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Red wolves once roamed freely from Texas to New York, but their numbers have dwindled to just a few dozen in the wild.
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Recently, I had the opportunity to care for a new litter of red wolf pups that were bred in captivity.
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Now I'm in North Carolina, the only place in America where red wolves can be released back into the wild.
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We're on Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge right now.
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There's been a consistent presence of red wolf ever since reintroduction 1987.
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The Red Wolf Recovery Program has successfully reintroduced over 120 adults and 34 pups to their natural habitat.
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So this is the combo VHFG PS: collar.
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And it lets us track them from the ground or from the air at any point time we're out there, you know, pound the ground for him.
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This is some good cover here in this tall grass.
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It is.
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And you can be really close with that without even seeing them.
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I'm hoping we get lucky and spot one of these incredibly rare creatures.
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Joe picks up signals of a young female in the area that recently produced her first litter.
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And we might get a glimpse over if she moves around soon.
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We are on her trail.
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There's a little bit, just a tiny bit of movement.
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Take take a look right over there about 11:00.
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It's the new Mama, and she appears to be hunting for food.
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Yeah, that definitely looks like her.
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You can see the little bit of the orange, the collar.
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Terrific.
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I never thought I'd get to see one of these in the flesh.
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The, you know, her body language and the, the way she's moving to me makes it look like she's hunting for small mammals, even field mice or something like that.
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Just the precise movements just kind of has her ears back and her head kind of down.
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In 1980, the red wolf was officially declared extinct in the wild, so this animal is living proof that Wildlife Conservation can succeed.
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What an inspiration and spark of hope for the future of wolves in North America.
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The wild bred wolves in North Carolina are among the very last of their kind, and without this protected land they wouldn't be here at all.
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Across the country in Texas, some of the last remaining coastal Prairie on Earth is another vitally important habitat that's federally protected.
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Prairie is one of the most overlooked habitats to a lot of people may just see flat open space, but it's so much more than what you see.
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It holds all sorts of wildlife, a million at waters.
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Prairie chickens once roamed these prairies, but with human expansion over the 20th century, their numbers dwindled toward extinction.
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As the habitat declined, so did the Prairie chicken population.
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They are currently below 200 in the wild.
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Thanks to weather events like Hurricane Harvey, they were reduced to as low as 12 individuals in the wild.
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These ground dwelling birds may be rare, but they're well known for their colorful behavior.
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In the springtime, the males will go out onto the Prairie and they'll do what we call booming.
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It's their mating dance.
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They puff up their feathers a little bit and they blow up these bright orange air sacks on their neck and they stomp their feet really fast and they let out this sound.
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It's honestly indescribable, the feeling that you get hearing such a strong sound come out of a little bird.
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You hear like this eerie across the Bray before you even see the birds, the dance, It just makes me laugh every time I look at it.
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Just makes you kind of want to shake with it a little bit.
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They might even fight each other.
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They get pretty territorial during that time of year, and it's all for the sake of getting a mate.
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The Atwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge in Texas was created in 1972 and offers the last remaining hope for this incredibly rare but important bird.
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A healthy Prairie habitat means you're going to have more Prairie chickens.
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It's an indicator species is what we call it.
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If we're managing the habitat specifically for this Prairie chicken, we're meeting the needs of all the other wildlife indirectly.
