Asha, the lonely female Mexican wolf who wandered hundreds of miles from southeastern Arizona into northern New Mexico and was finally captured near Taos, is still without a mate. I wrote earlier about her wanderings and her inability to read a road map and game management rules that said she was not supposed to venture north of Interstate 40 in New Mexico.
After she was captured by U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials in January, the wolf was placed in a wolf management facility near Socorro. She was paired up with a male wolf with the hope she would breed and have pups. And while she and the male got along, they apparently never “got it on.”
Realizing that the matchmakers’ dream was not to be realized, Asha — also given the ignominious official name of “Wolf #2754” — was relocated back to the mountains of southeastern Arizona earlier this month.
She’s apparently still on the lookout for a perfect mate and her amorous wanderings are being watched closely thanks to a radio collar which had tracked her adventures across New Mexico last year and early this year. The map below, courtesy of the Albuquerque Journal, shows her amazing wanderings, crossing heavily trafficked Interstate highways at least four times and skirting the northern part of White Sands Missile Range. She apparently spent quite a bit of time in the San Mateo Mountains of central New Mexico and in the Manzano Mountains just southeast of Albuquerque.
For some obscure reason, this wolf’s wanderings made me think of a silly Saturday Night Live skit many years ago featuring Eddie Murphy. It the skit, Murphy was playing “Buckwheat,” a character in the 1922-1944 short film series “The Little Rascals.” Buckwheat, the only black character in the films, was sometimes hard to understand because of his thick accent. Wikipedia notes that Buckwheat’s character in the series was significant because it “broke new ground by portraying white and black children interacting as equals during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the United States.”
In the Eddie Murphy skit, Buckwheat had been given the opportunity to produce his own music video. While Murphy, as a talented black comedian could get away with poking fun at a young black kid with speech difficulty, it was probably on the edge of not being politically correct. Nevertheless, I and many others thought it was pretty funny.
I’m including a link from YouTube of the skit that I remember the most, in which Murphy as Buckwheat tries to sing “Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places.” I think of Asha when I hear she has been “wookin’ pa nub.”
Clip courtesy of YouTube.
aero-cordero.com 