DOWN EAST magazine • April 2023
Hunted ferociously, wolves were extirpated from Maine by the 1890s, leaving what ecologists call “a vacant ecological niche.” Because wolves, by that time, had been exterminated throughout most of the eastern U.S., coyotes from western states and territories began inexorably spreading into habitats that wolves once occupied. The smaller canines moved eastward and northward and established breeding populations in Maine by the 1930s. The topic of reintroducing wolves to Maine has been floated here and there ever since the successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, in the 1990s. The deliberate reintroduction of wolves will never happen in Maine if deer hunters have anything to say about it, but the wolf’s DNA is still with us in Maine’s thriving coyote population. And the farmers’ old antipathy is still with us as well.