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Go to the wild that waits for me;
Go where the moose and the musk-ox be;
Go to the wolf and the secret snows;
Go to my fate...who knows,
who knows!
From "The Nostomaniac"
by Robert Service
Gray Wolves
The Gray Wolf is usually what everyone
thinks of when "wolf" is mentioned.
It is the most numerous of the members
of the wolf family, with several different
variations scattered throughout the world.
Gray wolves stay mostly in the forests
and woodlands of North America, Europe, and Asia.
Now, with most of their range taken by humans,
they tend to be confined to remote
areas away from human habitation.
The Gray Wolf is also the largest of all the wolves,
in fact it is the largest of the wild canines(or canids).
Their coloring varies greatly depending
on the type of habitat they are in.
The colors range from creamy white,
through brownish and reddish shades,
to the common grays and blacks.
Red Wolves
The Red Wolf used to roam throughout
the Southeastern United States,
from central Texas to south Florida.
Now, except for a reintroduced population in North Carolina,
they do not exist in the wild.
Some people believe that the Red Wolf
is actually a hybrid of Coyotes and Gray Wolves but,
although there have been cases of
Red Wolf/Coyote hybrids in the past, it is a species of it's own.
The coloring of the Red Wolf tends to range
from tawny shades to cinnamon shades with
black and gray mixed in occasionally.
Maned Wolves
The Maned wolves are found in the eastern portions of South America. They live mostly on the grasslands and forest edges, sometimes venturing into the swampy areas to hunt.
It is a rather tall animal with long, slender legs. It's bushy fur is usually reddish in color with black around the muzzle and paws and white on the tip of the tail. It has larger ears than most wolves, giving it the look of a huge fox, because it has to rely on it's hearing to hunt on the grasslands.
Maned wolves are very secretive, solitary animals, making it very hard to observe them in the wild. A pair will share a territory but they spend little time together except to breed.
The Falkland Island Wolf
The Falkland Island Wolf (sorry I don't have a picture of one) is now extinct, and has been for over a hundred years. I wanted to talk about this species of wolf because it gives a good example of what is happening to the other species worldwide.
These wolves lived exclusively on West and East Falkland Islands. There are a couple of theories of how they originated there. They could have came over an ice sheet about a million years ago and due to isolation evolved into a new species. Another theory is that they came to the islands with South American settlers as domesticated animals and became wild.
Now for the example I mentioned earlier. The Falkland Island Wolves are now extinct because they lost their territory to humans. They were hunted for their fur and by farmers who blamed them for killing livestock.
The last known Falkland Island Wolf was killed in 1876.
This is my section on the recovery of the Mexican Gray Wolf. I post all the latest news that I receive about this program, and I have a archive of past news from when the first wolves were released up until the present. This section means the most to me, so I hope everyone enjoys it.
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