New female red wolf coming to Nature Center

The Chattanooga Nature Center will welcome a new female red wolf in early December, hopefully leading to a litter in the spring.

The wolf is moving from a National Wildlife Refuge in Bulls Island, S.C., to the nature center in exchange for another female.

The new female is "genetically valuable" and will be paired with the center's male in hopes that they will produce pups after the mating season, which runs from January through March, said Tish Gailmard, the center's wildlife curator.

When the female wolf arrives at the center, she'll be put in a quarantine pen that shares a wall with the male.

"They can get to know each other through the fence," Mrs. Gailmard said. "If there's no signs of aggression, then we put them together."

The wolves are part of the Red Wolf Recovery program, which came to Chattanooga in 1996 and is aimed at increasing the nation's red wolf population.

The program originated in 1980, when only 17 known red wolves existed worldwide. Of those 17, only 12 were strong enough to breed.

To bolster the population, officials meet each summer to determine pairs for the next breeding season. To be "genetically valuable" means those wolves have a better chance of creating diversity in the bloodline, increasing the breeds' chances for survival, Mrs. Gailmard said.

Nature Center officials hope the breeding program will help the red wolves make a comeback in the wild, Executive Director Dr. Jean Lomino said.

"Like so many other animals that have become extinct because of pressures from construction and human impact on the land, one of our goals for not just the Nature Center but for human beings is to try to put our ecosystem back together again, make it intact," she said.

Preserving red wolves is important because they sit atop the food chain in the wild, Dr. Lomino said. Coyotes, which are not native to this part of the country, grew in population when the red wolf population decreased, she said.

The center does not receive city, state or federal funding money and relies on donations and grants to sustain its mission.