EARLY ONE MORNING this spring, veterinary techs at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo bundled a litter of 9-day-old Mexican wolf pups (Canis lupus baileyi) — each weighing just under two pounds — into a cloth carrier. The sleeping pups were then loaded onto a small private plane: Three would go to southeast Arizona, and three to New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, where U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists had recently located the den of AF1578, a 6-year-old female lobo they identified as an ideal foster mother.
Just days earlier, AF1578 had given birth
