With a brown satchel slung over his shoulder and eyes scanning the ground, Joe Butera walked down a logging road in a remote section of the northern Adirondacks.
He was looking for canid tracks and scat, like he’d seen this past winter and spring.
"This is where I found three individual scats that were huge," said the 70-year-old retired electrician, as he turned around at a gate and about 75 feet before an expanse of bog opened along the road.
Scats are important to him because he plans to have them tested for wolf DNA, part of his plan to provide evidence that the large canids live in the Adirondacks. A state and federally endangered species, wolves were eliminated from New York state in the 1800s after they were targeted by hunters and government bounties.
Butera is the leader of a small group called the Northeast Ecological Recovery Society, and has been advocating on wolves’ behalf for decades. In the past couple of years, he played a key role in the discovery of evidence that determined what was likely a wild wolf shot near Cooperstown.
He gathered. Butera then worked with other advocates to have its DNA tested by Trent and Princeton universities. Scientists ultimately concluded the animal was a gray wolf from the Great Lakes region, but little has been learned about the history of the animal, which has since been mounted by a taxidermist and put in storage at the New York State Museum.
