Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Wolves at the door


The one who was the church clerk
Last week my cousin from New Hampshire was visiting, and we made the genealogy rounds.
Samford University's Special Collections has a treasure trove of old Alabama Baptist church records. In between learning that one ancestor was a church clerk and that another was excluded (thrown out) twice, I overheard this conversation:
"Listen to this. The church has been in two previous locations."
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah. It says they had to move the first time because the church was built in a spot with no access to water. The second time, they had to move because of too much activity from Timber Wolves in the area!"

Actually I'm sure they meant Red Wolves (Canis rufus), since there never were any Timber Wolves (Gray Wolves, Canis lupus) in Alabama.
The Red Wolf was declared extinct in the wild in the 1980s.
There are now over 16 million Southern Baptists.
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Red Wolf Recovery Project
Red Wolves of Alligator River
Red Wolf Coalition
This page shows the historical range of the Red Wolf. The subspecies that lived in Alabama, called the Florida Red Wolf (Canis rufus floridanus) was completely extinct by 1930. A second subspecies, the Mississippi Red Wolf, Canis rufus gregoryi, was extinct by 1970, leaving only the Texas Red Wolf, Canis rufus rufus, the species being used in the Recovery Project.

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