Cry wolf? Debate over presence of wolves in Northeast

ALBANY, N.Y. — Are wolves hunting and howling in the Northeast woods again, more than a century after they were rooted out of the region?

Advocates who think so say a recent DNA analysis shows a strapping canine shot by a coyote hunter in upstate New York last winter was actually a wolf. They believe there are other wolves in New York and New England, saying they could be crossing the frozen St. Lawrence River while heading south from Canada. And they want the government to protect them.

“There has to be other wolves here,” said John Glowa, president of the Maine Wolf Coalition. “We have no doubt that eastern wolves are coming down and crossing the St. Lawrence. And they’re being killed. And they’re being called coyotes.”

Not everyone is convinced.

The test results are the latest entry in a long-running disagreement in the Northeast about the presence of a charismatic wild animal dogged by a reputation as a big, bad villain in children’s stories and as a livestock poacher to farmers. It’s a surprisingly complicated question, in part because eastern coyotes typically share some genetic material with wolves.

“The question is: What is a wolf? And that is not as simple as it sounds,” said Daniel Rosenblatt, New York Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologist.

Critics claim wildlife officials are slow to acknowledge wolves in their midst because they would have to accommodate the presence of a federally protected species.

State wildlife officials say there’s no evidence wild wolves have reestablished themselves in region, though some concede the possibility of scattered lone wolves. They’re not showing up on trail cameras, they say. Maine Wildlife Division Director Nate Webb said if wolves were back in any numbers in his state, they’d be preying on moose.

“I worked on wolves for over a decade and have been to hundreds of wolves kills personally. And it’s pretty, pretty easy to tell when a moose has been killed by wolves,” Webb said. “And that’s just not occurring here in Maine.”

Wolves were effectively shot, trapped and poisoned out of the Northeast by the start of the 20th century, leaving a gap for coyotes to fill. Smaller than wolves with pointier muzzles and ears, eastern coyotes are now common in the region.

But it’s not unusual for people in the Northeast report canines seemingly too big and bulky to be coyotes, which typically weigh around 40 pounds (18 kilograms).

In New York’s Adirondack Mountains,…