years, according to the state. One of them, killed by a hunter in 2001, was probably wild. But establishing whether any large canines spotted are actually wolves is complicated by the especially large coyotes in the region. According to scientists, their size is the result of historical, and possibly ongoing, interspecies hanky-panky.
Wolves, coyotes and dogs can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Northeastern coyotes have a significant amount of wolf DNA — often about 20 percent, researchers have found. This heritage has given rise to the name “coywolves,” though many scientists dislike the term on the grounds that it implies a distinct species or something like a 50-50 hybrid.
Instead, “it’s a hot mess,” said Bridgett vonHoldt, a professor and geneticist at Princeton University who studies canines, including gray wolves in the Great Lakes, eastern wolves in Canada, coyotes and dogs. “There’s a lot of genetics that are being shared between all these canines, and that creates a lot of confusion for the public and challenges for management.”
Legally, the species matters: In New York, wolves are…
2023-07-07 06:29:56
Post from www.nytimes.com
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