U.S. Effort to Save Rare Red Wolves Paying Off : Nature: Eighteen zoos are serving as living areas for the nearly extinct animals. Despite a good breeding year, the mortality rate was high.

Three lanky red wolf pups with an unsteady gait and a penchant for play are among the latest additions to a national program aimed at saving the nearly extinct species.

“They’re still a little clumsy and don’t have the fluid motion of their parents yet,” said John Harglewood, director of the Good Children’s Zoo at Oglebay Park, one of 18 zoos nationwide that serve as breeding and living areas for the wolves.

“They’re just like dog puppies, always wanting to play,” Harglewood said. “When people first see them, they think they’re just another attraction at the zoo but they really take an interest when they find out how rare they are.”

Five charcoal gray pups, one male and four females, with white markings on their feet and chest, were born to No. 278, a female, and No. 282 at Oglebay in early May. One of the females was stillborn and another died a day later from a bacterial infection, Harglewood said.

The surviving pups have since taken on the rusty red hue of their parents. They weigh 15 to 20 pounds, eat solid food and spend much of their time outside their den, a customized, rock-covered septic tank.

The number of red wolves worldwide stood at 131, 74 females and 57 males, on July 31, said Roland Smith, coordinator of the red wolf species survival plan for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Tacoma, Wash.

“This was a good breeding year,” Smith said in a telephone interview. “But our mortality rate was kind of high.”

Smith said 17 the 49 pups born this year died for various reasons. “We had a couple of litters where the female ate the young.”

Wolves give birth only in April and May and average about five pups in a litter, he said.

The adult wolves have been at Oglebay since December, 1988, but apparently were not comfortable enough in their new surroundings to breed in 1989, said Penny Miller, curator at the zoo.

Adult red wolves, about the size of a female German shepherd, are slightly smaller than their gray cousins. By the early 1970s, vanishing habitat and a bounty on them had driven them to virtual extinction, except for several isolated areas in Louisiana and Texas, where they began to mate with coyotes.

The animals once ranged as far east as Delaware, westward across central Indiana and Illinois to Oklahoma and throughout the South, from western Texas to Florida.

“Had they remained in the wild, they would be extinct,” Smith said.

From 1973 to 1980, more than 400 red wolves or coyote hybrids were examined by federal game officials seeking to preserve a pure strain. The fish and wildlife service established the red wolf recovery program in 1980, with 40 wolves determined to be genetically pure.

The wolves at Oglebay and elsewhere are all descendants of that core group.

“Our goal is to have about 350 wolves in captivity and about 200 in the wild,” Smith said. “With that we can keep the population together without losing genetic diversity for the next 50 to 100 years.”

Thirty-eight red wolves have been released at four sites, in the Carolinas, Mississippi and Florida, Smith said.

“The wolves have done pretty well, actually much better than we expected,” Smith said. “They’re never going to come back to the numbers there used to be because of a loss of habitat. But we should have a few pockets with red wolves in them.”