My son, Jack, and I were driving a U-Haul truck through Arizona on the way to California (he’s stationed at Camp Pendleton) and saw the animal in the picture (additional pictures and a video are in the online article). We thought it was a wolf. It was July 26 at 7:56 a.m., near milepost 317 on Route 60 westbound, a few miles east of the small community of Carrizo, AZ, on Fort Apache Indian Reservation lands in Gila County.
We saw it walking along the outside of the guardrail, then down into Corduroy Creek to the north. We stopped, got out of the truck, and took pictures about 100 yards from the animal on the north side of the highway. There was no collar, tags or accompanying people or animals visible. We had just seen a cow elk cross the road about 10 miles east of where we saw the animal.
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We first saw the animal at close range (approximately 10 yards from the front passenger seat). I could see clearly over the guardrail, and saw that it was all black, had no collar or ear tag, the face and snout looked like a wolf or dog—not a coyote—and its build looked like a wolf or dog, not a coyote. We took pictures with our cell phone cameras.
The area in which we saw the animal is within the range of the Mexican wolf population in Arizona. However, there are no black Mexican wolves. There are black dogs, black northern wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, and rare black coyotes in some parts of the U.S.
Northern wolves dispersed from Wyoming to northern Arizona (one in 2014) and northern New Mexico (one in 2008), and there are dogs and coyotes in Arizona. What is the animal we saw?
Mexican wolves have been studied extensively and are considered a subspecies that is genetically different from other wolves, although this is not definite (see the references at wlj.net). Because Mexican wolf management is based on a lot of research, I’ll be scientific in considering what this animal is. I propose these hypotheses and information regarding the identity of the animal.
The animal is:
A) A Mexican wolf. But there are no black Mexican wolves in the current population.
B) A northern wolf dispersing from the Northern Rocky Mountain population (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho) or Colorado where wolves have occurred in the last few years. Wolves have been documented moving from Wyoming to Arizona and New Mexico.
C) A captive northern wolf released by someone. I have no information on this possibility.
D) A coyote. Black coyotes are rare. My observation isthe animal does not have the narrow snout or body typical of a coyote.
E) A dog. The animal was alone and within a few miles of a human community.
F) A coyote x dog hybrid. Coyotes and dogs sometimes interbreed.
G) A wolf x dog hybrid. Dogs and wolves sometimes interbreed.
I don’t know which hypothesis is correct, but I think it is a wolf, and because it’s black I think it came from the northern populations. Maybe you have an opinion of what it is, or you have seen similar animals. Send an email to me or managing editor Anna Miller (anna@wlj.net) with your ideas and observations.
If the animal is a northern wolf, a dog, a wolf-dog hybrid, or a coyote-dog hybrid, it is likely capable of interbreeding with the Mexican wolves in the area in which it was seen. This has implications for the extensive effort to maintain the Mexican wolf as a genetically unique subspecies. Mexican wolves were introduced into the wild in southern Arizona and New Mexico in 1998-2003 with animals from a federal government captive breeding program. There were 196 Mexican wolves in the wild population in Arizona and New Mexico in 2022. Two Mexican wolves dispersed from southern Arizona; one to northern Arizona near Flagstaff in 2021, and one to northern New Mexico near Taos in 2023.
Regardless of what the black animal is, interbreeding of northern wolves and Mexican wolves will probably occur over time because wolves previously dispersed from Wyoming to Arizona and New Mexico, and wolves are colonizing Colorado from northern populations and the state plans to bring wolves into Colorado. From a practical standpoint, it might not matter much. Crosses between Mexican wolves and northern wolves will continue to prey on elk, deer and livestock.
However, the federal government has made extensive efforts and expense to preserve the Mexican wolf because of its genetics that justified its Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing as a subspecies. The government will need to decide if it will (or is able to) maintain the Mexican wolf subspecies or allow it to mix with other wolf subspecies.
This is an example of the complications caused by the ESA definition of species: species, subspecies and distinct population segments, about which I’ve written before (see the WLJ story linked above, June 18, 2023, “Resource Science: Wolf ESA populations are too complicated”). — Dr. Matt Cronin
(Editor’s note: Upon reading this article, New Mexico Catron County Sheriff’s Office Wolf Interaction Investigator Jess Carey reported to WLJ that black Mexican wolves have been seen in Catron County, and a black lab dog bred a female Mexican wolf years ago.)
Matthew A. Cronin is a scientist with Northwest Biology Company LLC in Bozeman, MT. He can be contacted at croninm@aol.com. A full list of references may be found online at wlj.net.
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