Reversing a legacy of trapping, hunting and poisoning that eradicated from the wild one of the Southwest's most enduring symbols, federal biologists announced Monday that they had released nearly a dozen wolves from chain-link pens into the remote ponderosa forests and meadows here in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona.
The release of the Mexican gray wolves is the first step in an effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state officials to return 100 of the animals to the range after an absence of almost 30 years. The program is criticized by some local cattle ranchers, whose conflict with the wolves dates from the homesteading era of the late 19th century and is perhaps as much an emblem of the West as the wolf itself.Biologists opened the door to the three acclimation pens on Sunday afternoon, allowing the wolves to walk out. Some of the wolves reacted at first by pacing inside the pens, approaching the opening only cautiously.
The biologists then left, and when they checked Monday morning on two of the pens, both near Alpine, they found the elk carcasses they had left outside devoured and wolf tracks leading off in the snow.
"They're out, running free," David Parsons, head of the wildlife agency's Mexican Wolf Recovery Project, said of the nine wolves from those two pens. "This is the payoff point for years of work."
Monday evening it was still not known whether the two wolves from the third pen, 40 miles to the south, had also left. Those wolves were being tracked by radio signal, which showed that they remained in the vicinity of their enclosure.
All the wolves will be allowed to roam a 7,000-square-mile area within the Apache and Gila National Forests along the Arizona-New Mexico border.
Like the release of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the event here followed years of sometimes contentious negotiations between the government and residents who fear that the wolves will prey on cattle and attack humans as well.
In a lawsuit filed last week to stop the release, ranchers accused the federal agency of failing to adequately analyze how wolf reintroduction will affect rural economies.
Caren Cowan, director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, said the group wanted the release postponed or halted until some of the issues in the lawsuit were resolved.
Hans Stuart, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said his agency only learned of the lawsuit Monday. He declined to comment on the suit.