Red wolves once ranged across the south eastern United States. By the 1960s so few were left that the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a group of North American zoos began breeding them in captivity, and today the only wild population lives in and around the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in north eastern North Carolina. Zoo wolves carry more genetic variety than the wild ones, and the way to move that variety into the wild is a foster. In April a litter was born at the St. Louis Zoo's Sears Lehmann Jr. Wildlife Reserve in Franklin County, Missouri. When the pups were seven days old, three of them were lifted from the den, flown to North Carolina with keeper Nicole Becker, and placed by federal biologists in the den of a wild red wolf mother whose own litter had just arrived. Some of her pups went the other way, to be raised at the zoo, which keeps the two populations mixing in both directions. It has to happen inside about two weeks of birth, while eyes and ears are still closed and a mother is most ready to accept a newcomer.

Three red wolf pups standing together on a dirt rise
Three red wolf pups at the Woodlands Nature Station, Kentucky. Photo: Mel Cunningham, Land Between the Lakes, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read the full story: St. Louis Zoo's endangered American red wolf pups join wild pack in North Carolina, by Brian Munoz, St. Louis Public Radio.

Months later the biologists' trail cameras found all three St. Louis pups alive and growing alongside their wild littermates. No wild red wolf mother has ever turned a fostered pup away. Regina Mossotti, the zoo's vice president of animal care, who also leads the national red wolf program for accredited zoos, says the timing is the hard part: the zoo litter has to arrive in the same fortnight as a wild one, and this year St. Louis had the only captive litter born in the window. Becker calls the foster a highlight of the zoo's conservation work. It has been a good spring for the species all round. In July the Fish and Wildlife Service reported four wild litters in North Carolina, with between twelve and sixteen pups through their first months, in a population that was down to as few as seven animals a decade ago. Three more of them answer to a Missouri birth certificate, and a North Carolina mother.

Our short take: the full story is by Brian Munoz for St. Louis Public Radio (1 September 2026), with the wild litter count from the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Red Wolf Recovery Program (15 July 2026) as reported by WUNC.