Endangered Mexican wolves will continue to be kept south of Interstate 40, after a federal judge in Tucson upheld the current strategy by wildlife officials working to restore the endangered predators to Arizona and New Mexico.
U.S. District Court Judge Scott Rash rejected claims in a March 31 ruling by a coalition of conservation groups that sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its 2022 update of the wolf recovery plan.
The conservationists argued the revised plan doesn’t do enough to foster genetic diversity within the small, reintroduced population, which, they said, must be allowed to spread naturally and establish new territories in suitable habitat outside of where they have been reestablished.
Under the current rules, animals that stray beyond I-40 are captured and returned to the federally designated Mexican Wolf Experimental Population Area, which covers a vast swath of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico south of the interstate.
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he 2024 Mexican wolf census documented a minimum of 286 wolves living in recovery areas Arizona and New Mexico. The Mexican wolf population has grown for a record nine consecutive years! See how biologists capture and collar wolves to manage the growing population. Video courtesy of Arizona Game and Fish Department.
Federal and state wildlife officials contend the experimental area represents the historic range of the distinct gray wolf subspecies.
Ultimately, Rash found nothing arbitrary, capricious or illegal about the wolf recovery plan. In granting a motion for summary judgment in favor of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, the judge ruled that the plan was both reasonable and achievable.
A photo from 2023 shows a Mexican wolf that was captured, given a radio collar and released back into the wild as part of the ongoing effort to reintroduce the endangered predator to Arizona and New Mexico.
His 42-page opinion came in response to a lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven environmental groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson and Defenders of Wildlife in Washington, D.C.
The groups are now considering whether to file an appeal, according to Greta Anderson, the Tucson-based deputy director for Western Watersheds Project, one of the plaintiffs.
“The best scientists have said that the Fish and Wildlife Service needs to be doing more to save the species, and science is the foundation of the Endangered Species Act,†Anderson said. “Fundamentally, we don’t believe that the current rule meets that threshold.â€
The Mexican wolf was once found across the Southwestern U.S. and in Mexico until government-sponsored predator-eradication practices drove it to the brink of extinction.
The subspecies was listed as endangered in 1976. Efforts to reintroduce it to Arizona and New Mexico began in 1998, using the captive-bred descendants of seven animals taken from the wild in Mexico.
There are now at least 286 Mexican wolves roaming wild in the two U.S. states, according to the results of the latest annual population survey released by wildlife officials last month.
That’s an increase of 11% over the 2023 estimate, and it marks the ninth consecutive year of population growth, the longest such streak since the reintroduction program began.
A tranquilized Mexican gray wolf is transported during helicopter capture operations in January 2023.
The survey identified at least 60 distinct wolf packs in Arizona and New Mexico, each containing two or more wolves with an established home range. In 2024, those packs produced a minimum of 164 pups, including 79 that made it to the end of the year, a survival rate of 48%.
Another 350 Mexican wolves currently live in captivity at facilities throughout the U.S. and Mexico, as part of the bi-national breeding program designed to save the subspecies.
