By Rick LoBello, Education Curator, El Paso Zoo

Don Diego was a 5 ½ month old Mexican wolf pup that Roy McBride, an experienced wolf trapper, captured in October 1977 in the mountains of Durango, Mexico.  The young wolf became one of the founders of the Mexican wolf captive breeding program and was an important part of the emergency effort to save the species.  Before they were systematically eradicated from the region because of conflicts with the cattle industry, for thousands of years Mexican wolves lived across large areas of the Chihuahuan Desert and the Southwest United States and Mexico.  When young Don Diego was captured the wild population was estimated to be only 50 animals. 

Not long after he was captured and transported across the Mexican border into Texas, the young wolf lived for a short time at McBride’s ranch in Alpine. Later in 1978 he was transferred to the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum and eventually moved to the Endangered Wolf Center (formerly the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center) in Eureka, Missouri. He lived there from 1982 to 1992 and is remembered as last wild caught Mexican wolf and as the founder of the Mexican wolf captive breeding program where he sired pups until 1989. 

I was extremely fortunate to see this newly captured wild wolf on Roy McBride’s ranch. Little did I know at the time that I was seeing the last of its kind before the species was declared extinct in the wild two years later in 1980.  

Roy was a well-known trapper who was under contract with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to capture endangered Mexican wolves for a U.S./Mexico captive breeding program (USFWS).   He had been making trips into the Sierra Madre of northwest Mexico for years; many of them wolf trapping ventures for ranchers wanting to kill off wolves interfering with cattle operations.

In March 1980, Roy completed “The Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi), an historical review and observations on its status and distribution” for the USFWS. The illustrated report summarized over twenty years of his wolf hunting trips, mainly in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Durango. If anyone knew where to find wolves in Mexico and how to capture them, Roy was the man. It was ironic that after playing a small part in helping to bring the species to the brink of extinction, he was now being asked to help save it.

One of the last wild endangered Mexican wolves known to science glared at me from inside a large enclosure on McBride’s small ranch. I can still picture its shaggy gray-and-rust- colored coat and how out of place it looked from behind the wire fence. A three-minute 8mm movie film refreshes my memory of that haunting day.  My heart was filled with sadness at the thought that to save the species we had to capture the last known survivors and keep them and their descendants in captivity until the time that it would be safe to release them back into the wild.

Years later I uploaded my old movie film to YouTube, documenting a moment in my life that I will never forget and an experience that motivates me to this day in my continuous struggle to fight for the return of the wolf to Texas.

I consider myself very fortunate to have known Roy McBride who was a living legend here in West Texas before he died on May 24, 2023. My graduate school advisor Dr. James F. Scudday at Sul Ross State University introduced me to Roy when I moved to Alpine to work on my master’s degree in biology.  The following year I was hired on as a seasonal park ranger at Big Bend National Park about a hundred miles to the south on the US Mexico border.  One day Roy gave me a call at Panther Junction Park Headquarters and invited me to see one of the wolves he captured for the new captive breeding program.  A few years later five of those wolves became founders of the McBride lineage and the young male that I saw that day became the first founder.   When we last talked on the phone, I reminded him of that day and made sure I that had all of my facts right before writing this article. I was surprised to learn that Roy did not know that the pup he captured was eventually named Don Diego.  Our conversation about wolves focused more on the future of the current reintroduction efforts and how he believes major errors were made in deciding which wolves would be included in the captive breeding program.  Roy believed that some of the wolves in the Ghost Ranch lineage were hybrids and that all wolves in North America are the same.  To best ensure the success of long-term recovery efforts he told me that wolves from the northern part of the continent should be considered to help increase the genetic diversity in the wild population, a controversial approach, but one of the key recovery criteria concerns addressed by the Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan.

Don Diego was trapped on Rancho El Salto 62 miles north and 43 miles west of Durango, Durango.  A few years later Don Diego fathered the first Mexican wolf litter conceived and born in captivity.   His son Francisco fathered the male pups that led the Hawks Nest and Campbell Blue packs.   I was fortunate to see some of the members of the Hawks Nest pack when Francisco and his mate were among the first eleven Mexican wolves released from captivity into the wild at the Apache National Forest in eastern Arizona on March 29, 1998. As of late 2025 the wild population in Arizona, New Mexico and northern Mexico is estimated at approximately 286 wolves. 

I was proud to be a founding member of the Mexican Wolf Coalition of Texas that formed during the spring of 1990 just in time for Earth Day.   That year we published the first edition of the Mexican Wolf Recovery Newsletter.   Right below the masthead the first words of Volume 1, Issue 1 were written by wolf advocate Douglas Pimlott: “I have high hopes for the future of wolves in North America.  Many men will cease to think of them as vermin and see them as they are –one of the most interesting and intelligent animals that ever lived on the globe.  Do you dare become involved in such a noble cause?” 

Five years after the formation of the Mexican Wolf Coalition of Texas, wolves were restored in 1995 to Yellowstone National Park and three years later captive born Mexican wolves, many of them ancestors of Don Diego, were released into the wild in the Blue Range Recovery Area in eastern Arizona.  I was there that late winter day joined by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Mexican Wolf Recovery Team leader David Parsons.   Director Babbitt and I later spoke at a border conservation meeting in Juarez, Chihuahua and I will never forget what he told me, ‘never give up.”

Today I continue my journey working with a new group of wolf advocates in Texas and other parts of the country, many of them motivated by over 20,000 people in El Paso who in 2019 signed letters to Texas Parks and Wildlife in support of Mexican wolf recovery in Texas. Two years later in 2021 a new non-profit organization called the Texas Lobo Coalition was established with a focus on working with the scientific community on a recovery plan and developing relationships with government officials and wolf habitat stakeholders including landowners in West Texas and the Big Bend country.   Earlier this year I posted an update on wolf advocacy efforts in Texas on the El Paso Zoo’s conservation blog.   I was encouraged by nearly 300 people on a Big Bend social media site who gave the story thumbs up. 

After speaking at length with former US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe and former Texas Parks and Wildlife Director Carter Smith, I am confident that someday here in Texas we will realize Margaret Meade’s famous quote “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The story of Don Diego started in Mexico and then Texas where the last Mexican wolves in the wild were documented in 1970 when two were killed on ranches north of Big Bend National Park. The story can not end until Texans can join other states, and Mexico is knowing the Mexican wolf is not just in Zoos like the El Paso Zoo, but in wilderness areas that remain. We treasure the wild and all its parts as our natural heritage for ourselves and for future generations.

Photos

Parque Natural Mexiquillo – copyright Bryan Sharp, Stanly Community College
Don Diego images and plaque courtesy of Danna Hilleren, Endangered Wolf Center
Ponderosa Pine habitat – Wikimedia Creative Commons