a fainting, ghostly presence
with a tail so naked it was
embarrassed to drag behind him.
—Faith Shearin
My mother-in-law and I sat at the kitchen table. She was eating oatmeal while I read Possum in the Garbage aloud. Mary doesn’t say much, so I wasn’t sure if she liked the poem or not. She has her favorites, many memorized in grammar school back in New Jersey. Somewhere, I have a recording of her reciting Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
—Elizabeth Bishop
Looking back, I can’t remember how I got into a conversation about a moose with a complete stranger at my local grocery store. We were both juggling an armful of stuff in the 15-items-or-less line and found ourselves comparing notes on the animals we had seen on trips to Yellowstone. Elk, coyote, buffalo. But it was the moose, she told me, that made her cry.
The Moose is a long poem, like the bus trip it describes, but it’s worth the journey through the stanzas for the reward at the end.
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water.
—Ted Kooser
Nebraska is Ted Kooser’s home and his poems take me back to the plains where I grew up—dark skies and the never-ending horizon. He was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006 and these days edits the column American Life in Poetry.
Here is the link to the full text of his poem Flying at Night.
No one would take her when Ruth passed,
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, “She’s old. Somebody
should put her down.”
—Ron Koertge
Mondays have improved greatly since I discovered American Life in Poetry. Ted Kooser’s weekly column slips into my email inbox when I’m not looking, distracted by my to-do list for the week. He rarely prints a poem that I don’t enjoy.
This recent one about an old cat named Lily is one of my favorites.
It was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at a frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there’d be no school tomorrow.
—Stanley Kunitz
Reading Halley’s Comet makes me think of my grandfathers. Like the poet, both were in grammar school when the comet made its first appearance of the 20th Century—it comes close enough to Earth be visible once every 75 years or so.
Did those little boys look up at the night sky searching for a streak of light?
This is a real wolf, standing on all fours,
his rich fur bristling in the night air,
his head is bent over the book open on the ground.
∼Billy Collins
A happy coincidence that Lobo Week ends on the day that National Poetry Month begins! Here is a link to the poem Wolf, excerpted above.
I plan to post a poem or a link to a poem each day in April. No pictures, just words. Mix freely with a big dose of imagination!
Once again it’s spring and last year’s Mexican wolf pups born in the wild have been given names by kids ranging from kindergartners to 8th-graders. This was the fifth year of Lobos of the Southwest’s contest and there were so many creative entries. You can see all of them here.
Artwork courtesy of McKenna H. & Lobos of the Southwest
Eleven wolf families had pups that got names.
Bear Wallow Pack: Zyanya
Bluestem Pack: Atira, Chico, Keystone, Moonlight
Diamond Pack: Aleu, Argentum, Rio Espiritu, Spirit, Ulv
Elkhorn Pack: River
Hoodoo Pack: Moon Beam, Willow
Iron Creek Pack: Fortitudo, Zeus
Leopold Pack: Akela
Luna Pack: Pluto
Essay courtesy of Adel V. and Lobos of the Southwest
Panther Creek Pack: Centinela, Da-Kari, Rakesh
Prieto Pack: Paz, Peaceful
San Mateo Pack: Sentouki
Some of the names not assigned to pups were reserved in the event more pups (from the 2016 litters) are captured and collared. Two of those runners-up are featured here.
Thank you to all of the kids who participated and put so much thought and effort into names for the wolf pups. Long live the lobos!
So many people have put so much time and effort into the recovery of the endangered population of Mexican gray wolves. One of the earliest was Norma Ames the team leader of the group that wrote the Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan published in 1982. Below is a brief piece I wrote about her. #LoboWeek
Photo Credit: Mark Dumont via Compfight cc
The wolf presented the mangled trophy to Norma–a dead ground squirrel. That was the moment she began to believe the beleaguered Mexican gray wolf had a shot at making a comeback in the wild.
Norma Ames, trained as a biologist, was the assistant chief of the New Mexico Game and Fish Department in 1971 when she adopted two endangered wolf pups born in captivity at the Department’s Ghost Ranch facility. She built an enclosure on her large, remote property in the forest, a place to raise and socialize the pups.
Five years after she took those first pups home (she later adopted a second pair), Mexican gray wolves, cousins to the northern gray wolf, were added to the endangered species list. In constant conflict with ranchers in the Southwest, their population had been decimated by relentless trapping, shooting, and poisoning. Seven wolves, called the McBride line for the trapper who captured them in the late 70s (all that he could locate), were brought in to start a breeding program.
The day Norma realized her wolves could and would still hunt she stopped the socializing, began to keep her distance. She strove to keep them as wild as possible, hoping that someday they might be reintroduced into their native habitat.
In the early 80s Norma headed up the team that published a recovery plan for the Mexican wolf.
From the time I picked up and read the report with Norma’s name on the cover page, I wanted to know more about her, but where to go to ask questions about a woman who wrote a relatively obscure government report more than 30 years ago. It turns out someone did find Norma and asked at least some of my questions. Peter Steinhart recounted the story of her role in the recovery of Mexican wolves in his 1995 book The Company of Wolves.
Norma’s wolves weren’t destined for the wild. Their lineage, Ghost Ranch, was considered tainted, not pure wolf. She stopped breeding them and, one by one, they died of old age. In 1987 after she had retired and was preparing to sell her place and move she had to make the tough decision to euthanize the lone survivor. She did it to save the wolf from living out its life in a cage at a zoo.
But in 1997, the year before the first McBride wolves were released in the mountains of Arizona, genetic testing confirmed that the Ghost Ranch lineage, which had been maintained in New Mexico, was pure and the two lines, plus another from Mexico, were crossbred, giving the population a much-needed genetic boost and a better chance at recovery.
Wolves mate once a year in the winter, typically in February. Norma died in February of 2005, seven years into the reintroduction effort. Recovery was inching forward, with long term survival of Mexican wolves still not assured. But by then there were eleven families of wolves running free in Arizona and New Mexico and several of the breeding wolves had been born in the wild.
More than twenty wolf pups were born in the spring of 2005 with at least ten still surviving at the end of the year. Some of them carried Ghost Ranch genes.
Washington—Officials are searching for a female bobcat they say has escaped from the National Zoo. Ollie, a 25 pound female bobcat was last seen in her enclosure around 7:30 a.m. Monday. USA Today 1/30/17
Bobcat
Photo by Paula Nixon
Winter this year seemed to be filled with bobcat sightings and bobcat stories.
Back in January, I wrote about seeing a bobcat outside my kitchen window. I got a good look at him, but was disappointed to find he had managed to avoid my wildlife camera strapped to a nearby piñon tree. A few days later I got the above shot—maybe the same cat, but no way to know for sure.
I was ready to post the photo when I ran across this story about a bobcat in Sedona, Arizona. Game and Fish officials tried to trap the animal after it bit and scratched four people, but ended up having to kill it when it evaded capture. Tests confirmed what they suspected—the bobcat had rabies. I decided to call my local game department to find out if there was anything unusual about seeing a bobcat walk through my backyard in broad daylight, not once, but twice.
A few weeks passed and I still hadn’t made the call when I saw the bobcat again. This time he passed within fifteen feet of the back door, crossing the patio while Dave and I watched in amazement. He never turned to look at us and seemed to be focused on something that only he could sense, maybe a rabbit. He flicked his stub of a tail and was gone.
Rick Winslow with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish listened when I told him about my multiple bobcat sightings and said it wasn’t uncommon to see them out and about during the day. He assured me that rabies is extremely rare in our area—the last case he could recall was years ago in the southern part of New Mexico.
And since then, not a sign of the bobcat. I’m certain he’s still out there, just keeping a low profile.
After a two-plus day walkabout in the leafy wilds of northern Washington an escaped bobcat returned to the National Zoo and walked right into a trap where some “goodies” had been left for her Wednesday, zookeepers said.
Ben Nuckols—Associated Press 2/1/17
Female Mexican Gray Wolf at Wildlife West Nature Park
Photo Credit: Paula Nixon
The deadline to submit comments on the 2017 Wolf Release Proposal is tonight at 11:59 pm. If you have read it, maybe you wondered about the wolf called F521 (her studbook number) and how it came to be that so many of the small population of Mexican wolves living in the wild are so closely related to her.
I first discovered F521 years ago in a monthly status report.
She was born on the side of a mountain in 1997 at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. Zookeepers called her Estrella, star in Spanish. She and her littermates were special because of their genetics, a mix of two of the three lineages of the small captive population.
At the age of five, F521 was released with her mate and family (2 juvenile pups and five new pups) in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was the summer of 2002, early on in the Mexican wolf reintroduction effort (at the time there were approximately 26 wolves living in the wild), and no one knew how this family, named the Bluestem Pack, would adapt to life in the wild.
In the first few weeks they had to be hazed away from a ranch and killed a blue heeler before settling in and chasing down their first elk. They established a territory and the next spring F521 gave birth to her first litter of wild-born pups. She remained the alpha (breeding) female of the Bluestem Pack for six years, outliving one mate, finding another, and continuing to raise new litters of pups each year. Some of those pups went on to establish new packs and have litters of their own.
In 2008 one of F521’s female offspring, F1042, replaced her as the alpha female in the pack.
The old wolf, probably no longer welcome in her pack, sometimes ran alone and sometimes ran with another pack. In December of 2010 she was found dead in the Gila National Forest, killed in an illegal shooting. F521 was thirteen.
Once again it is breeding season for wolves and the Bluestem Pack still lives in the White Mountains with F1042 as the alpha female. In late April or early May pups will be born.
The numbers cited in the 2017 proposal are surprising and alarming. Of the eighteen potential breeding pairs living in the wild in 2017, three have one adult that is a descendant of F521 and fifteen have both adults that are descendants of F521. Inbreeding has always posed a threat for Mexican gray wolves. They came so close to extinction that there were only seven founders when breeding in captivity began.
Fifteen years ago when F521 was released in the wild she was a star not only in name, but also in the genetic potential she offered to the wild population. She did her part— she lived wild and free for more than eight years and raised lots of pups.
The most recent estimate of Mexican wolves living in the wild is 113. A combination of too few wolves being released and too many wolves being killed illegally has led to the current dire situation.
More wolves from the captive population need to be released immediately.
The 2017 proposal is a start—2 families and 10 cross-fostered pups—a move in the right direction.
Please take a moment to send an email to mexicanwolfcomments@fws.gov in support of the proposed releases.