Natural History

As far as I know, no red wolf has ever had a white-tipped tail.

A few days ago, a video of a female canid and her puppies began making the rounds in the blogosphere. The footage was taken in Walton County, Florida, which is in the Florida Panhandle. It has been suggested that these animals are red wolves.

Now, I don’t doubt that the animals are large wild dogs, but they most likely aren’t red wolves.

Now, there are red wolves in Florida,  and more specifically, there are red wolves living not very far from where this footage was taken. However, the nearest red wolves are at the St. Vincent Island National Wildlife Refuge. In case you didn’t notice, they live on an island, and not only that, their movements are very closely monitored. A similar population is found on Cape St. George Island. Both of these islands are in the general same region as the animals in the footage. If these animals were living in the Rockies or Minnesota, I definitely would believe the theory that they dispersed that distance. However, these are closely monitored island populations. I don’t think they would have the opportunity to disperse to the mainland.

After all, red wolves have a real threat to their continued existence. Red wolves seem to like having relations with coyotes.  The only way to keep red wolves pure is to closely monitor them. Introducing them to islands is one very good way to keep coyotes out and the bloodline pure.

My other problem with the suggestion that these are red wolves is the amount of white on their tails. Half of the animals in the video, including the adult, have white tail tips. Indeed, one third to one half of their tails are white. Now this feature is not something I’ve heard of on any wolf native to North America.

Coyotes sometimes have a small amount of white on the tips of their tails, but they normally have only a tiny little tuft of white at the end of their tails.

I think this video is some interesting footage of some coyotes with some distant dog ancestry. Wild coyote-dog crosses are not common in the wild. One of the main ways that coyotes remain largely pure of cross-breeding with dogs is that female coyotes come in season during a very narrow window of just a few weeks a  year. Male coyotes are also not fertile the whole year, so hybridization in the wild is far less common than one would think. Most wild coyotes are pure coyote– although they can have traces of wolf or dog ancestry.

However, in subtropical and tropical climates, the female coyotes come in season over a longer period of time. It doesn’t matter when a coyote bitch has her pups. In cooler climates, a coyote must have unfrozen ground to dig her den, and to feed her pups, she must have them at a time in which the rabbits and other small game are producing young. Those young rabbits are a good supplement to the bitch’s nursing diet, and then they become good weaning food for the pups. As the pups mature, learning to hunt naive little rabbits is a good way to hone hunting skills. In colder climates, both of these necessities are strictly determined by the season. In subtropical and tropical climates, neither of these problems is as much an issue. The ground is never frozen, and the small game species produce offspring more months out of the year.

Because the breeding season occurs over a longer period of time, hybridization becomes much more likely, and in this part of the country, there is some evidence of genetic pollution from domestic dogs. A study of Southeastern coyote MtDNA found that there were some coyotes with dog MtDNA sequences. It is not known exactly when this hybridization occurred. It may have happened in the early days of coyote colonization of the Eastern US or happened to Western coyotes before they migrated east. Further, coyotes with dog MtDNA sequences don’t look look like dogs or behave like them. They look and act like normal Eastern coyotes.

Maybe the white tail tip on these coyotes is the last vestige of their  distant dog ancestry. Other than those characteristics, the animals look like Eastern coyotes, which are often mistaken for wolves of all sorts. They are a bit larger than one might expect coyotes to be.

But these are not red wolves. If they were red wolves, it is very likely that US Fish and Wildlife Service would know about them.

It’s nice to think that red wolves could be living wild in the subtropical South free of any human interference. The truth of the matter is they really don’t– not even the large population at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge exists without trappers culling out the coyotes and FWS scientists closely monitoring their movements.