CHAPTER 1
August 3, 2004. It’s been a hectic summer. Phone calls and faxes and e-mails, all of it coming in doses big enough to have kept me hobbled to the desk instead of out in the field. More than a month has passed since I squeezed into the backseat of the yellow Piper Super Cub parked down at Gardiner Airport, snapped the seat belt together, slipped on the headphones, and went airborne, purring across the high country on a search for the fifteen wolf packs now making their homes in Yellowstone. If there’s any shred of consolation it’s only that up until recently the summer flying has been less than gratifying, what with the northern Rockies having been ravaged by six years of drought. Long ago the green swales of Yellowstone bled to brown, exposing dirt where once there were wildflowers and grasses; fires have roared across the backcountry—ten thousand, twenty thousand acres at a time. On more than one occasion I’ve peered down from the airplane and swore I could see the animals suffering.
As of late, though, fine measures of rain have come to much of the park. Grasses are tall and thick, flowers everywhere. And rising in me is a yearning to savor it all, this easy month of August. For these few weeks animals are free of the edginess that tends to grip them at other times of year. Wolves are relaxed, even oblivious, plopped down in the shade of their summer rendezvous sites. I’m wanting to slow down, too—take it all in, pay attention not just to wolves but to the nature that surrounds them. Match my pace with the pace of the season.
I meet pilot Roger Stradley at the usual time for summer flights, 6:30 in the morning. We start early because of the nearly constant promise of afternoon wind and thunderstorms—tough on pilots and passengers alike. Rising through the clear morning light, we find the area around Gardiner still looking parched, desiccated. Yet by the time were past the foothills of the national park, crossing lands sitting at roughly 6,500 feet, the vegetation begins to perk up in a big way; by 7,000 foot Swan Lake Flats, the place looks downright lush. It’s like flying into paradise.
Finding Yellowstone’s wolves is a matter of following signals given off by radio collars worn by certain animals from each pack. First up on the checklist are the Swan Lake wolves, just south of Mammoth. In no time at all we find the bulk of the group—six animals bedded down together and maybe a lone pup among them, though it’s hard to say, since by now the young have grown so big it’s tough to distinguish them from the adults. Continuing to check radio signals one by one, we soon discover someone on our list is missing, only to locate him a few minutes later with two other wolves near a freshly killed bull elk. Not in possession of the carcass, though. Not even close. That privilege belongs to three grizzly bears, shaking their massive heads and slicing at the hide with their powerful paws. Though nowhere near as quick as the wolf, the bear is far stronger. Long ago he figured he could hijack pretty much any wolf kill he wanted, reducing those who took the prize in the first place to little more than hungry bystanders.
On we fly, tracking our way to the Geode Creek Pack (unable to find wolf Number 392), then Rose Creek and Agate Creek (four black pups), on to Slough Creek (six pups along with 378 are missing), to Druid Peak (gone from the Lamar Valley, totally bumming out the wolf watchers), to Specimen Ridge (all huddled at nine thousand feet, so tightly bunched together we have a hard time counting the five pups). After all that it’s time for Mollie’s Pack. Living as they do in the Pelican Valley, far from the chaos of cars and tourists, free even of the bother of other wolf packs, home ground for Mollie’s Pack is serene. Far below us Pelican Creek does a quiet rumba through long runs of meadow grass, past hot springs, in no hurry at all to make its final plunge into the cold, blue waters of Yellowstone Lake. The first of the Mollie wolves we locate, Number 379, is by all appearances tuned in to much the same music, sacked out in the shade of a small cluster of fir and spruce, indifferent to the drone of our plane circling overhead.
Across the past decade my work as a wolf biologist has changed in subtle yet significant ways. During the first three years of the project, we knew every single wolf intimately. Back then I’d fly over this landscape just as I’m doing today, but more often than not I’d be consumed by specifics: whether wolf Number 9 could hang in there for another year, maybe have another litter of pups; or if Number 39, whose mate was shot by a poacher, would be able to hook up with another partner. If only we could get through another year, I often thought, get just one more batch of pups, then the population would be on its feet. Today it’s a different world. We know fairly well the fifty-five animals now collared—ten or fifteen of these we know really well—but there are plenty of others we don’t. Whereas once we thought only of the struggles of individuals and their packs to become anchored in this new home, now our thoughts rest in matters of population dynamics, of the links between predator and prey. The relationships that drive our work, in other words, are these days less anchored in the intimate than the ecological.
Still, even now it’s hard to overstate the impact of working with this animal. I recall several years ago flying fairly low in the spotter plane, when we crossed directly over a wolf. As it looked up I could see its eyes, and they were magnificent, bright and burning. While a lot of animals in that sort of circumstance would be nearly overcome with fear, here was one tossing out a stare that seemed brimming with confidence. The wolf looked hard at us, following us with its gaze for a couple of seconds. Then it merely stepped away, back into its element. The encounter was so vivid that the pilot, like me, seemed barely able to contain himself. “Whoo-hoo!” he shouted. “That was big stuff!” Admittedly, such meetings don’t happen often—I’ve been flying wolves for twenty-five years and have seen such things maybe only half a dozen times. But it’s something that sticks with you long afterward.
We work the nearby forest for a while, sure that hiding under the branches are four or five of Mollie’s pups, then slide over to find the aged alpha male, Number 193, in a snooze fest of his own some four hundred yards away. His aging mate, the alpha female, is out in the valley, bedded down but clearly alert. Next comes Number 378, splayed in grass so deep it takes two circles in the plane to finally figure out that there really is a wolf in there. Given he’s from a pack living well to the north—or at least was collared with them—finding him here at all is a bit of a surprise. But Mollie’s Pack was this wolf’s original family, the group he was born to back in 2001. He probably still feels a certain kinship with them—ties that even now, three years later, keep calling.
Not far from the alpha female, young wolf Number 343 starts “wanging in”—a term we use for strong radio signals, telling us an animal is very close. Before actually seeing him, though, we glimpse something else: six grizzlies, including two big boys pushing five hundred pounds, as well as a sow with a cub-of-the-year—the entire crew gathered around a dead bull elk. For his part Number 343 has wisely decided to remain above the fray, bedding down nearby on a small cut in a grass-covered bank. What’s unusual about this sighting is the presence of a sow grizzly with cub. Female bears with young typically avoid such get-togethers, given that both wolves as well as male bears have a reputation for killing their young. Even now the little one is clearly agitated, standing on his hind legs and looking in on the carcass, but not daring to go any closer. On our next pass I notice still another bruin bedded down not ten yards from 343, waiting his own turn at the table, each unconcerned about the other. In fact, from my vantage point both bear and wolf appear to be wearing that wistful, faraway look that comes easily on the heels of summer in Yellowstone.
THEY WERE once among the most abundant predators in all of North America—at least five subspecies of wolves,1 perhaps two million animals,2 spread across the continent from coast to coast. Hunting white-tails in the lowland forests of the East, where now stand the skyscrapers of Boston and New York; howling in the dark of long, unbroken runs of chestnut and hickory in the central Midwest. Running the shores of the Great Lakes, slipping through the big trees of the Pacific Northwest, hunting in the cool of night in the arid deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. A recent, comprehensive research effort—looking at genetics, as well as genetic identity markers known as “haplotypes”—combined with a study of museum specimens suggests the pre-European wolf population west of the Mississippi, including Mexico, was around 380,000 animals. Even though it’s often argued today that wolves shouldn’t be found in the Southwestern United States because historically there were so few, there may actually have been thousands of them there at one time.
But despite their numbers, despite their speed and strength and remarkable cleverness, it took just a couple centuries for us to wipe them from well over 95 percent of their former range in the conterminous United States.3 By the time I came into the world, there were a mere five hundred left, mostly cornered in the remote regions of the upper Midwest.4 In part, of course, the extermination can be said to be a triumph of man’s astonishing ability to kill that which either frightens or inconveniences him. But in a very real sense it’s also a reflection of the fact that, unlike coyotes and mountain lions and even black bears, all of which have found ways to more or less coexist with people, wolves have shown no such inclination. Instead they’re prone always to stand their ground, not bending for the sake of living amicably alongside humans.
Which makes it all the more striking to think that in the ten years since wolves came home to Yellowstone, they’ve become for thousands of people a symbol of a wilderness ideal, a fascination kindled amidst growing threats to America’s last untrammeled places. Today less than 5 percent of the nation is protected wilderness. Of these places not even a handful are big enough to support healthy populations of large carnivores. Wildlife winter range in the Rockies is being lost to development at a staggering pace; in parts of Colorado alone land is being subdivided at the rate of ten acres every hour. Despite the dramatic success of the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction, no one can say for sure how these animals will fare in the long run. Their fates, after all, like the fates of most creatures, are connected to strands in the web of life over which they have no control.
Jim Hammill, who presided over the natural recovery of wolves in the upper peninsula of Michigan, tells of being a small boy in 1960, out chopping wood with his father in the North Woods. At one point during that chore, he recalls his dad stopping and pointing toward a small hill not far away. “That’s where I saw the last wolf in this country,” he told Jim. “It’s gone now. And nothing is the same.”5 When I first flew over Yellowstone National Park in 1994, I had much the same feeling, a strong sensation that for all the beauty of this landscape something wasn’t quite right. Like Jim Hammill’s dad, I too had grown accustomed to the ambience of wolves—a sensation based not just on their intriguing behavior but on the spirit they impart to their surroundings. Something akin to the attitude offered by famed wildlife biologists Olaus and Adolph Murie, who considered wolves the means by which to measure the basic integrity of wilderness. Or the notions of Aldo Leopold—the man who first recommended wolf reintroduction for Yellowstone back in 1944—as in his heartrending passage of regret at having shot one of the last wolves in New Mexico, witnessing in its eyes the dying of a “fierce green fire.”6
That image of Aldo Leopold bringing a rifle to his shoulder, taking aim, and pulling the trigger, only to find himself a moment later overcome by sadness at the dying of something truly wild, suggests much about America’s relationship with wolves. Through this one animal we’ve expressed both our best and worst inclinations—in some moments moved to feats of great generosity, in others bound by thoughtless convention. And every now and then, going well beyond Leopold, engaging in baffling acts of cruelty.
For years after wolves first returned to the Yellowstone, when thousands of people were coming from all over the world for a chance to glimpse them, individuals in northwest Wyoming were lacing hot dogs with powerful poisons like 1080 and Temik in an attempt to kill the animals, instead killing dozens of beloved pets. Websites sprung up coaching viewers on how to destroy wolves. By the end of the first decade of the reintroduction, at least thirty had been illegally killed in the immediate area. In central Idaho, which was also part of the original reintroduction project, a biologist in 2005 gave a dire description of the criminal poaching there: “Hunting season has arrived, and the wolves in Idaho are dropping like flies.” Today, of all the wolf deaths occurring outside the national parks, it’s estimated that fully 20 percent are by the hands of poachers.
When I first started working with this predator, I considered it mostly from a biological perspective, as a scientist on the trail of a rich and fascinating piece of the natural world. Recently, though, that outlook is often overwhelmed by a struggle to endure a furious, even brutal polarization between those who despise wolves and those who think they can do no wrong. Caught in the middle, and in ways strangely ignored by both sides, is the animal itself. A creature concerned only with the difficult, risky job of being a wolf. People are often surprised to learn that the average age of wolves in Yellowstone at time of death—at least those we collar, and so are able to follow throughout their lives—is only about four to five years. Despite their cleverness and their high level of social functioning, despite astonishing determination, their lives unfold against great risk—from having their skulls kicked in and limbs and teeth broken, to death at the hands of rival packs.
Added to this dangerous business of daily living, 2005 brought a catastrophic outbreak of disease. It began with an eruption of parvovirus. This viral disorder, especially dangerous to pups, is spread through the feces of various canines, including dogs, coyotes, wolves, and foxes. (Keep in mind that wolves spend a lot of time investigating with their noses, which means coming into frequent contact with animal droppings.) What’s more, parvo outbreaks are often associated with dry conditions, and Yellowstone has for years been locked in various degrees of drought. (Notably, parvovirus has long been suspected as the culprit behind a large die-off of wolves in Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park in the early 1980s.)
But the biggest blows to the population, occurring in 1999, 2005, and 2008, came from canine distemper, an often deadly, highly contagious virus affecting the respiratory, gastrointestinal, and central nervous systems, and one that often takes a tremendous toll on pups. For example, out of sixty-nine wolves born in the spring of 2005, only twenty-two were still alive by the end of the year.
Death rates for adults have also increased since the reintroduction began—a combination, we believe, of increased conflict between packs, along with disease. Blood samples taken from adult wolves in 2006 revealed that nearly all the wolves had an infection rate of parvovirus; in addition, there was roughly a 90 percent infection rate of the canine version of hepatitis, known as adenovirus. (Just how big of a role disease plays in the deaths of adults is hard to say, in part because cuts in our tracking flights mean we often don’t arrive on the scene in time to do necropsies.)
By the end of 2005 the wolf population in Yellowstone was at 118 animals—down 30 percent from the year before. And while the following year would see somewhat of a rebound, all in all it was a good reminder that despite some people’s claims that wolves possess superpowers, the truth is that they—like any other species—simply can’t out-smart their environment. The good news, though, is that they do tend to roll well with the punches.
As far as we can tell, with the return of the gray wolf the region called greater Yellowstone has reclaimed its full complement of historic mammals; indeed, the area is now commonly described as the largest generally intact ecosystem in the temperate world. This project says a lot about the value Americans place on the creatures of the wild, even those that can be troublesome on occasion. For that matter the entire restoration was guided by directives contained in the Endangered Species Act—a law created to ground a decades-old cornerstone of science that says the healthiest, most stable natural systems tend to be those with high levels of biodiversity. It was specifically the flowering of that knowledge that led the National Park Service—the same agency that killed the last wolf in Yellowstone in 1926—to commit seventy years later to an extraordinary effort to bring them back. Admittedly, some consider the act of returning the very animal we spent millions of dollars eradicating as a sign of madness. But to others, including many scientists, this has been a move filled with hope—a clear indication that we’ve finally started to move beyond a long-standing body of myth that treated all predators as if they were God’s great mistake. To those who value ecological health, the wolf has become a powerful touchstone to the wisdom of managing the last pieces of wild America with a generous commitment to wholeness. Of course we’ll never realize Thoreau’s fondest wish, “to know an entire heaven and an entire earth”; the needs of humans will likely always triumph over the needs of other species. Yet to the extent the wolf is forcing us to pay attention to its myriad links and connections—more significant than any of us could imagine—it will help us more fully embrace the true wonders of the wild.
It’s worth mentioning that perhaps more than any other place in America, the nature-based dramas unfolding in Yellowstone play to eager audiences around the world. Even in the earliest stages of this work, when we were still in Canada, catching wolves for later release in the national park, it took little time before our activities were headline news from China to Europe, Australia to South America. Many people in these other cultures have been watching for reasons that go well beyond the thrill of the wolf itself. Some questioned whether a wealthy nation like ours, one increasingly prone to sharing its concerns about the loss of species diversity in third-world countries, was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to effect a major restoration in its own backyard. Some biologists consider bringing wolves home to Yellowstone, northwest Montana, and central Idaho to be among the biggest conservation projects of the twentieth century—a twenty-year effort directed not on a regional level but by the full Congress of the United States. Such a commitment, matched by what is a truly remarkable success, will unquestionably have impacts on conservation efforts around the globe.
In truth it’s hard for me to even recall a life without wolves. For thirty-two years now, I’ve been working with them as a biologist—in the piney woods of Minnesota, along the rocky shores of Isle Royale National Park, and for the past decade, in the great sweeps of sage and lodgepole and grass-covered vales of Yellowstone. But long before any of that, while still just a boy, I spent a good halfdozen years simply daydreaming about them—staring north from my home in the maple and beech woodlands of the Midwest, conjuring images of wild country unfolding across the Canadian border and running all the way to the Arctic. A land of snow and birch and pine, of rivers and lakes. A land of wolves.
Happily, it was my great fortune to have been raised with my feet in the dirt, the seasons of childhood unfolding in the midst of a summer camp and school of horsemanship my parents owned in rural northeastern Ohio. There were hayrides in fall, a maple syrup operation in winter and early spring, and throughout the school year, week-long nature studies designed by my father for area school groups. For reasons that even today I don’t entirely understand, it was there, roaming the woods either alone or with my dog, that the idea of wolves first began taking hold, soon to become a driving force in my life. By my senior year in high school I’d secured a volunteer position with Purdue University’s Erich Klinghammer, who was conducting behavioral studies with a captive colony of wolves in Indiana. Part of this research involved people actually bonding with wolves, a feat that can only be accomplished by starting when pups are no more than a couple weeks old. And so it was that my first lucky break in the world of wolf research was to serve as a “mother” to four little ones named Sirgei, Sasha, Mephisto, and Faust. Hour after hour I stayed with them, literally around the clock—nursing and feeding, cleaning up, even sleeping with them. Due to the constraints of my senior project, I ended up having to leave just before reaching that critical point when wolves finally manage to forge bonds with humans. Even so, years later I visited Klinghammer at his Wolf Park facility in northern Indiana, where I got the chance to go into the pen with one of my former charges, Sirgei—by now a large adult. He jumped up on me, a paw on each shoulder, looking me in the face, studying me intently, as if he might have some vague recollection of who I was.
From there would come more wolf work, over ten years’ worth, much of it with famed wolf biologist Rolf Peterson on Isle Royale. Later, as part of my masters and PhD degrees—both of which focused on beavers—I was lucky enough to walk thousands of miles alone through the North Woods, checking trap lines, live capturing some two thousand beavers across four national parks, including Voyageurs and Grand Portage in Minnesota, Apostle Islands in Wisconsin, and Isle Royale in Michigan. And while the work wasn’t focused on wolves, it was nonetheless in the thick of wolf country. What’s more, I always managed to get wolf jobs on the side with either Rolf or Dave Mech, making this one of the most satisfying times of my life.
In 1994, having at last finished my fieldwork for my PhD, I learned of a job working with wolves in Yellowstone. This was to be a reintroduction, bringing animals into an ecosystem that hadn’t seen a viable breeding population for some seventy years. I remember clearly the day the program’s project leader, Mike Phillips—a man who’d been one of my hiking partners at Isle Royale thirteen years earlier—called to offer me the job. It was a phone call that left me both thrilled and troubled. I was by then, after all, firmly attached to the North Woods, had in fact a short time earlier been given the promise of a job working as a wildlife biologist in beautiful Voyageurs National Park. I talked it out with Rolf Peterson, who in that pleasantly understated fashion of many Scandinavians told me that Voyageurs would be “a solid second choice.” The Yellowstone project, he seemed to be saying, was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Over the past sixteen years I’ve become deeply connected to the northern Rocky Mountains—and specifically to this, the world’s first national park—whereas of this writing some 101 wolves are running free. This from a starting point of thirty-one wolves brought down from Canada across two years—fourteen animals in three groups in the spring of 1995, then seventeen more in four separate groups the following year, in 1996. From a biological standpoint alone this effort has been hugely significant. Of all the places in North America where wolves still roam, fewer than a dozen are sanctuaries: Isle Royale, Denali, Voyageurs, and Glacier National Parks in the United States; Wood Buffalo, Banff, Jasper, Kluane, and Riding Mountain National Parks, as well as Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada.
Along with these locations are lands not designated as preserves but that still offer security for wolves—portions of Alaska, Yukon and Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the coast of British Columbia—yet these areas may not be able to offer protection beyond the next fifty to one hundred years. Farther to the south is Isle Royale, which as an island offers great safety but is so small that its wolf population may in the long run not be sustainable. Elsewhere in the Lower 48 parks and preserves have leaky boundaries, where wolves routinely cross out and are killed. (Happily, Algonquin Provincial Park recently shored up some of those leaks, extending a buffer out from the park border, which offers wolves an extra measure of protection.) To this dwindling list we can now add Yellowstone. It’s hardly perfect, being both modest in size and riddled with dangers along its borders. Nonetheless, bringing gray wolves back to this most southern preserve is a spectacular accomplishment.
To return the animal that was for thousands of years the top predator of the Yellowstone landscape is to change nearly everything about the place. In a very real sense, with the return of wolves we’ve gained the opportunity to glimpse the dynamic forces of nature that drove this region before the coming of the Europeans. Many of the park’s elk herds, for example—the primary prey species for these wolves—now face an additional risk of predation. As a result, in some places these elk have changed their behavior—moving away from certain feeding areas along park streams and rivers that have poor visibility. Preliminary research suggests that such movements are allowing willow, cottonwood shoots, and other vegetation to be “released,” flourishing where they haven’t for decades. With the return of such plants have come beaver, and with the construction of beaver dams, a loose toss of back channels and still ponds perfect for muskrat, amphibians, fish, waterfowl, even songbirds like yellow and Wilson’s warblers. Likewise as coyote populations have dwindled in the face of wolves, some of this smaller canine’s favorite prey, including antelope fawns and red fox, may enjoy higher survival rates. And on it goes. As astonishing as it may sound, in the decades to come wolves may prove no less fundamental to the life of Yellowstone than water is to the Everglades. “Ecologically speaking,” says John Varley, the extraordinary former director of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, “wolf reintroduction is hands down the most exciting thing to happen in the history of the national park.”
When wolves were first back in Yellowstone, in the mid-90s, and elk started moving away from certain riparian areas, thus allowing that flourish of new willow growth we talked about earlier, some researchers believed those animals were simply abandoning places where it was hard to see the approach of predators. This idea is known as “the landscape of fear” hypothesis, and it still has plenty of supporters. Still, an increasing number of scientists are questioning that premise, wondering instead if the release of vegetation in certain areas—and all the new life that comes in its wake—is really more due to the fact that there are simply fewer elk around, less than half the number found in the early 90s.
At the same time, it’s also true that wolves seem to be causing elk to assemble in much smaller groups than they once did. That too, of course, has significant impacts on vegetation. When wolf recovery began, it wasn’t unusual to see groups of three hundred to five hundred elk. Somewhat smaller assemblies, fifty to a hundred, were everywhere. These days we rarely see groups of more than fifteen. Why the change? Probably because small groups are harder for predators to find. (Of course there’s a limit to this strategy, the trick being to have a group size small enough so that the wolves don’t find you, but not so small—say two or three animals—that when they do find you, you’re it.) In other words, even if the “landscape of fear” hypothesis proves incorrect, and vegetation release is more a basic numbers game, wolves could still be affecting elk distribution by changing their behavior.
This reduction in the size of elk assemblies, by the way, may very likely have impacts on diseases like brucellosis, a disorder much in the news, given its potential to cause domestic cattle to abort their fetuses. Brucellosis, as research by Paul Cross of the US Geological Survey suggests, is most easily spread among elk when they’re congregated in big groups. By dispersing elk, wolves and indeed predators in general may turn out to be important factors in slowing the spread of that dangerous disease.
For those of us working as scientists, with every roll of the seasons come new questions, new opportunities for learning. And always, a constant reminder that just when we think we have wolves figured out, they’re bound to prove us wrong. The combination of a habitat previously unpopulated by wolves, along with this animal’s astonishing ability to adapt, has created for biologists something akin to astronauts landing on an untouched planet. This reintroduction has brought with it the prospect of learning how wolves settle landscapes, kill prey, deal with interpack skirmishes, socialize, mate, raise their pups, even fend off grizzly bears. And while it’s true that many of such behaviors have been looked at before, never have we had the visibility afforded us by Yellowstone. Some researchers claim that what they learn in a given year in this national park would in other places take a decade.7
Relatively little research had been done, for instance, in documenting the life histories of individual animals. How long do they live? How many pups does a wolf have in her lifetime? How many of those pups live past one year, or for that matter, go on to breed themselves? At what age do wolves stop breeding? At what age do they stop killing prey, if ever? Though some of these questions had been addressed anecdotally, few had been examined over time, in quantitative fashion. Because we were able to document the beginning of this population—and also because of how visibly accessible the Yellowstone wolves proved to be—we were uniquely poised to unravel some of these more subtle aspects of their natural history. So far we’ve been able to document the lifetime reproductive success of seventy-four females, and that number continues to grow. At the same time, genetic research has given us a strong sense of the various family lineages that exist in the Yellowstone wolf population—a bit of scientific sleuthing that makes it clear that not all packs are equal. Some simply do a better than average job producing offspring, which in turn allows that family lineage to have a much greater influence on the Yellowstone wolf population as a whole.
Genetic research has also led to some unexpected surprises, a few of which will no doubt set off whole new chapters of research. Thanks to ongoing genetic studies by biologist Dan Stahler, for example, we now know that the average life span of a gray female wolf in Yellowstone is roughly four years, while the average age of a black female is roughly eight. In other words, there seem to be some big advantages to being black, as opposed to being gray. (On the whole, the average life span of a Yellowstone wolf seems to be somewhat longer than we thought ten years ago; that said, the new numbers may simply have to do with the fact that we now have a much larger, and thus more accurate sampling size.)
While we still can’t say exactly why black females live twice as long as gray females, we’re speculating that the gene for being black could be linked to another gene that actually enhances a wolf’s immune system. (We don’t have similar data on males yet, though in general males live shorter lives because they’re involved in more conflicts. They’re also more commonly on the front lines when it comes to taking down elk, which is a hugely dangerous business.) If black females live longer, perhaps from an enhanced immune system, one question that quickly comes to mind is why, when it comes to color, the wolves of Yellowstone are still roughly divided—half gray, half black. Wouldn’t such a striking advantage in time lead to there being significantly more black wolves than gray ones? A possible answer is that gray wolves shine when it comes to pups, enjoying a slightly higher survival rate than black ones; this advantage seems to disappear once the animals get through their first summer. Dan’s research is still in its infancy, and clearly, there’s much more to learn. Notably, such studies couldn’t even be conducted outside of Yellowstone, since in other places wolves are so frequently shot that these sorts of survival patterns simply don’t manifest themselves.
Some frustrated with the wolf have suggested that, given the increasing demand on western landscapes, we should manage Yellowstone more as a game farm, an outdoor zoo, fencing in or otherwise controlling those species that get into trouble now and then outside the park.8 But in a very real sense such a move would hobble us as well. As even Sigmund Freud pointed out—and clearly, Sigmund was no nature boy—wild preserves and the creatures that occupy them can be just as important to a culture’s mental health as fantasy is to an individual; remove either one, he seemed to say, and neurosis will follow. By piquing our imaginations, by sparking in us a sense of wonder, Yellowstone’s wolves have done much to invigorate our sense of place, even our sense of generosity, rekindling relationships that allow us to again feel at home in the world.
Having finished the work of checking on Mollie’s Pack, pilot Roger Stradley turns the yellow Piper down the east side of Yellowstone Lake—one of my favorite stretches of this wild, meandering commute. As usual, today’s radio tracking has been fast and furious, requiring plenty of focus—punching in this frequency, deleting that one, hearing something from two prior frequencies, and moving the antennae left and right—watching to see where Roger’s going to bank the plane. Here along Yellowstone Lake, though, with some twenty miles to go before reaching the Delta Pack, I can take a breath. Gaze out the window into the blue water below, watch Columbine, Beaverdam, Trapper, and Mountain Creeks push down their rocky beds.
The Yellowstone River Delta, namesake for the Delta Pack, is by any measure among the most beautiful places in the entire park. Sometimes I travel here after human activity winds down in the fall, thrilling at how the place seems to drip with wildness; now and then I’ll pull back the reins on my horse, Amos, stopping for no other reason than to feel the silence. True, it’s grizzly country—so much so that some of the park station who’ve visited here swear they’ll never come again. But that just makes me like it more. As it turns out, on this day the Delta Pack is nowhere to be found—not by their den, not by their rendezvous site. In the end we find only one wolf from the entire pack, then feel the wind coming up, prompting Roger to turn the Super Cub toward home. On the way back to Gardiner, near the park’s northern boundary, we pick up the Nez Perce, Biscuit Basin, Cougar Creek, and Gibbon Meadows Packs, locating them in what’s fast becoming blustery weather.
By the time our wheels touch down again we’ve logged four and a half hours. And while my knees and butt are well aware of it, my mind and spirit feel renewed—even with a dozen phone calls, fifty e-mails, and several unscheduled appointments and meetings no doubt waiting for me back at the office. Through all that chatter I’ll be drawing on memories of having just seen eleven grizzlies, two black bears, fifty-five wolves, a hundred elk, two moose, several hundred bison, and five deer—all against a backdrop of a green and verdant Yellowstone. Leaving the airport, I’m already thinking maybe I should saddle Amos this fall and take another one of those rides down the Delta. I know that horse, and I’m telling you, he’d really like that.
Portrait of a WolfNUMBER 760
Ifirst encountered Wolf 760 in 2010, atop a massive three-fingered mountain in the remote southeast corner of the park known as the Trident—one of the wildest, most unfettered places imaginable. For some people this place, being so remote, holds an aura of legend. It was winter, and we were once again collaring wolves, this time looking for the Delta Pack. Of all the Yellowstone packs, this is the one that travels most widely, usually through such isolated country that sometimes simply finding them can be a huge challenge. Spotter plane pilot Roger Stradley finally located the pack on the stony flanks of the Trident, at which point he put out the call to bring us in with the helicopter. When helicopter pilot Bob Hawkins and I first saw the wolves, and more specifically, the craggy, rugged terrain they were crossing, we looked at each other and shook our heads. Let’s get out of here, we agreed. There’s just no way this is gonna work.
At the last minute, though, on a whim I asked Bob to hold for a few seconds so we could watch and see what the wolves would do next. We’d fully expected them to go down the mountain, which was by far the best escape route. But instead they kept moving upslope, plowing through deep snow, pushing hard toward the relatively flat ten-thousand-foot summit of the Trident. Given that line of travel, I knew if they kept going this direction we might have a chance. Bob began circling the pack from a safe distance, not wanting to push them too hard, just keeping an eye on them. We hovered for a time at the rugged edges of the mountain, along stony cliffs plunging a thousand feet into the snowscape, me sitting in the open side door of the helicopter, blasted by frigid air, hardly able to believe the brilliant panorama tumbling all around me.
The wolves stayed on course, finally making it all the way to the open summit, onto a clean white slate of unbroken snow. The only problem for us was that they’d reached extreme elevation, some ten thousand feet high—the air so thin that the blades of a helicopter don’t have much to hold on to.
“There’s not much I can do up here,” Bob reminded me. “We’ll have to go straight in. If they give us any back and forth, I won’t be able to stay with them.”
Given that the wolves were right in front of us, lumbering through deep snow, I thought we should give it a try. Maybe because they were tired—having, after all, just finished a rather heroic bout of mountain climbing—they seemed not to have any extra energy for the usual “juke and jive” moves that wolves use to evade us. Bob was able to slide right in on the first wolf, and I landed a tranquilizer dart. Then it was out toward the edge of the plateau, where we managed another one, just as the pack was making a bee-line into the rugged, loosely wooded folds of Escarpment Creek. It was the first time we’d caught the wolf known as 760. After placing the collar on him, I sat there on top of the Trident, waiting for Bob to come back in the helicopter and pick me up. I watched the wolf and then stared out into that wild country, spreading out in all directions.
A year passes. It’s 2011. Once again we’re flying in the southeast part of the park, trying to replace a nonfunctioning collar on one of the wolves in the Delta Pack. Spotter plane pilot Roger Stradley locates the group on Mountain Creek, roughly 1,500 feet below the towering Trident. The snow is especially deep—in fact, the deepest it’s been in several decades—and as we approach the wolves take to the frozen bed of Mountain Creek, where it’s easier going. As we move in, though, I make a mistake—one that to this day I can’t quite get my head around. Somehow I mis-identify wolf 760 as the animal whose collar has quit working. Bob swoops in and I dart him, then we get one of the pups.
Once on the ground, though, when I lay eyes on the adult wolf, I instantly realize it’s the wrong animal. Way too big. Gigantic, in fact. In a single year 760 has managed to put on an astonishing thirty pounds, achieving what still stands as the record weight for a Yellowstone wolf—a whopping 148 pounds. Weighing wolves is something of an inexact science, given that when we dart them they can be holding up to twenty pounds of meat in their stomachs. As it happens, 760 is slightly unsettled by the tranquilizer, and at one point vomits. (This is not an unusual reaction to tranquilizers. When it happens, we cradle the wolf’s head with our arms, making sure to keep its airway clear of any obstructions.) In the case of 760, though, nothing comes up but bile. Not a scrap of meat. Incredibly, he’s 148 pounds without any food in him.
Sitting here, I get a feeling that’s hard to describe. Having personally darted over two hundred of these animals, and handling several hundred more, there are times when I have to guard against ending up on “autopilot”; it’s especially easy to end up there on hectic days, when I get the collar on one wolf, take the necessary samples and measurements—all very methodically—then find myself pressing on to the next pack. Unfortunately, it seems such mechanical mind can creep in now and then when you make the study of nature your job. Sometimes the magic that came so easily in the early years of a scientist’s career, when every day brought a proper sense of awe and wonder, can on heavy work days begin to slip out of reach.
But big Number 760 wakes me up from this work-induced trance. What are he and his pack doing here out in deep snow, I start wondering, miles from a decent chance at a moose or bighorn sheep? I stand up and look around, noticing how the snow holds not a single track from another animal. Against that backdrop, suddenly I see 760 as something much more than just another wolf. He is Wolf with a capital letter. Here is the creature that caused so much turmoil in the western world—a strong, vigorous predator that fifteen hundred years ago was sold by popular religion as the symbol of evil, and incredibly, is today being sold that way again. Sitting in this quiet drainage, a stone’s throw from the most remote location in the continental United States, I worry about whether as a culture we can still embrace this thing called wilderness. Or if the day is coming when we’ll manage our last wild places more or less as farms, charged with growing crops of elk and deer for the autumn harvest.
Greater Yellowstone, like a handful of other precious places in the northern Rockies, is still wild enough to occasionally be inconvenient. Awkward. Unpredictable. Qualities that lie at the heart of any place worthy of the name wilderness. On this January day in the canyon, in the snow next to that beautiful, perfectly chiseled wolf, I’m thinking that unless we make room in our lives for such irregularity, for the messiness of big mystery, then the last wild places will fade to a pale shadow of what they once were. And of what they might yet be.