Endangered red wolves need space to stay wild: ‘We’ve got a long way to go’

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.