Poachers behind dwindling Mexican grey wolves?

Wildlife managers said Thursday the drop, from 110 wolves in 2014 to 97 last year, was unexpected and disturbing but that federal and state governments should stick with their decades-long recovery efforts for the animal. 

The tally did not include an estimated 20 more Mexican wolves roaming south of the US border. Captive breeding Without doubt the rarest subspecies of grey wolves in North America, they had been gradually expanding over the previous five years, averaging 11 percent annual growth in southern New Mexico and south eastern Arizona, said John Bradley, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Last year saw the deaths of 13 wolves, nine of them females, and a sharp decrease in the number of wolf pups that survived through December, wildlife managers said. 

Mexican wolves were believed to be all but extinct in the United States and Mexico when the last five were caught alive in Mexico between 1977 and 1980 and used for a captive breeding program that saw 11 animals released to the wild in the two south western US states in 1998. 

Like their larger counterparts in the Northern Rockies and the Midwest, Mexican grey wolves draw the ire of ranchers for preying on cattle and are a big game prized by hunters. But conservationists have hailed the comeback of wolves in states like Idaho, Montana and Michigan as a triumph for keystone predators that were once hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction before coming under U.S. Endangered Species Act protections in the 1970s. 

Wildlife advocates decried the 2015 decline in Mexican wolves and pointed to illegal killings as a probable factor. Last year’s deaths, including two females killed accidentally after being captured by government biologists are under investigation.