Schoolchildren name Asha's endangered Mexican gray wolf pups

Schoolchildren from New Mexico and Arizona celebrated the birth of five Mexican gray wolf pups by naming the latest litter of the critically endangered species, conservation groups announced Tuesday.

Kachina, Aspen, Kai, Sage and Aala are the names of the 7-week-old pups born last month at the Sevilleta Wolf Management Facility to Asha, a wild-born wolf, and Arcadia, who was born and raised in captivity. The pups’ names recall southwestern flora, Hopi folk spirits and the Diné language.

Names were selected from a pool of submissions from K-12 students in the Southwest and across the world, said Erin Hunt, the managing director of Lobos of the Southwest. The public then voted for their favorite names.

One student submitted Kweo Kachina, which is the name of the Hopi wolf spirit embodied at ceremonial dances and in carved figures known as kachina dolls. Another suggested Sage to represent both wisdom and the southwestern plant. The name Kai was chosen because it means willow in Diné, the language spoken by the Navajo people. The name Aala is said to mean “she who hunts and heals,” another student wrote.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not name the wolves it monitors, instead assigning a number to identify them. It does name packs, groups of two or more wolves, often after geographic locations.

Fish and Wildlife has said it plans to release the family group, known as the Caldera Pack, in New Mexico this summer, which will mark the first release of a pack in years, Hunt said. However, the family’s release has already been delayed once.

Once free, they will join an estimated 286 other Mexican wolves in the wild, according to the latest U.S. Fish and Wildlife report.

Meet the parents

Asha, identified formally as F2754, is the pups’ mother and has twice tested the boundaries of her tentative freedom under Fish and Wildlife’s purview. Wolves are not permitted to cross north of Interstate 40, a journey Asha has made twice.

Asha was captured near the Valles Caldera National Preserve and paired with Arcadia, M1966, at Sevilleta near Socorro. The captive-bred wolf will experience the wild for the first time when released.

Though known for wandering outside of her allowed territory, Asha has no history of hunting livestock or otherwise interacting with humans.

Historically, Mexican wolves roamed across most of the southwestern United States, including Texas, Utah and Colorado, as well as Mexico. Now, they’ve been reintroduced only to central and southern Arizona and New Mexico.

To protect ranching industries, Mexican wolves were hunted to near extinction in the wild. By 1973, there were only seven survivors in the entire species.

Though reintroduction efforts continue, resilience and genetic-diversity remain a concern. Wild wolves are all genetically similar enough to be siblings, Hunt said, while captive-bred wolves are much more genetically diverse.

“Those puppies represent the best of all worlds,” Hunt said. “They represent a possibility for Asha to teach them her wild ways, her peaceful wandering and how to be an excellent wild wolf out on the landscape. And they’ve got the benefit of their father’s genetics, so that’s going to be a huge injection of gene diversity into the wild population.”