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  Return to the Ancestral Homeland

  And so, in 1986, the twenty-two deer that had been born on an estate in faraway England—some of them, perhaps, offspring of those I had seen when I visited Woburn Abbey in 1956—set off for China. It was a long plane journey but much quicker than the sea voyages their ancestors had endured. Maja vividly remembers the day they arrived. She found it fascinating that they were traveling Air France. “These deer were first introduced to the Western world by a French missionary, and they came back on a French plane.” Everyone was so excited that they forgot what they were supposed to be doing as they struggled to get closer for a first glimpse of the historic cargo. The containers were jostled, and both Maja and the keeper who had traveled with them from the UK feared the cages would fall and the deer escape. Fortunately, although they had not been sedated, the deer themselves remained very calm. “In fact,” said Maja, “they behaved much better than the humans present!”

  Finally all the cages were loaded onto trucks, and the deer set off on the last part of their long journey. Maja said she felt so sorry for the hundreds of excited people who lined the roads, hoping for a glimpse of the new arrivals, because all they saw were the trucks. What a moment when the deer finally entered their quarantine quarters and stood on Chinese soil—where their ancestors had roamed half a century before. Right from the start the Chinese were very proud of the project, and there was a great deal of publicity. Children, in particular, were interested.

  “We got a lot of letters from kids,” Maja told me. She remembered one in particular from a five-year-old girl. Her parents had given her two RMB (at the time, this would have been about seventy-five cents) for a month’s pocket money. She sent it to the deer park and asked if they would “please buy chocolate for the uncle and auntie Milu so they know they’ve arrived in a country that welcomes them.”

  There was one unexpected outcome of the return of the milu. When local villagers heard about the deer park, they realized that it would be a perfect place, quiet and green, for burying the cremation remains of their loved ones. And so, after a death, they went there and dug little graves in the park. Maja told me she was once walking the grounds with a Chinese official. He looked at the graves and announced, “We must eliminate these.” But Maja told him that in her native country—Slovakia—it is very bad luck to desecrate a grave. The official looked around, took her by the hand, and whispered that they, too, feel the same. So today there is a special place where one can see little mounds—and the people have permission to return there every year during the Qing Ming Festival at the beginning of April, when Chinese pay their respects to the dead.

  Visiting the Père David’s Deer at Woburn Abbey

  Maja arranged for a few of the Chinese scientists involved with the Père David’s deer to visit the UK, and a highlight was their visit to Woburn Abbey. There they would meet the people who are working to maintain the herds outside China. I was hoping to join them, but unfortunately the Chinese delegation arrived the day I had to leave for America. Still, I was able to meet Maja for the first time during my visit to Woburn Abbey, and Lord Robin Russell (son of the duke of Bedford) was a charming host.

  For almost a week it had been raining, but after my sister Judy and I had driven all day in heavy rain, the sun came out to create a glorious spring evening. The grass was brilliant green, the old oaks a softer olive shade. At first, the only Père David’s we found was one that had “double-shed”—lost his antlers before the rut and not yet grown new ones. Without them he could not compete with the others, and was probably wise to avoid the herd. We passed herds of sika deer, roe deer, fallow deer—and the spectacular red deer. Where were the Père David’s? We searched and searched, and finally found them down where it was very wet. What a wonderful sight—about two hundred of them, their coats a rich golden color in the light of the setting sun.

  Too soon twilight began to fall and we had to leave them. But then, in the charming old cottage where Robin lives with his wife, we sat and talked deer. I got to know Maja better and learned more about the history of the Père David’s project. Robin generously offered me access to the photo archives. And we discussed forming a collaboration between their education program and the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots.

  A Final Dispatch from China

  During my Asia tour in the fall of 2007, Maja arranged for me to revisit the milu park outside Beijing. There I was very pleased to meet two of the delegation to Woburn Abbey whom I had missed in the summer: Director Zhang Li Yuan, and Chinese Professor Wang Zongyi, who has been so instrumental in reintroducing the deer and such a very big help to Maja. After sitting and talking (with Maja translating) and drinking hot tea, we set off on a golf cart to see the deer. It was bitterly cold with icicles hanging down from some of the trees, and I was glad I had dressed warmly.

  That tour depressed me. The first time I had visited the park, there had been a real feeling of being in the countryside, even though it is so close to Beijing. But now there is development pressing in from all sides. The herd of milu had grown. They had eaten all the available grass so that, especially in the winter, they needed supplementary food. They appeared healthy enough, but they were standing around their feeding troughs looking somehow weary—bored, perhaps. They almost looked like a different species from what I had seen in 1994; the sense of freedom and nobility that had been so strong during my previous visit to this place was no longer there.

  We were glad to get back inside the comparative warmth of the little environment center. As we enjoyed a truly delicious vegetarian lunch, my hosts told me about the twenty-five-hundred-acre nature reserve in Shishou in central China, on the Yangtze River. At the beginning of the 1990s, I heard, China’s National Environment Protection Agency had agreed that a small herd could be moved to this area, where they settled down well. And some individuals swam across the river and started a truly free-ranging population on the other side, in Hunan province. At first there were concerns that they would be hunted, but instead the local population reveres and protects them. Both Maja and Professor Wang Zongyi begged me to make time to go and see these milu, living in the wild as they did so long ago, and one day I should love to do so.

  In the meantime, I carry around a glass medallion, given to me by Guo Geng, embossed with a drawing of the milu made during the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). And at our JGI office in Beijing, we have an antler, shed by a four-year-old stag, that I take to lectures when I am in China as one of my symbols of hope. It represents the resilience of animals if we just give them a chance. Since returning to China in 1985, the milu have prospered and their numbers have increased. There are about a thousand now, all told.

  Red Wolf

  (Canis rufus)

  When I was a child, I loved the legend of Romulus and Remus, the twins raised by a she-wolf in the forests of Italy. It gave a strange sense of authenticity to my favorite wolf story of all—the adoption of little Mowgli into a wolf pack, in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. And then came Jack London’s Call of the Wild, which not only reinforced my love of the wolf, but gave me a passionate longing to spend time in the wilderness with these magnificent animals.

  It is unfortunate that wolves have been so hated and so feared. There are very few authenticated accounts of wolves attacking human beings in North America. Occasionally they will take livestock because, of course, we have moved farther and farther into their wild hunting grounds. And because of this, along with fear, they have been horribly persecuted in Canada, the United States, and Mexico—trapped and poisoned and hunted with bows and arrows, spears and guns. Even attacked from the air by people in helicopters. And in light of what we now know, thanks to numerous wildlife biologists who have spent years observing them in the wild, the all-out attempt to eradicate wolves can be seen as tragic, unjustified—and in a way extraordinary since they are indisputably the ancestors of “man’s best friend,” the domesticated dog.

  There are three species of wolves in N
orth America, of which the gray wolf is the best known. Then there is its close cousin, the Mexican gray wolf. And the red wolf, the subject of this chapter. The three species have many similarities in behavior. A pack typically comprises a breeding pair and their offspring—yearling pups from a previous litter and the pups of the season. They are most active in the early morning and evening when they hunt as a pack. Small cubs, of course, stay in the den—initially with their mother—and other pack members return to feed them by regurgitating meat.

  Art Beyer, USFWS wildlife biologist, checking out the health of wild pups, just a few days old. The parents will come back after the biologists leave and move the pups to a different secret location. (Melissa McGaw)

  Red wolves are recognizably smaller than gray wolves and about twice as large as coyotes—although yearling red wolves are almost the same in size and coloring as adult coyotes. At one time they were common throughout the southeastern United States, but predator control along with loss of habitat severely decimated their numbers during the 1960s, until only a few remained along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana.

  By 1973, when the red wolf was finally classified as endangered, it was on the very brink of extinction. Scientists decided, in a desperate bid to save the species, to capture as many as possible for captive breeding with the goal of eventually returning them to the wild. Only seventeen were found. When the last of these was captured in 1980, the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild. All red wolves in existence today are descendants of fourteen of those individuals captured in the early 1970s.

  From Pen to Freedom

  The breeding program, in which a number of zoos took part, was coordinated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program. By 1986, it was thought that there were enough young captive-born wolves to start the release program, and after careful surveys North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge had been selected as the most suitable area. And so, fourteen years after the birth of the first captive litter of red wolves, four adult pairs were taken to their new home.

  Of course, not everyone was thrilled at the idea of wolves roaming in the wild again. And so, in order to convince the public that, if things went wrong, the wolves could be easily recaptured at any time, scientists had been working on collars that could be remotely activated to discharge an anesthetic into the animal concerned. Unfortunately, these were not ready in time, and the four wolves, and others who followed, had to be held in large fenced enclosures for almost a year, much longer than planned. At least they had time to get accustomed to their new environment—its scents and sounds and some of the various animals they would meet in the field. And finally the day came when the first pair of wolves could be released to begin exploring their new wilderness home. The other pairs were released at weekly intervals.

  It was a heady time for the Red Wolf Recovery Program field team. Chris Lucash, who continues to devote his life to this program, was part of the original team. I asked him how he felt when the wolves were first released. “How I felt? Wow! Excited, elated, incredibly—and naively—optimistic. I felt extremely fortunate, maybe even blessed, to be in a place at a point in time that was so rare and potentially such a pivot point in history, at least for one very historically unlucky species. This was the most important thing I could be doing.” It was a time, he told me, when they were filled with hope at every release.

  They did not fully realize the dangers these naive wolves would face. They did not guess that 60 to 80 percent of those wolves would not make it—would get sick or collide with a car as they tried to cross the roads that bisected their new home. And the field team felt devastated by each loss. “We had to learn to keep some distance, try not to get too emotionally involved,” said Chris. That was one of the reasons why the wolves, for the most part, were not given names.

  But it was impossible to remain absolutely detached, especially back then. There were only a few wolves, and the biologists knew them all personally; they handled them, followed their movements, tried to understand their behavior and motives. And when they had to capture them, they had to find ways to outwit them. “Our hopes and spirits rose high with the good news, and sank deep with the bad. Those of us here from early on had to do a lot of growing up—and it just happened to be in association with these animals.” Chris and Michael Morse, another biologist from those first days who is still with the team, have shared some of those early stories with me.

  A True Survivor

  Although the wolves are not officially named, for convenience the field team gave them names that usually derived from the location of the pack or some nearby geographic feature. “Not too romantic, but better than a stud book number,” said Chris. And, for the most part, those are the names that I have used. Survivor, though, is the name that I have chosen, retrospectively, for the first wild-born pup of the recovery program—because she survived against incredible odds.

  “Her captive-born parents were physically impressive and beautiful, but ill-fated,” said Chris. It seems they only had the one pup; the biologists did not disturb the den at the time, but looked for signs later. A few weeks after whelping, Survivor’s mother crawled back to the release pen and into the den box from which she had been released about eight months before. And there she died of a uterine infection. Survivor, who could barely have been weaned before her mother died, survived, presumably, with the help of her father. Alas, a few months later she lost him, too—he died of asphyxiation with a raccoon’s kidney lodged in his trachea. For weeks, then months, there was no sighting of Survivor, although sometimes the team found tracks that could have been hers. And, indeed, against all odds she had survived.

  Eventually she was captured and collared. She managed to evade death during a private trapping season (when trappers are allowed to trap furbearing animals as a form of nuisance control or as a “hobby”). In fact, she became very smart at avoiding traps, and when the team wanted to catch her—in order to replace her collar, for example—they had to work hard to outsmart her.

  She eventually paired with a male, and they became the first wolves allowed to stay on private land, south of the refuge. After this, Survivor was captured—yet again—to replace her collar. It was to be for the last time, for the new collar stopped working, and they never found her again.

  Brindled Hope

  Brindled Hope was one of the first wolves to be released in late 1987. It was months after her arrival from a wolf sanctuary in Missouri that they noticed her name, handwritten in small letters, on the back of her sky-kennel. She was not a very impressive-looking wolf, Michael told me. She was smaller than average—and at five years, older than most selected for release. Nevertheless she and the mate who had been chosen for her produced one of the first two pups born into the wild that year. The pup was a female, officially 351F but whom I am calling here Hope.

  It was not long before disaster struck: Brindled Hope’s mate was killed by a car on the highway when their pup was only a month old. Brindled Hope, not knowing, waited for him as long as she could, but she needed to move to an area where there was more prey. And so, after eleven days, she set off toward the more open farmlands where she had once hunted with her mate. She and her pup traveled beside the highway, quickly moving into the thick vegetation whenever a car approached. There the team found the two of them, the pup struggling to keep up with her mother. Keeping their distance, the biologists followed until they reached a dirt road leading to the safety of the fields. First, though, the mother and pup had to cross the highway—and the biologists stopped traffic in both directions until the pair made it across. Brindled Hope successfully raised her pup, Hope, and eventually mother and daughter paired with the Bulls Boys and lived in their pack for many years.

  The Bulls Boys

  Biologists prepare some captive wolves for release by raising them in wild settings on islands within wildlife refuges, where they can learn the survival skills they will need for their new life. Such were the Bulls Boys
, brothers who arrived as yearlings in 1989 after living for almost a year on Bulls Island at Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina. They were released into what was known as the Milltail Farms area on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. “We had no clue that they would catapult the fledgling wolf project on the road to success,” said Michael. “With their tall, lanky bodies, sizable feet, and broad heads, their appearance, although impressive, gave no hint of the substantial impact they would have on the recovery program.”

  The Milltail Farms area comprised some ten thousand acres of farms and forest where Brindled Hope had lived with her pup, Hope. When Hope was old enough to get by without her mother, Brindled Hope was recaptured, was paired with a new mate, and produced four new pups in captivity. Then she and her new family—including her mate—were released back into the Milltail Farms area. Surely, thought the biologists, there was plenty of space for all. But the Bulls Boys—the Milltail pack—were not pleased, and within a month had attacked and killed the male intruder. Soon after this, one of the brothers—I’ll call him Boy One—paired with Hope; the other, Boy Two, paired with Brindled Hope, whose four pups, remarkably, were allowed to remain unchallenged.

  It seemed that the Bulls Boys might each sire a litter in the next breeding season, and excitement ran high in the field team. “Second-generation pups were a major measure of the recovery program’s success, and it was happening in the first two years!” said Michael. But as he said to me, “It was all too good to be true.” Boy One, from Bulls Island and not familiar with roads, was killed crossing a highway just before the 1989 breeding season.