A Year-Round Guide to Franklin and Nantahala

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column

Rosemary and Goat Cheese Strata

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column

Red Wolf Resilience

Red wolf pups in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge

Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Eleanor read her column aloud. 


Wherever wolves live, humans make up myths about them. In some stories, we become them, turn into werewolves. In others, they become us, wait in an old woman’s bed for her granddaughter to bring a basket of goods. A she-wolf found the infant twins Romulus and Remus abandoned on the banks of the Tiber River. She nursed them; they founded Rome.

Wolves lurk in shadows, creep along edges, eyes glowing in the darkness. They become our mascots, our patronuses, our protectors, and sometimes our devourers. We admire them, we fear them. We killed them. Now, in North Carolina, we’re trying to bring our wolves back.



Red wolves look like tall coyotes. They have fluffy faces and long, pointy ears, and they weigh between 45 and 85 pounds, about like gangly German shepherds with different fur. Lankier than gray wolves, they loped freely across the Northeastern to the Southeastern United States when settlers first set foot on North American soil. The settlers decided red wolves were adversaries. They ate livestock, after all. They lurked and crept in the shadows.

By the 1960s, nearly every red wolf in North America had been killed by humans. To prevent total extinction, scientists captured and bred them. In 1987, the federal government chose North Carolina’s own edges — our Albemarle Peninsula — to return the wolves to the wild. The government protected them from poaching, and the number of wild wolves slowly grew.

Red wolf

In the pocosin flats of the Albemarle Peninsula, the last wild red wolves roam freely. photograph by Neil Jernigan

Roland Kays heads the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Biodiversity Lab and hosts YouTube’s Wild Animals channel. He uses camera traps to spy on red wolves and other creatures. He sees how the natural world can thrive when red wolves come back to take their place as top predators.

“Red wolves help other animals like raccoons from becoming overabundant,” he says. When red wolves are in an area, they eat creatures that graze on row crops, which helps farmers. They eat animals that can spread rabies or interfere with songbird populations. In this way, they help keep the ecosystem stable.

But because red wolves also frighten their human neighbors, could possibly eat small domestic animals, and look similar to coyotes, hunters killed nearly every wild red wolf. As of 2024, between 15 and 19 red wolves remain in the wild.

“North Carolina has the only population of red wolves in the world, and they’re barely hanging on,” Kays says. “They are unique and important parts of the ecosystem, and if we want to coexist with them, we have to figure it out.”

Sun rising in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, home to North Carolina's wild red wolves.

With fewer than two dozen living in the wild — all residing in Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge — the red wolf is the world’s most endangered canid. photograph by Trevor Baker/iStock/Getty Images Plus

On the Albemarle Peninsula, within the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, the last of the wild red wolves roam. Their heritage is complicated as they may breed with coyotes. They have families. They have friends. They speak to each other in wolf language, with yaps and barks, growls, whines, and howls. They communicate with their ears and tails. They move like shadows. They stalk and stare. These fully wild dogs, made of fluff and tooth and bone, wrapped in folklore and placed back in our woods, will not be here without our care.

Since before recorded time, we’ve invented stories about wolves. Now, we have this new story. How will it end? We get to decide.

This story was published on Jan 15, 2025

Eleanor Spicer Rice

Dr. Eleanor Spicer Rice is an entomologist based in Raleigh and the author of 10 books on topics ranging from industrious ants to deadly apex predators.