Green Wolf Farm

10/23/2026

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On August 8, 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered federal marksmen to shoot the alpha female of the Fox Mountain wolf pack in New Mexico. At the time, the entire wild population of Mexican gray wolves stood at 58 animals, with roughly six breeding females left on the landscape. She was one of the six.

Every Mexican wolf alive today descends from seven founders captured when the subspecies was on the brink of extinction in the late 1970s. Federal biologists started releasing captive-bred wolves back into the Apache and Gila national forests of Arizona and New Mexico in 1998. Fourteen years later, the wild recovery was barely treading water, held down by poaching, highway collisions, and federal removals over livestock losses.

Known in tracking logs as AF1188, the Fox Mountain alpha female had been born in the wild, and so had her mate, AM1158. Together, the pair had raised a yearling and four new pups born that spring, subsisting primarily on elk across the rugged canyon country of the northwest Gila National Forest. Because the two wolves were cousins, federal officials classified the female as having low genetic value to the breeding program. In a population built from a handful of survivors, however, nearly every wild wolf in the forest was related.

Between late March and August 1, 2012, investigators tied the Fox Mountain pack to four dead cattle, three of which were killed on private ranchland outside the official recovery boundary. Field crews tried non-lethal hazing to push the pack away from the pastures. They brought in range riders to patrol the herds and dropped diversionary roadkill carcasses in the woods to keep the wolves fed while they raised their litter. None of it stopped the livestock losses. Under the recovery rules in place at the time, a wolf linked to three or more cattle kills in a single year had to be removed, and the kill order was handed to USDA Wildlife Services.

Even though the rancher had already been reimbursed $4,650 for the lost livestock, the order to shoot one of the last six wild mothers set off an immediate national uproar. Two days after issuing the permit, on August 10, the Fish and Wildlife Service backed down and canceled the shooting. The Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center in Scottsdale, Arizona stepped in and offered to fund a live capture and house the wolf for the rest of her life. Federal trappers were sent back into the mountains with instructions to bring her in alive.

Then the wolf disappeared.

USDA Wildlife Services trappers set leg-hold traps across the northwest Gila and checked their lines every morning. Weeks went by without a single track near the sets. By early September, more than a month into the manhunt, Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Tom Buckley admitted to the Associated Press that the wolf was outsmarting the field crews: "She's one elusive girl. We're still trying."

She dodged the traplines for two full months before finally stepping into a set on October 10, 2012. Trappers loaded the wild-born mother into a crate and drove her out of New Mexico to the sanctuary in Scottsdale, where staff placed her in an off-display enclosure away from the public. Back in the Gila, her mate and yearling were left to finish raising the four six-month-old pups on their own.

While sanctuary officials reported in the weeks after her arrival that she was eating well, a wolf born in the Gila wilderness does not always settle into a fenced compound. According to a 2016 statement from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Fox Mountain alpha female died before the spring of 2016 after years of struggling to adapt to life in captivity, right around the same time federal trappers went back into the New Mexico mountains to capture one of her surviving wild sons.

The Mexican wolf population has since grown to over 240 in the wild, while nearly 150 have been illegally killed since the reintroduction began.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Associated Press (2012) / KUNM (2012) / Center for Biological Diversity (2012, 2016) / WildEarth Guardians (2012) / Wolf Conservation Center (2012) / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

10/22/2026

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Roughly two hundred wild horses roam the Brittany Triangle, a remote wedge of pine forest and meadow framed by the Chilko and Taseko rivers on the Chilcotin Plateau of British Columbia. For generations, the accepted history was that these animals descended from Spanish mustangs traded north to the Tsilhqot’in people around 1740.

When geneticists finally tested their DNA, the Spanish bloodline was barely there. What showed up instead was a French horse from seventeen-hundreds Quebec and a cold-weather horse from north of the Arctic Circle in Siberia.

The study was conducted by Gus Cothran, a leading equine geneticist at Texas A&M University, alongside British Columbia wildlife biologist Wayne McCrory. Working from blood samples of captured horses and hair plucked from forest bedding sites and low branches across the Brittany Triangle, the pair released their findings in January 2015.

Their analysis showed that the herd traced primarily to the Canadian Horse, a sturdy breed first shipped by King Louis XIV from France to Quebec in 1665. Those horses became the heavy work animals of eastern Canada throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were later named Canada’s official national breed.

Finding French bloodlines in a wild British Columbia herd was unexpected, though historically plausible, as Voyageurs and Hudson's Bay Company traders steadily moved eastern horses across the Rockies during the fur trade era.

The second genetic match made far less sense.

Cothran found distinct genetic markers tying the Brittany Triangle herd to the Yakut horse, a rugged, long-haired breed native to the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia capable of surviving winter temperatures of sixty below zero. How Siberian horse genetics reached an isolated plateau in the interior of British Columbia remains unsolved.

One working theory is that nineteenth-century Russian fur traders operating along the Pacific Northwest coast brought Yakut stock across the Bering Sea, and the horses eventually traded inland along Indigenous networks. No written shipping logs have ever surfaced to prove it, and the researchers noted in their final report that the DNA raised more questions than it answered.

Even stranger was the contrast with the horses living right next door. While the Brittany Triangle herd inside the river boundaries carried French and Siberian markers with only trace amounts of Spanish ancestry, the broader Chilcotin wild horse population roaming outside the triangle still carried strong Spanish Iberian bloodlines. Separated by deep river canyons, the two neighboring herds came from completely different parts of the world.

Today, the Brittany Triangle herd lives inside the Elegesi Qayus Wild Horse Preserve, established in 2002 by the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation, a community of the Tsilhqot’in Nation. It is the only wild horse preserve in western Canada.

Unlike provincial agencies that often classify free-roaming horses as feral pests competing with cattle, the Xeni Gwet’in manage the herd as a central piece of their cultural history and a natural part of the plateau ecosystem.

Six months before the genetics report came out, the land beneath the herd made legal history of its own. On June 26, 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark unanimous ruling in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, granting the first declaration of Aboriginal title in Canadian history.

The fight had started decades earlier when the Xeni Gwet’in set up roadblocks to stop industrial clear-cutting that would have hauled an estimated 62,000 truckloads of lodgepole pine out of their valley. The high court recognized Tsilhqot’in title to roughly 1,900 square kilometers of territory, including the Nemiah Valley and the entire Brittany Triangle.

Follow-up genomic work with researchers at the Centre for Geogenetics in Denmark was proposed to pin down exactly when the Siberian bloodline entered the herd. Until those sequences are finished, two hundred horses with Arctic DNA continue grazing on a high plateau in British Columbia, protected by the people who kept the loggers out.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Cothran & McCrory (2015), A Preliminary Genetic Study of the Wild Horse in the Brittany Triangle / Friends of the Nemaiah Valley / Valhalla Wilderness Society / Horse Journals / The Globe and Mail / Tsilhqot’in National Government / Supreme Court of Canada, 2014 SCC 44

10/21/2026

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10/20/2026

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Riddle/Kiger Update
So, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the Kiger/Riddle lawsuit. As we’re entering our third year in the 9th District court case appealing the BLMs plans for the Kiger and Riddle HMAs, the BLM announced gathers in 2024, 2025 and now in 2026. The first 2 were stopped through agreements. This year BLM announced an emergency gather with only 6 days notice which included a holiday weekend. The first website announcement said the gather was needed due to drought. We quickly pointed out the entire county where Riddle HMA is was under flash flood warnings because of a major precipitation event. BLM took down the reason for their alleged “emergency” gather and gave us no reason for a couple days. They finally arrived at the emergency being that 78% of the forage burned in the Bald Mountain fire.
We could see from their own fire perimeter maps that this was an exaggeration. Our experts estimated it to be closer to 48%. And despite some claims by those who know nothing about our case several members of plaintiff organizations have been on Kiger and Riddle, including those experts.
Those who are criticizing us and claiming we have not been there or that we have offered no opinion of a better, scientifically supported plan to properly manage these herds have no information other than hearsay, because we are not sharing communications between the 2 legal teams that happen outside official public court filings.
And, BLM did not “appeal “ the Preliminary Injunction that was just granted by the court. Judge Immergut was made aware that we had attempted to get a voluntary agreement with BLM to only remove horses over 278. Our expert testified in Court that 278 is the minimum population size needed for the genetic health of the herd. BLM declined that offer and it went to a hearing for the injunction, after which the judge ruled that because none of us have had time to follow the proper method required to judge forage production, and because BLMs wild horse specialist declared to the court that there were large areas of the HMA that didn’t burn, and rain and warmer than normal fall weather was allowing regrowth already within burn areas, removal of 100% of the horses was not necessary, therefore awarding our injunction against 100% removal, and allowing BLM to remove horses above that number on the range.
What people should be concerned about…1. BLM gave less than 24 hour notice for people who would like to observe the gather and 2. Are there really 418 horses out there, we don’t think so because everyone who has been there in the last weeks and months is having trouble laying eyes on them, though we are finding some recent signs of horse. 3. Do any of us really trust BLM will follow the judge’s ruling and leave 278 horses out there?
However, attacking us when we have fought to protect the genetic health of this herd or pretending we lost because the BLM is permitted to gather some is irresponsible if you care about these horses. We were willing to compromise if there was a chance any horse would starve.

10/20/2026

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10/19/2026

Lol 😂

10/19/2026

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10/18/2026

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Across the Midwest, state game agencies spent decades writing off the bigmouth buffalo as a trash fish. Regulators lumped them into the same bucket as invasive carp, slapped them with the "rough fish" label, and left them completely unregulated. In 19 of the 22 states where bigmouth buffalo are native, an angler can kill as many as they want, year-round, including running shallow bays at night with bright halogen spotlights while the fish stack up to spawn. Biologists assumed they were short-lived bottom feeders that topped out around 20 years old, so nobody bothered tracking their numbers.

That assumption collapsed in 2019 when Alec Lackmann, then a graduate student at North Dakota State University, published a study in *Communications Biology*. Lackmann pulled nearly 400 bigmouth buffalo out of west-central Minnesota lakes to examine their otoliths: tiny calcium carbonate ear stones that lay down annual growth rings like the trunk of a tree. To verify the ring counts, he turned to bomb radiocarbon dating, testing the inner rings against the spike in carbon-14 left behind by Cold War nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 60s.

Five of the fish had survived past a century. The oldest, pulled from Crystal Lake in Otter Tail County, was a 112-year-old female that hatched in 1906, back when Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House. The previous textbook maximum lifespan for the species sat at 26 years. Overnight, the bigmouth buffalo became the oldest verified freshwater bony fish known to science, outlasting roughly 12,000 other freshwater species on Earth.

The extreme ages pointed to a much worse problem: the total absence of young fish. The first 16 fish Lackmann checked were already past 80. Across the study, nearly half the sample sat in their 80s and 90s. In several lakes, almost no young fish had survived since the 1930s. The adults were still migrating and laying eggs every spring, but predatory fish like northern pike were wiping out the fingerlings before they could hit the five- or six-year mark where they get too big to swallow.

A 2023 follow-up across Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle River system pushed the record further, turning up fish older than 125 years that hatched around 1894. Across that entire 127-year span, the population showed evidence of only 13 successful spawning years. Only a single spawn had succeeded since 1948, and water control dams had dropped reservoir levels so fast that the eggs dried out on the banks. Then, in 2024, Lackmann sampled Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota: 99.7 percent of the 390 fish sampled had hatched before 1972, with a median age of 79. For half a century, the annual spawn had produced almost zero surviving offspring.

Now a researcher at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Lackmann is pushing state wildlife departments to kill off the unlimited harvest. The species has no federal protections. Over the past decade, modern bowfishing rigs, outfitted with elevated shooting platforms and high-powered generator lights, have boomed in popularity. Shooters regularly target bigmouth buffalo in knee-deep water during the spring spawn, filling truck beds with fish that hatched before the First World War and dumping the carcasses in the weeds.

A native fish that can outlive three human generations and remain fertile at 120 years old is an extraordinary evolutionary survivor. But surviving a century in cold water does not protect an animal from regulations that still treat it like garbage.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Lackmann et al. (2019), Communications Biology / Lackmann et al. (2023), Qu’Appelle study / Lackmann et al. (2024), Scientific Reports / National Geographic / Star Tribune / Agate Magazine. See less

10/17/2026

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Coyotes are the primary predator of pronghorn fawns across the West, and in Grand Teton they are the leading cause of fawn mortality at every study site ever monitored. A coyote can run down a fawn in sagebrush in seconds. A female pronghorn will fight, and we have written about that on this page, but she cannot be everywhere at once and she usually has two fawns to protect. The coyotes know this and they work in pairs, one drawing the mother while the other takes the fawn. At some sites, 90 percent of fawns die before summer is over. Most of them die in the first two weeks.

What Kim Berger wanted to know was whether wolves changed that equation.

Berger, along with Eric Gese and Joel Berger, radio-collared more than 100 pronghorn fawns in Grand Teton over three years and monitored their survival through summer. They divided the study area into zones based on wolf presence: places where wolves were abundant and places where wolves were absent but coyote densities were high.

In the wolf-free zones, 10 percent of fawns survived. In the wolf-abundant zones, 34 percent survived. Fawn survival was more than three times higher where wolves were present. The results were published in 2008 in the journals Ecology and Ecological Applications.

The mechanism is not complicated. Wolves kill coyotes. They do it regularly, directly, and without hesitation. A wolf will go out of its way to chase and kill a coyote that crosses into its territory. After wolves were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 1995, coyote numbers in wolf-occupied areas dropped significantly. The coyotes that survived either moved to areas without wolves or became more cautious and spent less time hunting in the open sagebrush flats where pronghorn fawns are born.

Wolves, meanwhile, almost never kill pronghorn fawns themselves. A newborn pronghorn fawn weighs about 7 pounds. A wolf weighs 100. Berger explained the math: “It would be like trying to feed an entire family on a single Big Mac.” A wolf needs elk. A pronghorn fawn is not worth the calories it takes to find one. So the wolves suppress the animal that kills fawns without replacing it as a fawn predator. The fawns end up safer in wolf country than anywhere else.

The population-level effect was large enough to change the trajectory of the herd. Berger’s simulation modeling showed that without wolves, the Grand Teton pronghorn population was on a declining trend, with a growth rate of 0.92, meaning the herd was shrinking by about 8 percent per year. With wolves, the growth rate flipped to 1.06, a growing population. After wolf reintroduction, the park’s pronghorn population increased by roughly 50 percent.

“People tend to think that more wolves always mean fewer prey,” Berger said. In this case, the opposite was true. More wolves meant fewer coyotes, and fewer coyotes meant more pronghorn fawns reaching fall. The wolf did not help the pronghorn by intending to. It helped by being large enough that everything below it in the hierarchy rearranged itself around the risk of being near it.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Berger, Gese & Berger (2008), Ecology 89:818-828 / Berger & Conner (2008), Ecological Applications 18:599-612 / Wildlife Conservation Society / Mongabay / WyoFile.