A family of red wolves lie in their enclosure at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, R.I., on July 7. Thanks to a network of breeding facilities like this one, there is little danger of the species going extinct. But the goal has always been a viable wild population. The Associated Press

Jeff Akin had to bite his tongue.

He was chatting with a neighbor about efforts to protect and grow the area’s red wolf population. The endangered wolves are equipped with bright orange radio collars to help locals distinguish the federally protected species from invasive, prolific coyotes.

“If I see one of those wolves with a collar on, I’m going to shoot it in the gut, so it runs off and dies,” Akin says the neighbor told him. “Because if it dies near you, and they come out and find the collar, they can arrest you.”

Akin is a hunter and the walls of his country house are lined with photos of the animals he’s killed. But what he heard made him sick.

“I wouldn’t shoot a squirrel in the stomach if I was hungry,” he says. “It’s just not humane.”

A group of red wolves stretch out on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on March 23 near Manns Harbor, N.C. The wolves are outfitted with orange, reflective collars to make them more visible at night and distinguish them from coyotes, which wear white ones. Associated Press file photo

In a way, the anecdote sums up the plight of this uniquely American species.

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.

“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.

Out here, 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 Akin and Sutherland say they have to try.

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

On a recent visit to Alligator River, Madison parks his truck beside a canal, climbs out and hoists an H-shaped antenna into the air. Faint beeps emanate from a radio in his left hand as he slowly swivels from side to side.

“Based on the radio telemetry, there are six red wolves hunkered down in there,” says Madison, motioning to a patch of brush between two cleared farm fields. His bushy red-and-grey beard lends him an uncanny resemblance to his quarry.

That’s roughly half of the world’s total known wild red wolf population.

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 expanse of upland swamp on North Carolina’s Albermarle Peninsula, not far from Sir Walter Raleigh’s doomed “lost colony” of Roanoke.

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.

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.