🐺 Mexican wolf removed from extinct species list

The story of the resurgence of the lobo mexicano (Canis lupis baileyi) begins in the late 1970s when former wolf trapper Roy T. McBride was commissioned by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a survey of wolves in Mexico.

The survey became a trapping mission with the aim of starting a captive breeding program for the critically endangered mammal, and by 1980 McBride had captured five wolves.

Three of them became the founders of what came to be known as the McBride lineage of Mexican wolves. By 1995, about 100 McBride wolves had been born in the United States.

The offspring were first returned to the wild in the southwest of the United States in 1998 and in subsequent years they were also reintroduced in northern Mexico.

The Janos Biosphere Reserve in Chihuahua, created by presidential decree in 2009, was one of the places that became home for the reintroduced species.

As for the Janos reserve, Ceballos explained that one of the key objectives in its creation was to reestablish populations of all the large mammals that lived in the region at the start of the last century. Apart from wolves and bison, prairie dogs, pronghorns and bighorn sheep have also been reintroduced.

“We just need to reintroduce a couple of more species so that there are practically all of those that lived there in 1900,” Ceballos said.

Read more at Mexico News Daily.