MANTEO, N.C. -- Zacary Hunter, 8, was dressed for the occasion. His red T-shirt was adorned with an embroidered face of a red wolf and the lettering SAVE ME! His mother, Tricia, had made the shirt for him as part of a school project back home in Telford, Pa.
``It was a project on endangered species, and he got assigned the red wolf," Tricia explained. ``We went online for his report and learned that a lot of red wolves are in North Carolina."
So when she, Zacary, and his brother Jacob, 5, came to the Outer Banks in late June on vacation, they immediately signed up for a Red Wolf Howling Safari, a two-hour educational program at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Although visitors usually do not see the wolves (few people ever do), with a little luck and some human-produced howls, the wolves will howl back.
The refuge, on about 152,000 acres of forested wetland just east of Manteo and west of Columbia, is home to an abundance of wildlife, including bears, deer, otters, alligators, and at least 200 species of birds. But the most famous animal here is the red wolf, an endangered species that was declared extinct in the wild in 1980. In a reintroduction program, the US Fish and Wildlife Service captured the few remaining red wolves to breed them in captivity and reestablish the species in the wild. Though there are 38 spots in the country that conduct captive breeding programs, the only place in the world where red wolves roam wild is here in eastern North Carolina, across 1.7 million acres in five counties.
Wild, however, does not mean without human intervention. As part of the Red Wolf Recovery Program headquartered at the Alligator River refuge, more than half the wolves wear radio transmitter collars that emit frequencies so biologists can study their movement and behavior. Scientists do aerial tracking as well. And when they trap wolves to attach the collars, they inoculate them against heartworm and other diseases.
In 1987 the Fish and Wildlife Service released four pairs of captive-bred red wolves in the refuge, and today nearly 20 packs comprising 100 wolves roam the area. (There are places in New England to see red wolves in captivity: Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence and Beardsley Zoological Gardens in Bridgeport, Conn.)
Before Zacary and Jacob went off to howl with the 100 or so other visitors, they visited a table staffed by Diane Hendry, recovery outreach coordinator, who showed them pelts from a red wolf and a coyote. Red wolves, about 4 feet long and weighing 53 to 84 pounds, are larger. Despite their name, they are mostly brown and buff, sometimes with a reddish color on their ears, head, and legs.
