A DNA test has confirmed that an animal shot around 100 miles from the Vermont border last December was a wolf.
While data has shown that some coyotes in the Northeast are wolf-coyote hybrids, the DNA of the 85-pound creature killed near Cooperstown, New York, was 99% wolf — a mixture of Great Lakes, Northwest Territories and eastern gray wolf, according to the results of a DNA test announced today.
Joseph Butera, a member of the Northeast Ecological Recovery Society, a not-for-profit that advocates for the restoration of native species in the Northeast, coordinated the DNA test after he saw the wolf pictured on the hunter’s social media page. The hunter agreed to supply a tissue sample, which was tested by a lab at Trent University in Ontario.
While gray wolves regained protection under the federal Endangered Species Act in February, they were not covered when the hunter shot the wolf.
Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department officials say wolves are unlikely to become established in Vermont anytime soon. While the occasional wolf may stray from its established population in Canada — less than a two days’ journey, according to the Vermont-based Center for Biological Diversity — the coyote has largely taken the wolf’s place at the top of the food chain.
If state officials identified a wolf in the state, Mark Scott, director of the Wildlife Division at Vermont Fish & Wildlife, said he doubts it would come from a wild population.
“We just don’t have any evidence that they’re here,” he said
However, members of regional environmental groups — the Northeast Ecological Recovery Society, the Maine Wolf Coalition and the Center for Biological Diversity — said the deceased wolf’s presence is part of a pattern of appearances that are slowly increasing in frequency. They want to see state governments study the issue.
It’s a sign, wildlife advocates said, that wolves — who have been extinct in Vermont since the late 1800s, according to the Fish & Wildlife Department — could become reestablished in the area with some policy tweaks in New England and Canada.
John Glowa, with the Maine Wolf Coalition, a volunteer group that has been collecting samples of feces and animal tissue from across the Northeast to identify the presence of wolves, said his group is not advocating for the “reintroduction” of wolves, but rather the “recolonization” of the species.
Recolonization, he said, is when an animal is exterminated from a location, but later expands back into that territory on its own as conditions become suitable. New York is only 60 miles from documented wolf populations in Quebec, he said.
“We’ve been working really hard to promote a binational recovery plan between the U.S. and Canada to simply allow wolves to survive in Canada so they can disperse the United States and occupy some of the very suitable habitat that we have here in the U.S.,” Glowa said.
Both the complexity and the purity of the New York wolf’s DNA suggests that the animal may have traveled from Canada, where different wolves are known to breed with each other, according to a press release from the Center for Biological Diversity.
“The science, including DNA evidence and a growing number of dead wolves, tells us that wolves are present in the Northeast, despite continued government denials,” Glowa said in the release.
Two wolves have been documented in Vermont, according to the Maine Wolf Coalition. In 1998, a 72-pound male was shot and killed in Glover, and in 2006, a 91-pound male was killed in North Troy.
Brenna Galdenzi, president of Vermont advocacy organization Protect Our Wildlife, said the issue deserves attention and research. She pointed to a forthcoming process by the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, during which officials will reconsider the open coyote hunting season.
In Vermont, coyotes became established in the mid-1950s and are thought to have bred with wolves as the species migrated east.
Galdenzi said she’s seen some photos of coyotes, which hunters and trappers have posted to social media, where the animals look wolf-like, with round ears, “broad blocky faces and muzzles and are exceptionally large.”
“We urge Fish & Wildlife to stop the open unregulated hunting season on coyotes and make an effort to understand what’s happening in the field and what kind of wild canid we have here in Vermont,” she said.
While gray wolves regained their protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, coyote-wolf hybrids have no such protection, she said, and without more research, it’s hard to know whether wolves exist in the state or not.
Scott, with the Fish & Wildlife Department, said DNA testing is expensive, and funds have not yet been allocated for that purpose.
“From a bigger picture standpoint in the state of Vermont, we know we’ve got a canid here that is acting sometimes a little bit like a wolf, but, we know it’s predominantly the coyote,” he said. “It’s a matter of, you have only so much money to do wildlife management research. Where do you put it?”