Mexican Gray Wolf Asha Wanders 500 Miles Away From Recovery Area, Returned to Arizona

Asha, a Mexican gray wolf, is being returned to Arizona after wandering 500 miles from the defined recovery area.

Asha the Mexican Gray Wolf

A group of children dubbed the female Mexican gray wolf Asha.

Asha has been transferred back to the wilds of Arizona after being discovered wandering in the northern parts of New Mexico outside of a subspecies recovery area, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday.

500 Miles from the Recovery Area

The wolf was on her way north into New Mexico's southern Rocky Mountains when the wildlife agency apprehended her outside the recovery area in January.

The Fish and Wildlife Service claims that it will not anthropomorphize wild animals by adopting human or pet names popular among the public and nonprofit organizations, and refers to the wolf as Female Wolf 2745.

According to Cyndi Tuell, the director of the nonprofit Western Watersheds for Arizona and New Mexico, wolves like Asha have repeatedly demonstrated that this entire political line is environmentally ineffective.

Tuell and other environmentalists argue that the zone is arbitrary and that the animals should be free to wander, perhaps introducing them to other wolves for breeding and increasing genetic variation.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the wolf born in 2021 went into an area with no other wolves to procreate with.

She passed north of Interstate 40 and eventually made her way into New Mexico, where she was taken into captivity near Taos and temporarily housed at a wildlife service station outside Socorro. The wolf was returned to east Arizona before being released into the Apache National Forest on June 7.

In the fall of 2022, she was equipped with a radio collar, and the agency will continue to track her activities when she is released.

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Endangered Subspecies

The Mexican gray wolf is subspecies of the gray wolf, whose populations in the Southwest had plummeted perilously near to extinction before efforts under the 1973 Endangered Species Act to bring it back were successful. The species is listed as endangered, according to Defenders of Wildlife.

Because of prejudice and misunderstandings about Mexican gray wolves, humans represent the biggest threat. Because inbreeding is a severe problem in the wild, the genetic variety of Mexican gray wolves requires continuous monitoring and improvement.

The last recorded wild Mexican gray wolves were caught in the late 1970s, and the slow recovery began with the successful breeding of seven of the animals in captivity.

On March 30, 1998, government biologists released 11 gray wolves from three chain-link acclimation pens within the 7,000-square-mile federally designated Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area in east-central Arizona: three adult males and three adult females, with three female pups and yearlings, and two male pups.

None of the 11 wolves released on March 30, 1998, survived at the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area. Some had been taken back into captivity and the rest had been shot dead by hunters and poachers, according to DesertUSA.

A yearly census of Mexican gray wolves surviving in the wild in the United States reported a total of 241 in New Mexico and Arizona, the Fish and Wildlife Service reported via CBS News.