Returning the wolf to Yellowstone

Harry sent this review from New West media in Missoula and thought you all would enjoy it. Having just finished The Ninemile Wolves by Rick Bass, this is like the next chapter in the story. There’s a link to New West at the end.

Reviewed by Allen M. Jones, 6-12-05

For all the bad news that comes with living in the Rocky Mountain West (high land values, low wages, xenophobia, myopic county commissioners), the good news still mostly tips the scales down hard.

Hunting and fishing, skiing, a few ranchers for a dollop of local color. For the politically minded, you also have an available portfolio of endless, personal jihads. Running through the issues, you can find a flag to be raised for damn near any political taste. Coalbed-methane? Got you covered. Brucellosis and buffalo? Step right up. Heap-Leach Mining? Walk this way. 

Then you’ve got your Yellowstone wolves. Mention it in a certain kind of bar and it’s like turning on the propane, striking a match. A hot button, emotionalized topic start to finish, it’s been the western equivalent of stem cell research, abortion rights. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody’s an expert. Since the reintroduction ten years ago, when thirty-one wolves were released into the park (they’ve since burgeoned into a population of around three hundred), at least thirty wolves have been killed illegally.

Only a few weeks ago, a collared wolf was found dead and poisoned in Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness. And yet, take a drive through Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley at dusk and try to count the hundreds of wolf watchers clustered above the highway with spotting scopes and binoculars, each of them hoping for even the briefest glimpse of some vestigial wildness. This is the polarization of the west in microcosm. 

Stirred into this roiling stew of outfitters versus biologists, locals versus tourists, comes the newest bone, Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone. Co-authored by biologist Douglas W. Smith, current head of the Yellowstone Wolf Recovery Project, and award-winning nature writer Gary Ferguson, it is, more than anything else, a soothing, well-considered exercise in scientific moderation and narrative description. Taking us from the first raising of an acclimation pen gate through to the final, wildly successful dispersal of wolves into seventeen distinct packs, there is little in this thoroughly well written, even-handed account for even the harshest critic to take issue with. 

Start with the statistics, with the incidental facts and trivia. “People are often surprised to learn that the average age of wolves in Yellowstone at time of death...is only 3.4 years...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." The numbers make for great cocktail conversations. “Over the past hundred years in all of North America there have been less than twenty cases of wolves attacking humans, not one of which has resulted in a fatality." (Howard’s note: There was a documented fatal attack in Saskatchewan last year, apparently by wolves who had become acclimated to humans and had previously attacked dogs.)

In introducing the Lamar Valley (a center of wolf activity), the authors write, “It was here that the last wolf disappeared from Yellowstone, killed in 1926. And here that three groups of reintroduced wolves would in 1995 once more walk into the life of the wild, taking their pack names from natural features laid down on maps long before: Crystal Creek, Rose Creek, and Soda Butte."

Later, in one of the “portrait of a wolf" chapters, it’s mentioned that out of the original thirty-one wolves released, only a few played pivotal roles in the success of the project. “Genetic studies done in 1999 showed that 79 percent of all wolves in Yellowstone...were related to the outstanding alpha female Number 9."

Separately, both Gary Ferguson and Doug Smith have written on the wolf recovery project, but this is apparently the first time they have worked together. And while Ferguson is listed as a co-author, the narrative is told from the point of view of Doug Smith. Given the depth of Smith’s experience (he was present when the first wolf was released), he has to be considered one of the foremost authorities. It can be assumed, however, that like most scientists, his writing style might lean toward the antiseptic, the dry, failures certainly not shared by Ferguson.

And so it is here, with this pairing of legitimacy and narrative skill, the vivid retelling of anecdote and the near novelistic recapturing of certain crucial moments in the development of the wolf recovery project, that the most obvious value of the book lies. Whether it’s in the descriptions of what it’s like to lean out of a helicopter with a dart gun, or to track a radio collar signal, or to recapture a wolf with nets (“In that face, grizzled and gray with age, was the look of a beautifully fierce and resolute animal. The only wolf skull I have in my office in Mammoth is that of 27 “ a reminder of her incorrigible, incorruptible spirit."), you leave the pages feeling that you’ve been given privileged insight, that you know some sort of secret.

For instance, the moment the recovery project might be said to have truly begun came when Carter Niemeyer, “sent up north to kindle the collaring operation that will eventually land wolves in Yellowstone," tries to win the trust of an independent trapper by participating in a skinning contest, slipping the skin from a previously trapped wolf on the man’s living room carpet. 

The arguments for wolf reintroduction are manifest. At one point, the authors discuss the surprising benefits to the park's ecology: “[The elk are] 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 come beaver, and with the construction of beaver dams, a loose toss of...muskrat, amphibians, fish, waterfowl, even songbirds..."

But the strongest argument, at least for my money, comes with the opportunity for unprecedented, observational research. The authors compare releasing the wolves into this unpopulated habitat 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...Some researchers claim that what they learn in a given year in this national park would in other places take a decade.” of course, by its very definition, wildness is inaccessible.

Even now, it’s a rare thing to see a Yellowstone wolf. That’s as it should be. Were they readily available, they would certainly no longer be quite what we imagine them to be, what we in some measure need them to be. Fortunately, we have emissaries as talented and conscientious as Smith and Ferguson who are willing to make the trip back from the wilderness to happily describe what they’ve seen.

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