By ALLEN G. BREED AP National Writer
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ALLIGATOR RIVER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.C. —

Once declared extinct in the wild, Canis rufus — the only wolf species found solely in the United States — was reintroduced in the late 1980s on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, just across the sound from eastern North Carolina’s famed Outer Banks. Over the next quarter century, it became a poster child for the Endangered Species Act and a model for efforts to bring back other species.

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“The red wolf program was a tremendous conservation success,” says Ron Sutherland, a biologist with the Wildlands Network. “It was the first time that a large carnivore had been returned to the wild after being driven extinct, anywhere in the world.”

But the wild population is now back to the brink of oblivion, decimated by gunshots, vehicle strikes, suspected poisonings and, some have argued, government neglect.

For the first time in nearly three decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to release an updated recovery plan for the red wolf. According to a draft, the agency proposes spending a quarter billion dollars over the next 50 years to rebuild and expand the wild wolf population.

“It was done once before,” says Joe Madison, North Carolina manager for the Red Wolf Recovery Program. “And we can do it again.”

But the effort depends heavily on cooperation from private landowners. And the passage of 36 years seems to have done little to soften locals’ hearts toward the apex predator.

In North Carolina, farming and leasing land to hunters are big business. The red wolf is seen by some as competition, and a threat to a way of life on a fragile landscape already imperiled by climate change.

“They don’t belong here!” a woman shouted at agency staff during a recent public meeting on the program.

Add to that a widespread mistrust of government and the road ahead looks long and perilous for “America’s wolf.” But allies like Sutherland say they have to try.

“The red wolf, it’s ours,” Sutherland says. “It’s ours to save.”

The red wolf once roamed from central Texas to southern Iowa and as far northeast as Long Island, New York. But generations of persecution, encroachment and habitat loss reduced them to just a remnant clinging to the ragged Gulf coast along the Texas-Louisiana border.

Starting in 1973, the year Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, the last wolves were pulled from the wild and placed in a captive-breeding program.

“By 1980,” Madison says, “they had declared red wolves extinct in the wild.”

But the captive breeding program did so well that, after just a few years, officials felt it was time to try restoring the red wolf to the wild.

They chose Alligator River, a 158,000-acre (63,940-hectare) expanse of upland swamp on North Carolina’s Albermarle Peninsula, not far from Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed “lost colony” of Roanoke.

The program started in 1987 with four breeding pairs. Five years later, a second group was placed in Great Smoky Mountains National Park — 522,427 acres (211,418 hectares) of forest straddling the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.

The inland experiment was ended in 1998, due to “low prey availability, extremely low pup survival, disease, and the inability of red wolves to maintain stable territories within the Park,” the government said at the time.

But with the releases of adults and fostering of captive-born pups into wild family groups, the Alligator River population thrived.

“It was the model for how gray wolves were returned to Yellowstone,” Sutherland says of the Western species, which has since been taken off the endangered list. “And it’s been the model since then for all kinds of re-wilding of projects all over the world.”

By 2012, the population in the five-county restoration area reached a peak of about 120 animals. Then the bottom fell out.

Shootings and vehicle strikes — busy U.S. 64 to the Outer Banks runs through the middle of the refuge — were the leading causes of death.

Meanwhile, coyotes moved into the area and began mating with the depleted wolf stock. Around the same time, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission allowed nighttime spotlight hunting of coyotes, which are much smaller, but look similar to red wolves.

A 2018 species status assessment declared the wild population would likely disappear within six years “without substantial intervention.”

With no new releases, the wild population eventually dipped to just seven known animals.

Fish and Wildlife has yet to identify other suitable locations for wild populations and it’s unclear whether the North Carolina wolves have a half century.