CHAPTER 9
The wolves of Yellowstone are home again, having resurrected the old haunts of long ago, living out their lives in this wild country much as other generations of wolves had done before them. Only time will tell, of course, but the ten-year mark found us approaching the end of what can be thought of as the first phase of wolf recovery. This first decade was all about growth—a time when the wolves used every trick in the book (and a few not in the book) to take advantage of open territory and a tremendous prey base. All that activity, in turn, led to a stabilizing of the population. Individual animals, both adults and pups, were in the early phase of the reintroduction generally big and healthy (though of course they were still subject to diseases like distemper). Dispersal was low, with some wolves choosing to stay in their natal packs for four or even five years—something rarely seen elsewhere in North America. A number of packs enjoyed multiple litters.
But today, late in 2011, the Yellowstone wolf population is 101 animals—down 60 percent from what it was three years ago. By all appearances, 2008 and 2009 marked the crossing of a bridge of sorts, carrying us out of the colonization era, a time of expansion. We’ve now entered a stabilization phase, where we’ll likely see reductions in the weights of both adults and pups living on the northern range—more often than not a precursor to declining survival rates. From here on more wolves will disperse from their families. Conflict among the packs will be the norm, especially on the northern range where even now the territories are tightly packed, resulting in more animals dying in skirmishes. And all of this, in turn, will continue to be driven in large part by a smaller, healthier elk herd.
We may see continued declines in both the numbers of wolves and elk, but this will be followed by a time when both predator and prey reach a kind of equilibrium with their surrounding environment. As the number of wolves goes down, meaning there’s more food to go around, the rate of dispersal by young wolves will once again settle at modest levels. So too then will there be fewer conflicts between the packs. Of course this entire scenario is subject to a host of wild cards—events that can serve to reset the game, if you will—from massive wildfires like those that occurred in 1988, to a host of diseases ranging from parvovirus, to mange, to distemper.
With the end of that first phase of the wolf cycle, the time had come to remove them from the endangered species list. Delisting is, after all, an indication that there are enough wolves in the system to allow more flexible management options—including recreational hunting outside the park—without endangering the population. The plan under which wolves were reintroduced called for Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming to take over management of the species after federal managers achieved restoration, so long as each state had solid plans for protecting the population in the years to come. Idaho and Montana were fairly quick to create approved plans, while Wyoming’s strategy was to basically treat wolves as predators outside a very limited area, thereby opening them to being shot on sight. (It’s seldom talked about, but the original plan for this reintroduction was to have the US Fish and Wildlife Service actually reintroduce the wolves, with the states managing them from the very beginning. The states vetoed this idea, believing wolves were way too much of a political hot potato.)
As we mentioned at the beginning of the book, the fact that wolves were delisted not through normal scientific management protocols, but rather through a Congressional rider attached to a national budget bill, poses troubling questions for the future of science in this country. Nonetheless, it was in fact time for them to be delisted.
As former Yellowstone Wolf Project director Mike Phillips used to say, “It’s important to be reasonable. With a system like Yellowstone in place the gray wolf can withstand a great deal of human exploitation and still thrive. They’ll continue to be wild. And they’ll continue to inspire.” Delisting is an opportunity for the American public to see this project as evidence that the Endangered Species Act really works. Given that this act is under fierce attack—some would say its very existence is now threatened—it seems vital to show the nation what is in truth an outstanding success. As John Varley pointed out, “What this reintroduction may show is that we can restore ecosystems to some semblance of what they were before European settlement. And more important still, that we can live with them.”
I recall one of my professors in graduate school making the comment that the worst thing that can happen to wildlife biology is for it to end up in the courts. By and large, lawsuits have not helped the wolves of Yellowstone. What’s more, land management and political leaders in other parts of the country who might otherwise accept this predator know full well that getting a wolf population means legal action, and for that reason alone they tend to do everything possible to avoid any talk of reintroductions. Were there a way to resolve problems more reasonably without falling into the quagmire of the court system, wolves might well be able to be successfully placed elsewhere in years to come. But it would require a coming together of those genuinely willing to seek solutions, refusing to let the process be hijacked by people on both sides who show up primarily to thump their chests and draw lines in the sand. Likewise the wildlife management agency involved must be fully present, completely supportive, with neither hidden agendas nor backroom deals.1
In addition to struggles over delisting, there also remains today a considerable bone of contention for some residents living near greater Yellowstone—one unlikely to disappear anytime soon—having to do with wolves and livestock. On one hand such concerns are well placed, as over the past decade wolves have certainly been guilty on numerous occasions of killing sheep, cattle, horses, and dogs. If there’s good news to report, it’s that wolves have taken considerably fewer domestic animals than was originally predicted in the Environmental Impact Statement, which estimated a population of a hundred wolves in Yellowstone would each year cause the deaths of between 38 and 110 sheep, and from 3 to 37 cows. Livestock death from other causes, from weather to wild dogs, continues to outpace wolf kills by a staggering margin.
Of course that’s little comfort if you happen to be the unfortunate rancher staring at the remains of a cow or sheep recently devoured by a pack of wolves. Thanks in large part to the tireless work of Hank Fischer, near the beginning of the reintroduction the national conservation group Defenders of Wildlife set up a fund to compensate ranchers for wolf-related livestock losses. Sadly, Defenders would be the only major environmental group in America willing to not only acknowledge the potential damage that wolves bring but also actually spend down their own bank account trying to ease it. By and large wolf supporters and detractors alike have preferred to stay on their own sides of the fence, happy to hurl stones at one another. Admittedly, this has been a wonderful tool for attracting new funds and new members. But such positions have led not only to more livestock being lost than necessary but more wolves, as well.
Even with such a compensation program in place, some ranchers claim—and there’s research to support their view—that for every animal known to have been killed by wolves there are others taken for which no evidence is ever found.2 What’s more, a number of producers have told me that despite not having lost any cows, their cattle tend to weigh in less at the end of the grazing season from having been stressed by wolves. And finally, no one can argue that going to all the trouble to prevent wolf kills requires time and energy that could be more profitably spent doing lots of other chores from a never-ending list of things one has to do to run a ranch.
Without question, what’s been most successful so far in addressing wolf-livestock conflicts are efforts focused on prevention, which typically means providing some sort of deterrent out in the field with the sheep or cattle. In one vivid example a rancher who had wolves close by (the pack had actually located their summer rendezvous site adjacent to his cows) decided to ride the herd daily. While the wolves did chase his cows a few times, none were ever taken. Meanwhile a neighboring rancher several miles away rode his herd only once a week and ended up suffering a loss. In a sense we need to lean on some basic management principles long used in other places, including parts of Europe, where a combination of shepherds and multiple guard dogs has all but eliminated predator kills. The Keystone Alliance in Bozeman, Montana, now provides volunteers to literally babysit cattle during the critical calving season, thereby deterring wolves. Again, the vast majority of wolves simply don’t recognize sheep or cows as a potential food source. The trick is to discourage those few mavericks tempted to give them a try.
Though there aren’t any domestic sheep or cattle grazing in Yellowstone National Park, the backcountry is nonetheless rich with horse traffic, summer to fall. The vast majority of outfitters continue to let their horses run loose at night, and few have had any trouble with wolves. During summer months I routinely do fieldwork by horseback, riding and camping in some of the highest density wolf areas in Yellowstone, and have yet to encounter a problem. Not everyone, though, can make that claim. Retired park ranger Gerald Mernin had Mollie’s Pack move in on his horses one night, harassing them just outside his flashlight beam for a good couple of hours before finally retreating. Gerald and ranger Patty Bean did about the only thing they could do, which was to sit up with the horses, placing themselves between their stock and the wolves. (Just because I haven’t had any such problems in the backcountry doesn’t mean I sleep all that well. Most nights I lie awake listening for the horse bells, jumping up at the slightest indication of a problem. As Ed Bangs liked to say, “Life with wolves is never easier, but it’s always more interesting.”) Though as yet there are no studies to prove it, I’ve come to believe the liberal use of bells is helpful, as is mixing in mules with horses. Mules have a well-earned reputation for being bold and cantankerous toward wolves, often perfectly willing to approach them, which tends to send the wolves hightailing off to less disputed ground.
While wolf-livestock problems can certainly be moderated, there’s probably no way to stop them entirely. In the summer of 2003, several wolves were chasing horses around in Gardner’s Hole—perhaps in part because earlier in the summer a dead horse had been left out for them to eat. I ended up being the lucky one given the assignment of “solving” the situation, so I called Dave Mech for advice. Dave, who tends to have insightful answers to just about any wolf question imaginable, this time had no remedies. “If that problem had a solution,” he said, “we would’ve implemented it thirty years ago.”
After sixteen years of hard work, carried out not just by some outstanding professionals and volunteers but in large part by the wolves themselves, it’s worth taking a look at what a fully restored Yellowstone wolf population looks like. As we mentioned earlier, the diversity of conditions in the national park—the drier, prey-abundant lands of the northern range, offering one of the highest prey concentrations in the world, versus slimmer pickings in the park’s interior—makes for a rich and varied portrait.
By late 2005 there were five wolf packs living on the northern range: Leopold (formed in 1996 and named after the famous Aldo Leopold), Slough Creek (2003), Agate Creek (2002), Druid Peak (1996), and one other new pack called Hellroaring, made up of former Leopold wolves. (As mentioned, the Swan Lake Pack resurrected itself in early 2006.) Because they all live on the northern range, these groups are similar when it comes to the size of their territories, what they eat, how many pups they have, and how big the packs are. Even survival rates and other important demographic and ecological aspects are comparable.
Again, the bounty of prey on the northern range makes it a highly desirable location. Even so, if anything can be said to have marked the tenth anniversary year of the reintroduction in this part of the park, it would be a widespread state of unrest and turmoil. By early 2005 the Slough Creek Pack had grown to fourteen animals—at the time, twice the size of the Druid Peak group. With all the bluster and might such numbers afford, the Slough Creek wolves rolled into the Lamar Valley, pushing the legendary Druids eastward, driving them to the very margins of the territory they held with such ferocity for more than eight years. That push continued as the year unfolded. In the end Druid was forced to abandon their longtime traditional den site at the confluence of the Lamar and Soda Butte Rivers for a site farther to the east, up the Lamar River. This shift proved a great disappointment to wolf watchers, by the way, who since 1997 had been able to track the Druid wolves from the road, even routinely seeing the pups, at least when they got old enough to make forays away from the den.
Adding insult to injury for the Druids is the fact that, as noted earlier, 2005 was one of the worst years yet for pup survival—a nearly catastrophic situation caused by canine distemper. Though six pups were born to this pack in the spring of that year, not a single one survived. Of the pack’s remaining two adult females, four-year-old Number 255 died, and we weren’t able to locate the alpha for several months. As the year drew to a close, then, this once mighty pack claimed just four animals: the alpha male and another large male, along with two uncollared yearlings. Yet as was true for some other packs, the following spring brought a new lease on life to the Druids. Denning near Round Prairie, the group had eleven pups enter the fold in the spring of 2006; many of these youngsters were seen regularly by park visitors, at least until roughly mid-July, when the family packed up and headed east toward the remote folds of Cache Creek.
Meanwhile the Slough Creek Pack had four different females give birth to fifteen pups in the spring of 2005, showing strong potential to become the new movers and shakers on the block. Remarkably, the females not only denned together but also seemed perfectly willing to nurse pups from each other’s litters. Once again, much of this activity was easily visible from Slough Creek Road, which helped some in allaying the disappointment of wolf watchers who could in that year no longer keep easy tabs on the Druids. While disease would visit Slough Creek by the end of the year, the group still claimed a respectable fifteen animals. Little could we have imagined that just five months later, the pack would be wracked by one of the most amazing events ever seen in the wolf world.
In the spring of 2006, two Slough Creek females gave birth, using the same spacious den as the year before. By all indications things were going along just fine, when out of nowhere a mysterious, unidentified group of twelve wolves—one that to this day we refer to as the Unknown Pack—came charging out of the north to wreak havoc on the pack. By the time the dust settled, there were two dead adult Slough Creek males, while other members of the pack had scattered in all directions. As for the two females and their pups, suddenly they were prisoners in their own den. For two weeks the siege continued. One day I looked down from the tracking plane to see six Unknown wolves bedded down around the main opening to the den, the mothers and apparently their pups trapped inside. Growing ever more desperate for food and water, on at least one occasion the two females left the den and headed upslope, only to be ferociously chased all the way back into the den entrance by the Unknowns. While we believe pups were in fact born in that den, for whatever reason we never found them. One possibility, though it can never be proven, is that the adult females consumed them.
While we can’t know for certain, it seems likely the Unknowns were made up of members of the Rose Creek and Buffalo Fork Packs—groups we lost radio contact with two years earlier. The early months of 2006 saw greater moisture in that part of the park than we’ve seen in years. Perhaps finding themselves snowbound, the Unknowns may have left for more friendly conditions down the Lamar Valley, where they ran into the Slough Creek Pack. Following those dramatic events at the den, Slough Creek clung to the fringes of their territory for about two months, as the Unknowns were sighted frequently in the Lamar Valley. Then in mid-June, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone, vanishing into the wilds.
Beyond the ebbs and flows of the highly celebrated Druid and Slough Creek wolves, by November of 2005 three other packs of the northern range had disappeared altogether. Among these were the Geode Creek Pack, which probably dissolved in the face of the death of male Number 227, who was killed by Leopold wolves, as well as the loss of their alpha female and founder, Number 106. Having followed 106 closely since her birth to the Druids in 1997, it was especially frustrating for me to have her radio collar fail prematurely, leaving us in the dark when it comes to the details of her demise. By all indications she had pups in 2005 (we were able to locate her den); yet if that’s true, none survived. By the end of summer three other collared wolves of the Geode Pack were either dead or missing. One, a two-year-old female, was apparently killed by an elk, while a yearling male died in early August, of starvation. Finally there was a four-year-old female, who simply vanished.
By 2005 the Swan Lake Pack was already on shaky legs. The deaths of both the pack’s founding wolf, longtime alpha female Number 152, along with another adult female, left just three males, only one of which—Number 295—was collared. As the year drew to a close, 295 was alone and wandering all over the place—a strong sign that there was nothing left of his old pack. Then, in the early weeks of 2006 he found an available female; that spring she gave birth to six pups, thereby pulling the Swan Lake Pack back from the brink of extinction. Several years later, though, with some of the animals apparently suffering from mange, the group wandered out of the park and simply fizzled away. It’s worth noting that Swan Lake Pack’s territory, which was next taken over by the Gardener’s Hole Pack, and then the Quadrant Mountain Pack, seems in general to work well for several years, but then the packs begin to unravel. Indeed, the Quadrant Mountain Pack has also just crumbled. It’s hard to say for sure, but there may be some relationship between such a fate and the fact that this territory lies in part outside the national park. As of late winter 2005, we could no longer find the Specimen Ridge Pack, leaving any hope of their continued existence all but extinguished.
The loss of these three packs, combined with poor pup survival—out of forty-nine pups born on the northern range that year, only eight survived—meant the wolf population in this part of the park declined considerably.
Drifting south through Yellowstone we find greater snowfall, as well as striking differences in the number of thermal features—favorite hangouts for prey animals through the bitterly cold months of winter. Each wolf pack has adapted to these variables in its own way, meaning that each is somewhat unique in how it lives. Mollie’s Pack, for instance (remember, these wolves were originally called the Crystal Creek Pack and were the first to live in Yellowstone’s famed Lamar Valley), now lives primarily in Pelican Valley. While offering tremendous summer habitat for elk, bison, and deer, in winter the valley turns extremely harsh, bereft of deer and most elk, with only a hardy bunch of about two hundred bison staying on. While occasionally Mollie’s wolves find an elk wintering near one of the many thermal springs in the area, especially around Astringent Creek, these tend to be bulls—not exactly easy prey, even for a pack of wolves. Prior to that time when bison have been weakened by winter, the wolves in the interior of the park will travel far and wide searching for elk. Perhaps in part due to these tough conditions (as well as the fact that grizzlies often steal their kills), Mollie’s Pack has twice been through cycles where their pack was very large, only to be followed by a crash. As mentioned earlier, in 2000 the pack was down to just four animals and failed to reproduce, which is highly unusual.
The tale of Mollie’s wolves would grow still more remarkable. On a routine overflight in the third week of December of 2004, we found dead from unknown causes the alpha female of the pack, Number 174—her body lying in a remote location southeast of the Pelican Valley, near Jones Pass. Strangely, the day after that discovery we failed to find a single other member of the pack. Our sense that something odd was afoot took on new weight at the point we flew over the group’s traditional home ground in Pelican Valley, where scavengers from coyotes to ravens to bald eagles were feeding on a dead bison. But no wolves in sight—as far as we know, the first time Mollie’s Pack ever failed to descend on a winter carcass. Some of us began quietly wondering if this dynamic, forceful pack, having for so long prevailed against the rugged conditions of central Yellowstone, with the loss of their leader simply disintegrated.
The surviving wolves of Mollie’s Pack continued to go missing from the Pelican Valley until February of 2005, when we spotted them attacking and eventually killing a bull bison. Remarkably, the kill was made by wolf Number 378 and just one other adult, along with the questionable assistance of four eager, though mostly unskilled pups. With their alpha female (Number 174) dying shortly before the February breeding season—and with no unrelated females coming along who might take her place—the spring of 2005 saw no new pups being born to Mollie’s Pack. Finally, later in the summer a GPS-collared wolf from the Nez Perce Pack, Number 486, found her way to Mollie’s wolves, apparently becoming the dominant female of what was then an eight-member pack. Late in the year their numbers dropped to just seven, as Number 379 was apparently killed by the kick of an elk—a strike so powerful that it caved in three of his ribs, puncturing the lungs and heart. By 2011, Mollie’s Pack would be thoroughly robust again, claiming a remarkable nineteen animals.
As they have for years, these wolves continue to deal with grizzlies stealing their food. A recent trip by horseback in Mollie’s territory to process kills led us into the heaviest grizzly country we’d ever seen. Sign of the great bears were everywhere—from tracks, to scat, to carcasses—so thick at times that I actually felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck. These days, rarely does a single hour pass between Mollie’s Pack making a kill and bears showing up to steal it—sometimes four, five, even six of them, coming from all directions. Some of us now believe the grizzlies are actually following these wolves—not exactly on their tails, but with the help of their incredible noses, staying at all times close enough to tell when a kill’s been made. I used to think such theft of carcasses didn’t have all that much effect on Mollie’s wolves. Now I’m not so sure. If these wolves are routinely losing food prematurely to bears, it stands to reason they’d be forced to make more and more kills, in the process putting themselves at ever greater risk. Indeed, in mid-August I witnessed the pack locked in a ferocious battle with a bull elk (this being the time of year when elk are at their strongest). Much of the fight unfolded in the bottom of a creek—the wolves soaking wet, the elk swinging his velvet-covered antlers, kicking ferociously. At one point the pack had the elk down in the water, only to see it jump up and start fighting again. In the end Mollie’s Pack won the struggle. Barely an hour later, a grizzly had taken over the kill.
Though there’s some evidence that the interior packs fared better in 2005 than their counterparts on the northern range—in the face of a distemper outbreak the pup survival rate here was 55 percent, compared to 16 percent on the northern range—these wolves too have their fair share of challenges. Not too far from Pelican Valley is the Nez Perce Pack, formed in 1998, whose territory embraces the Madison-Fire-hole River drainages. Subsisting on the smallest elk herd in the park, roughly five hundred animals,3 these wolves too have had to learn how to kill bison, each year managing to take more of them as the elk herd slowly declines.4 Unlike Mollie’s Pack, where bison only number a couple hundred, the Nez Perce Pack has access to several thousand animals of the Great Central herd. As wolves have done through eons, the Nez Perce Pack is adapting, learning how to kill what is arguably the most formidable prey animal in the park. Like Mollie’s Pack, thermal features in the area play an important part in their day-to-day lives. (Curiously, in late 2004 the Nez Perce Pack, so constant in its territory over seven years, was seen for several weeks at a variety of sites on the northern range, including Hellroaring, Specimen Ridge, Mount Everts, and Junction Butte. A year later, their numbers had dwindled to a paltry five animals. In December of 2005, we found Number 48 dead, killed four months short of her tenth birthday by wolves of the rival Gibbon Pack. Immediately following this event we were unable to locate other members of the Nez Perce Pack; with 48’s death, it seemed, so too went the glue that held this once-great pack together.)
Into the region in and around Nez Perce territory would come a few lesser-known packs: one in the Gibbon River area, and then south of Old Faithful a breeding pair called the Biscuit Basin Pack hanging on for a time in what seemed questionable habitat before leaving the park to settle in Idaho. In 2000 we were surprised to also find wolves living in the rather inhospitable area around Cougar Creek; known as the Cougar Creek Pack, they formed from the Leopold group of the northern range, as well as what we think are unmarked wolves from the Nez Perce Pack. Hospitable landscape or not, though, as of 2011 they were still there, still making a living. While this territory is located along the main path bison use to leave Yellowstone in hard winters, there are never large numbers of elk here. Like the Nez Perce Pack, the Cougar Creek wolves subsist on a combination of elk and bison, growing ever more efficient at taking the latter. Also in their favor, and unique to this pack, is an abundance of beaver. While Yellowstone overall isn’t prime beaver habitat, one of the main hubs for this animal does lie within Cougar Creek wolf territory. Cougar, Gneiss, Maple, Campanula, and Duck Creeks all have beaver colonies, as does the Madison River, each drainage thus providing wolves a significant food source throughout the summer. (Beavers only reach high numbers in three areas of Yellowstone National Park—the Cougar Creek region, the Yellowstone Delta, and the Bechler River. Not surprisingly, all three have wolf packs.)
Moving north again from the Cougar Creek Pack is the Chief Joseph Pack, formed in 1996. Early on in the reintroduction these animals resided mostly within Yellowstone National Park, though in the last few years they’ve been ranging outside in the state of Montana, for a time confining their park time mostly to denning activity until finally leaving entirely. Their territory embraced the only highway thoroughfare in the park, State Road 191. We routinely refer to this highway, especially around mile marker 30, as a killing field; indeed so far about fifteen wolves have been hit by vehicles in this area, several of them belonging to the Nez Perce Pack. There are virtually no bison here. Elk is their primary prey, along with an occasional meal of beaver. These wolves have an enormous territory, suggesting they need to travel widely in order to keep themselves fed. Occasionally they manage to run afoul of humans by killing livestock. As a result, a few have been killed through control actions outside the park.
Jumping to the southern boundary, we find two other packs, the dynamics of which are again quite different. First is the Yellowstone Delta Pack—formed in 1995 as the Soda Butte Pack, but later moved to the Yellowstone River Delta on the southeast arm of Yellowstone Lake. This pack has the distinction of living in the most remote spot in the Lower 48. Much like the territory of Mollie’s Pack, prey abounds here in the summer, with plenty of elk, moose, and deer, even an occasional lone bison. And also like Mollie’s Pack, the vast majority of these animals vacate the area in winter, leaving behind mostly moose and a few rogue bison. That in turn triggers big movements in the pack. Most of these are journeys to lands outside Yellowstone National Park on the adjacent Bridger-Teton Wilderness, but now and then the animals end up drifting to places that lie beyond our ability to track. Yet every year, much like the Chief Joseph Pack, they settle back down on park lands to den and raise their pups. While the Delta wolves have no thermal features to hold wintering prey, like the Cougar Creek Pack they do enjoy an abundant supply of beavers.
One early characteristic of the Delta wolves was their fascinating, if annoying, habit of removing their radio collars. As one might almost expect, it would fall to the most remote pack in the park—and therefore the most difficult and expensive to collar—to end up with the strongest hankering to chew off the hardware. Not able to remove collars on their own, they simply sidle up next to pack mates, who seem happy to oblige. One year we collared five wolves in this pack, and within six months every one was chewed off. We finally grew so desperate we had the collars—already a tough blend of steel cord and fiberglass—fitted with brass studs. These too they removed with little difficulty. For a couple years we only had one collared wolf in this pack, the alpha female, who given her dominant role would be unlikely to let a pack mate nuzzle up and gnaw away at her collar. (In 2005, the batteries in this wolf’s collar finally gave out, leaving us in touch with only a lone yearling female.) Though this chewing habit has been seen in only a few packs, once wolves learn the technique it remains a problem forevermore. I sometimes wonder if the day will come when the Delta wolves will just plain give us the slip for good. Our struggle to solve this collaring problem recently led us to invest in even more sophisticated technology. The plan is to attach a collar that will remotely track the wolves, communicating their location to us each week via satellite-based email. First, however, we have to find them—something that’s proven more than a little difficult in recent weeks.
Finally is the Bechler Pack, formed in 2002, which as of 2011 is still there, though none of the members are currently wearing collars. Curiously, due to limited prey, this is another area I would’ve considered less than ideal wolf habitat. The pack was formed when a very large male from the Rose Creek wolves—strikingly white, unmistakable from an aircraft—dispersed to start a new pack in the southwest corner of the park. Their success may be due to having for the most part enjoyed relatively mild winters, which has allowed a smattering of elk and moose to hang around in the cold months. In a normal winter, though, the Bechler is devoid of virtually anything for a wolf to hunt. Unlike certain other harsh places we’ve mentioned, here the snow typically gets so deep no ungulates can survive. Even with mild winters this pack tends to leave now and then, traveling widely through the Targhee National Forest. A return to more normal climate conditions would almost certainly make life tougher for them, possibly causing the group to journey even farther afield. This penchant for traveling, along with the fact that they’re such a long distance from our airport base in Gardiner—and finally, with the fact that today none are wearing collars—means we know less about this pack than any other.
Seventeen of the nineteen wolf packs that formed in Yellowstone since reintroduction were together through 2005. Now, however, most of the places wolves can survive have been settled, and as prey declines, wolves will decline with them. As of this writing, late in the fall of 2011, there are four wolf packs on the northern range: the Blacktail Pack with fifteen members, the Agate Creek Pack with six, the Lamar Canyon Pack with eleven, and the Eight Mile Pack with seven. (The Eight Mile Pack started outside the park, moved inside for the summer, and then went back out again before finally settling enough for us to count them as part of the park population. Incidentally, it may have been competition from the Eight Mile Pack, which had ten pups in 2011, that caused the Quadrant Mountain group to finally disintegrate.) Adding still more difficulty to the task of getting accurate wolf counts is a category we call “loners and nonpack wolves.” Some of these are former members of packs that were shot up outside the park during hunting season.
It’s interesting to note that today within the interior of the park, which in the early years seemed unquestionably a less desirable habitat for wolves, there are now six packs, all holding steady: Cougar, Canyon, Mary Mountain, Mollie’s, Delta, and Bechler. Again, their success may be due to having mastered the fine art of augmenting their diet, turning to bison and, on occasion, other ungulates.
If you’re getting the feeling that this is a dynamic, changing world, prone to great ebbs and flows—many of which we can’t see coming—you’re absolutely right. At this point only one thing seems certain: The stories of these packs, as well as the tales of individual wolves, will prove no less fascinating in the second decade of Yellowstone wolf recovery than it did in the first.
In truth absolutely no one thought this reintroduction would go so well. Certainly the designers of the project deserve credit for preparing the way, reaching out to and informing the public, ultimately giving the wolves a solid structure within which they could thrive. What’s more, in addition to an extraordinary group of volunteers there’s also been a dedicated team of professional scientists whose company I’ve been privileged to keep. I began my own tenure in Yellowstone as the project biologist in 1994, taking over as project leader in May of 1997 after a brilliant performance in that slot by the indefatigable Mike Phillips. Slipping in behind me as biologist from 1998 through 2000 was a highly seasoned salt-of-the-cougar-world, Kerry Murphy.
After Murph would come “Dano” Dan Stahler, who’d cut his teeth in the wolf world by trapping in Minnesota with Mike Nelson and Dave Mech. Dan first came to Yellowstone to help out with wolf den research, going on to perform superbly on various winter studies. He gained his master’s degree with us through the University of Vermont, working with world-renowned raven researcher Bernd Heinrich, examining the relationships between wolves and ravens. Dan’s still with us, for a time having spearheaded our scavenger research, then moving on to some rather complicated tasks associated with everything from genetics to GPS collars. Then there was Wayne Brewster, considered one of the main architects of the entire wolf reintroduction (Yellowstone was actually Wayne’s third job in twenty years related to wolf recovery in the American West), as well as noted biologist and head of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, John Varley.
Finally, the glue that held much of this project together during the first ten years of the project was Debra Guernsey—a longtime veteran of the project, now gone, who quite literally worked her way up through the ranks, starting out as one of the very first volunteers in April of 1995. For sheer tenure she outdistanced almost everyone, thereby possessing an indispensable historic view. Right from the beginning Deb gave her all to this effort, as a volunteer sleeping in the office when necessary, on occasion even selling personal possessions to keep doing the work she loved. Whenever there was something to be done, she did it, right down to making runs for roadkill and then gutting elk—tasks required to feed the wolves while they were in the acclimation pens. Once on the payroll, she eventually settled in to become our database manager and information whiz kid. “I never thought I’d love it this much,” Deb once told me. “Every single day comes a moment when I stop and suddenly feel really, really grateful.”
The wolves of Yellowstone have done a beautiful job at what they do best—securing and defending territory, raising young, mastering the ebbs and flows of their prey. Along the way they’ve been teaching all of us—revealing not just their own natural histories but also some basic principles about wolf restoration in general. Today we understand much better the importance of launching a project like this into a core protected area like Yellowstone, a place containing sufficient quantities of resources to allow a population to become fully anchored. Indeed, of the three Northern Rocky Mountain recovery zones that were a part of this reintroduction—Yellowstone, central Idaho, and northwest Montana—Yellowstone and Idaho are doing best because they rest on a foundation of exceptional habitat, places not just devoid of humans and livestock but also with abundant prey. Northwest Montana, meanwhile, though blessed with large and magnificent areas like the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park, proved less than ideal wolf habitat primarily because the elevations are too high to support year-round prey.
The remarkable success of the Yellowstone Wolf Project likely also rests in the fact that we started not with zoo-raised animals, as was necessary with the Mexican wolf reintroduction in Arizona and New Mexico, but rather those already familiar with the rigors of living in the wild. Upon release from their acclimation pens, these wolves knew right away what to do, in some cases killing elk within a few hundred yards of the pen. Through no fault of their own, other projects have had to reintroduce captive-reared wolves, animals that have to navigate a far steeper, more difficult learning curve before they at last possess the skills necessary for survival.
Right now we have significantly more wolves in the United States than we did just two decades ago—not just in the northern Rocky Mountains but in the American Southwest, the Lake States of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and finally, with another species known as the red wolf, in North Carolina. Where else might wolf recovery make sense? One place attractive to many is the long, broad sweeps of forest comprising northern New England. Though most of these lands are privately owned by paper companies, that fact would hardly trouble wolves, since healthy populations can certainly be supported in a working forest. Assuming there exists some form of protection from human exploitation, the same habitats that support white-tailed deer and moose would also support wolves. Some have also argued for restoration of wolves in the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado and northern New Mexico. Again, there are broad sweeps of public land in this region, though a fair percentage is at high elevations, much like those of northwestern Montana, which influences the availability of prey.
To some degree wolves will by themselves expand to areas in eastern Oregon, northern Utah, and northern Colorado—all of which have already had animals make it across their borders. Wolf 293 of the Swan Lake Pack was hit on the road near Denver, which even in a straight line—and wolves don’t travel in straight lines—is a trip of about four hundred miles. Meanwhile in 2003 male wolf 253 of the Druid Peak Pack was captured in a coyote trap not terribly far from Salt Lake City, Utah, then brought back to a release site near Jackson, Wyoming. Having heard reports that 253 was traveling with another wolf at the time of capture—I assumed a female—I boldly predicted (on television, no less) that he would head straight back to the Beehive State. Hardly. Instead he made a beeline back to the Lamar Valley. Idaho has now had wolves swim across the Snake River into eastern Oregon.
Yet movement by individual pioneers doesn’t necessarily mean a wolf population will anchor in these places naturally. After all, wolves had been living for decades across the Canadian border near northwest Montana yet never managed to anchor themselves in greater Yellowstone. Even if unverified sightings of individual animals in and around the national park were correct, never did it result in the species rooting here. Research suggests that many of these occasional travelers are too isolated, not to mention vulnerable to a major gauntlet of human-caused mortality, to be able to establish breeding populations.
The twentieth century saw astonishing changes in the world of wolves. From roughly 1900 to 1950, there was a mantra common even among land managers, declaring the only good wolf to be a dead one. That notion, combined with increasingly efficient technology, led to a brand of wholesale extirpation never before seen anywhere on the continent. The killing fever finally spent, wolves received a break for a time, able to reclaim in the 1960s and 1970s at least some of the ground previously lost—this, until concerns by hunters and livestock producers started the guns firing again, this time mostly from the open doors of helicopters.
In the 1980s and 1990s came recovery—the gray wolf in Michigan and Wisconsin, the red wolf in North Carolina, the Mexican wolf in New Mexico. Then finally here in Yellowstone, some seventy years after the last wolf was killed in the Lamar Valley. Today the world’s first national park—some say America’s best idea ever—is again feeling the footsteps of wolf packs, again resounding with their soulful howls. In this protected space the wolf will prove himself a survivor extraordinaire, one that will hopefully remain a part of this wonderful web of life for centuries to come. For those of us who’ve been here watching and listening, it’s been one of the most enthralling decades of our lives.
Portrait of a WolfNUMBER 692
It doesn’t take long watching wolves react to our approaching helicopter during winter darting operations to know that they consider it a king-size irritation. And yet what some of them do in response to that irritation has offered fascinating glimpses into individual personalities. Most wolves, especially females, tend to flee the helicopter. That response often works out just fine for them, since, depending on conditions, they can often outrun us and escape into the trees. In fact, of all the wolves we may try to catch in a given season, a fast female who’s been darted before—and therefore associates the sound of the helicopter with trouble—will be the most challenging. Males, meanwhile, which are slower and tire sooner because of their larger body size, sometimes just quit running altogether. (Male wolves are in fact about 20 percent larger than females when full grown, an extra measure of weight that can come in handy during territorial defense. It’s probably not unlike African lions: Being considerably bigger and slower, the male lion rarely hunts, instead using his bulk to defend the pride.) On rare occasions a male wolf will actually run toward the helicopter, stopping just a few feet away with legs spread, hair up on his neck, snapping his jaws. Taking us on. The difficulty with such encounters is that I can’t shoot a dart at a wolf facing me, because there’s too much chance of injury. Instead the pilot has to somehow maneuver the helicopter so the wolf is running away, which is no easy task when the wolf doesn’t feel like running.
Enter 692, a female that could teach many of the boys a thing or two about sheer will and determination. She and I would have close encounters with each other on two occasions. And neither time was she running for the trees.
Our first meeting was when she was living with the Blacktail Pack on Blacktail Deer Plateau. At the sound of the approaching helicopter, she seemed unsure what to do. While she didn’t immediately challenge us, as we got close she ran hard at us with her jaws working rapidly, only to suddenly turn and make a run for it—a strategy of attacking and then retreating, if you will. She was obviously feisty. We eased in slowly, carefully waiting for that right moment when the stars align and we manage to not fly past our target, when in a sudden flash there comes the chance for a good shot. Now! Take it! She felt the dart go in, and she wasn’t happy about it. Before we knew it she’d spun on a dime and was leaping into the air at the helicopter, higher than I’ve seen any wolf jump under any circumstances, jaws snapping, missing the helicopter skid (and me) by only a couple of feet. She fell back unharmed, hitting the snow, then took several steps toward us at full speed to try again, mustering everything she had for the attempt. What a wolf!
In the end we got the collar on. But in a case of Murphy’s Law at its finest, one year later that collar failed. Which meant we had to replace it, engaging her in still another crazy dance. Once again we found ourselves in good darting terrain, on Blacktail Deer Plateau, and as we approached the pack, every one of the wolves ran. All but one of them, anyway. Number 692. When we got about 150 yards away, she turned and ran right at the helicopter. Within seconds she was outside the door, looking very much like she wanted to get in. Veteran pilot Bob Hawkins jerked the helicopter skyward like I’d never seen him do before, pulling away quickly so she didn’t end up in my lap, then driving back toward her to get her to move away so that I could get a dart in. And still, 692 kept running at us, unwilling to flee.
After what seemed like minutes, but I’m sure was more like seconds, she turned away, perhaps thinking we’d had enough, and took just enough steps that I could drop a dart into the muscle of her hind leg. I always let out a “thank goodness” kind of sigh after getting a dart in a wolf, but this time the thought was especially sincere. Bob later let out his own sigh of relief, pulling the helicopter up and away when the work was done, eager to give 692 plenty of room when she started to wake up.
A week before writing this particular portrait, everything was going well with 692. Her collar was working. She continued a curious fondness she’d long had for slipping in and out of the Blacktail Pack on a whim, wandering mostly alone across a staggeringly big slice of landscape—east nearly all the way to Cody, then eighty miles back to the northeast corner of Yellowstone, often with impressive detours along the way. Sometimes, when I was out walking in the field, I imagined her catching my scent on the wind, recognizing it, and running over to let me know what she thought of me. She’s one of a kind, I often thought to myself.
Then on November 6, 2011, during one of her typical quick jaunts along the edges of the national park, 692 was illegally gunned down outside Gardiner, Montana. And with the simple pull of that trigger, one of the strongest, most confident female wolves in all of Yellowstone was no more.