The Adirondacks were home to wolves over one hundred years ago until human intervention caused their eradication from New York.

Ongoing discussion concerning the reintroduction of these dominant canines is underway. The issue of wolf reintroduction is currently very controversial. One aspect of the controversy is what wolf type originally inhabited the Adirondacks, the timber wolf or the red wolf.

“What we may have had in the Adirondacks and in the Eastern United States was an animal that may no longer exist.”

At the museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, there are remains of what is claimed to be the last wolf in the Adirondacks, which was killed in the late 1800s.

According to Kenneth Kogut, regional wildlife manager for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, genetics work on that animal has proven that it was not a timber wolf, also known as a gray wolf. This canid specimen is more closely aligned genetically with the Algonquin wolf, or red wolf. “What we may have had in the Adirondacks and in the eastern United States was an animal that may no longer exist,” explains Kogut.

James Strittholt, executive director of the Conservation Biology Institute, a nonprofit conservation research organization based in Oregon, also expresses this speculation. “A lot of people think that they [gray wolves] were transients; they would move through this area but not stay around, and that the real native wolf was a red wolf like the Algonquin wolf.”

In 1999, the Conservation Biology Institute studied the plausibility of wolf reintroduction in the Adirondacks. Strittholt notes that there was a lot of confusion about which wolf would be reintroduced during the course of the study. “We had a group in Montreal do some genetic work on what people thought were coyotes that were shot and killed in the region. They were finding that the animals they were thinking were coyotes had more red wolf genes than coyote genes,” says Strittholt.

This coyote-red wolf hybrid is also roaming the Adirondacks and is known as the eastern coyote.

Kogut explains that these canids are twice as big as the western coyote and a little smaller than red wolves. These “super coyotes” are filling the niche that was once occupied by the original wolf Adirondack habitat.

“The scientific community is in turmoil.”

“The primary diet for eastern coyotes in the Adirondacks is whitetail deer, which is very wolf-like in behavior,” says Kogut. “So the scientific community is in turmoil over this issue, what do we have here? Is it closer to being a coyote or is it closer to being a wolf?”

This conundrum is one of the reasons why the Conservation Biology Institute's study recommended against wolf reintroduction in the Adirondacks. There is already an animal on the landscape that is part wolf. According to Strittholt, if red wolves were reintroduced into the Adirondacks, the only way to maintain a pure blood line would be to kill all the coyote-like animals found in the area. Otherwise, the animals would interbreed and a species would result similarly to what is found in the Adirondacks currently, which defeats the purpose of reintroducing wolves in the first place.

Issues of genetic logistics aside, there is also a social angle to the wolf reintroduction controversy. According to Jess Edberg, information and program specialist at the International Wolf Center in Minnesota, some main concerns about wolf reintroduction are general safety while hiking and camping, livestock and domestic pet safety, and hunter success rates of whitetail deer. Most of these concerns stem from a lack of education about wolves. Wolf attacks on livestock are relatively rare and attacks on humans are even rarer.

Edberg notes that proponents of wolf reintroduction believe that these animals can help improve the health of prey animal herds because they usually go after weak or sick animals.

However, according to outdoor columnist Dennis Aprill, reintroducing wolves into the Adirondacks could compromise the small, but growing, moose population. Coyotes kill deer. Wolves are bigger, stronger animals. There is fear that they would hunt the largest prey animal in the Adirondacks:moose.

Perhaps wolf reintroduction will not be an issue if the animals recolonize naturally as moose did. Edberg believes that it is theoretically possible for the wolves in southern Canada to migrate into the Adirondacks. However, road density is high in that area. If natural recolonization did happen, it would take a very long time, she believes. Individual animals would travel south looking for unoccupied space–an area where they can establish a territory and locate a mate.

While issues of reintroduction and natural recolonization are debated, nature has been taking its course. Genetics work has proven that the animals that we have in the Adirondacks are a hybrid of coyotes and red wolves. Without human intervention, and if Darwin was correct, natural selection will run its course and the animal that ends up inhabiting the Adirondacks will be the one best suited to the environment.

Timeline of Wolves and Coyotes

• 1893-Reuben Cary trapped and killed what is attributed to be the last Adirondack wolf.
• 1930s–Coyotes began to establish themselves in New York.
• 1950s–Red wolves were essentially extinct in the wild in the United States.
• 1973–Wolf preservation increased due to the enactment of the Endangered Species Act.
• 1999–An article titled “Genetic Characterization and Taxonomic Description of New York Canids” was published by scientists from the University of Trent in Ontario, McMaster University in Ontario, and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The study concluded that the “eastern coyote represents a hybrid between the eastern Canadian wolf and the coyote.”
• 2002–Cornell University published the results of a survey in which Adirondack residents were nearly evenly split over the issue of wolf reintroduction.