The Company of Wolves (40 page)

Much of what people think about wolves in Yellowstone is inferred from what they conclude about elk. Elk are especially controversial in Yellowstone. People debate how many there used to be and how many the park can support today. Park scientists don’t know what the prehistoric elk population may have been, and so cannot tell what a normal density might be. Current views of the elk are colored by faulty estimates of past numbers. Milton Skinner, who was park naturalist in the 1920s, declared, “Back in 1900 when I first knew the region, there were over 75,000 elk in it.… But in 1925, there were only 30,000 left.” No one today can say how Skinner arrived at his early estimate. Recently, Yellowstone National Park
research biologist Douglas Houston looked at the park’s past elk-census efforts and concluded that early managers tended to overestimate the number of elk. Between 1911 and 1920, for example, they allowed counting routes to overlap, so that the same elk could be counted twice. In addition, they estimated the elk they didn’t see on the basis of the way they felt the population might be going. In 1915, when there was no census, it was estimated that there were 35,000 elk in the park. The next year, it was assumed, because the winter had been mild, that the number was even higher, even though only 12,455 elk were actually counted. The fall of 1919 started with cold temperatures and heavy snows and the ensuing winter was remembered as severe, even though records show that December, January, and February were unseasonably mild. And since people expected elk to succumb to hard winters, it was concluded that as many as 14,000 had fallen to starvation and hunters. After reviewing the historical evidence, Houston declared, “Nothing resembling a population eruption and crash occurred.”

But the Park Service continued to believe that elk numbers were originally high and then fell precipitously. Skinner thought he saw a clear decline, and believed its cause was that wintering grounds to the north of the park had filled in with farms and fences, livestock which stripped the ground of winter forage, and hunters who mowed down the weakened elk. “The only hope for saving the elk,” he wrote, “lay in keeping them in the mountains on protected lands rather than letting them migrate down into the lower valleys fairly swarming with rifles.” The Park Service put out hay to try to keep elk in the park in winter.

However, with the drought of 1931–34, the Park Service’s view of elk changed: now the elk appeared to be too numerous. Early photographs of the park showed thick groves of aspen and willow. In drought years of the 1930s, the park’s plant cover suffered. Soil was trampled bare by elk herds, and shrubs and grasses were nibbled to ground level. Park biologist Rudolf Grimm believed that human settlement north of the park was holding elk on winter range inside the park, and that “the continued heavy use of this range by excessively large numbers of animals had detrimental effects upon the growth and succession of plant cover.” He held that the process had been going on for decades but had only become apparent during the
drought. Park scientists put up “exclosures,” fencing around groves of aspen or plots of sage or grass, and watched to see how plants responded when protected from grazing. They saw native vegetation return inside the exclosures while plants outside continued to be nibbled to the ground. In aspen exclosures trees grew taller, while outside they lost height because of browsing. The number of trees inside the fences increased as suckers growing from older trees put forth new stalks that weren’t eaten by herbivores, while outside the fences the number of trees declined. One could see a braid of ecological consequence unraveling as the vegetation changed. As aspen disappeared, so would the beavers. Without beavers building dams, the streams would cut deeper and water tables would drop. Stream-side willows and cottonwoods would disappear. Even the trout would vanish. Grimm believed elk were the heart of the problem. He estimated the northern-Yellowstone herd numbered about 12,000 in 1939 and urged that it be reduced to no more than 7,334, “to prevent serious injury to the range plant cover and needless suffering among the animals.”

The hunting had already begun. From 1935 to 1968, the Park Service shot elk inside the park in an attempt to regulate numbers. Habitat quality did not improve, and by 1962 the Park Service sought to reduce the elk to about 5,000. The elk hunts were intensified. Elk were hazed with helicopters toward waiting teams of hunters, who blazed away at them from point-blank range. Before the shooting stopped, the northern-elk herd was reduced to about 5,725 animals. When the scenes of slaughter were shown on television, the reaction was predictable: the American public was outraged, most especially because the killing was taking place inside a national park.

Biologists generally accepted the view that the elk were overpopulated. Wrote Durward Allen, “This situation has been brought about by the elimination of important natural enemies and the failure, in establishing the park, to include adequate year around range for big-game animals. At the time of Lewis and Clark it was to some extent true that the wolf and cougar allowed the grass to grow.” Murie had suggested, in 1938, that the best solution would be to restore predators. In 1963, an Advisory Board on Wildlife Management assembled by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and headed by A. Starker Leopold, professor of zoology at the University
of California, issued a report focused in part on the Yellowstone elk hunts. It supported the hunt, but argued that, if humans had not altered ecological balances in the first place, the hunt would probably not have been necessary. The Leopold Report urged that national parks should, as a matter of principle, re-create and maintain the conditions that existed when whites first arrived. Udall directed the parks to try as much as possible to implement the principles of the report.

But was the changing face of the park really the result of predator control? In the 1980s, Douglas Houston undertook a more exhaustive study of elk-population estimates, climate, and vegetation and concluded that there had been no elk eruption before 1980 and that the earlier studies revealed effects of drought rather than overgrazing. He set up exclosures and found that, even where grazing was excluded, the aspen stands did not resemble the groves in photographs taken during the 1890s. He was convinced that the decline of aspen was due to the suppression of fires, which formerly stimulated low, dense growth of trees from suckers. The decline of willow he believed may have been due to reduced soil moisture because of climate change and fire suppression. More recent studies of pollen in lake sediments suggest that there has been little change in aspen cover in the park over the years. The view of the Park Service today is that climate, rather than predators, regulates elk numbers.

But in the 1960s, the Park Service believed elk densities were unnaturally high. Some voices clamored for more human predation on elk, others for restoration of wolves. In the 1960s, Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Jack Anderson may well have thought wolves were the preferable of the two.

In 1967, wolves suddenly started appearing again in Yellowstone. At first, there were sightings by park visitors and back-country rangers. Then, in December 1967, Marshall Gates, a seasonal ranger back to visit in winter, filmed a wolf running away from him on an eight-millimeter movie camera. Glen Cole set up a monitoring system whereby visitors who saw what they thought might be wolves could report the incidents to rangers. In two years, he claimed to have 126
observations of 214 wolves. “The greater number of observations since 1968,” he held, “is partly due to an established system for reporting sightings of wolves and intensified efforts to see the animals,” implying that the wolves had been in the park all along. He suggested that the increased sightings after 1969 were due to “one and possibly two pairs of wolves producing young.” By 1971, he believed there were “a minimum of ten and possibly 15 different animals” in the park.

But, gradually, those sightings faded. John Varley of the National Park Service mapped the sightings year by year, and showed that the animals moved west and out of the park, where, one by one, they seem to have been shot by ranchers. Between 1973 and 1975, John Weaver searched the park for wolves but found none. Varley guesses the failure of the wolves to stay in the park may have had to do with the fact that the elk hunts had reduced the elk population to a quarter of their previous levels, and that prey populations may have been too low to support the wolves. By 1975, Yellowstone’s nights were again empty of wolf song.

What accounted for this cluster of sightings? The evidence is strong that someone introduced wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1967. A Park Service employee reported seeing wolves in cages in the back of a truck in a Park Service garage at the time. Craighead, who worked in the park during those years, says emphatically, “There
was
an introduction. The behavior of Superintendent Anderson at the time that that first wolf was sighted and some statements he made to me at the time” led Craighead to conclude that the wolves had been released by Park Service personnel. He suspects Park Service managers may have manufactured earlier sightings of wolves in park records to give the appearance of a natural return. And Stanley Hathaway, former Wyoming governor and later Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, recalls seeing one of the animals while on a winter snowmobiling tour of the park with Superintendent Anderson. They had stopped for lunch at West Thumb, and Hathaway looked out onto the frozen surface of Yellowstone Lake and saw a large, dark animal chasing a wounded goose. “I said to Anderson, ‘When did we get wolves in Yellowstone?’ He said, ‘That’s not a wolf. It’s a coyote.’ I said, ‘You can’t fool
me. That’s a wolf.’ I can definitely tell you it wasn’t a coyote. It was too big and too dark in color.

“He said, ‘Yeah, we put a few in here a few years ago. We brought them from Alaska to see what would happen.’ He said they brought five or six, as I remember.”

Other Park Service personnel adamantly deny that they introduced wolves. Glen Cole, now retired from the service, says, “It wasn’t done. A group of professionals in a federal agency just don’t do that. Your professional reputation is at stake. You don’t pull that kind of crap.”

Says Mary Meagher, who has been a member of the park’s scientific staff since 1959: “No, we didn’t dump off any wolves. If we thought it would have worked, we would have. I do not believe wolf reintroduction could be pulled off without my knowledge. And I have no knowledge of one.”

Cole suggests that there were always wolves in the area, and that they staged their own small renaissance. Or, he says, “It’s conceivable someone would have dumped a pet wolf. We did see some animals there, and they surely didn’t behave like wolves. It’s conceivable someone could have dropped one in. But I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for its chances.”

Whatever entered the park in 1967 didn’t last. Said Cole, “There’s intense competition for food there, both from avians and mammals. A carcass doesn’t last very long. It was a difficult place for wolves. Coyotes were in there very strong and would pack up and kill moose.” Perhaps it was because they were unable to form packs and thus unable to compete with the coyotes that the wolves drifted west to wither under the gunfire of ranchers outside the park.

Cole says he long ago decided that coyote densities of two per square mile in the winter elk range north of the park would prevent Canadian wolves from recolonizing Yellowstone: “I think a wolf would have to fight his way through coyotes to get there.” He believed that if wolves survived in the national forests around the park they would not serve as a source of future populations. Having worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to get its predator-control hunters to pull their Compound 1080 bait stations back from the park boundaries, he looked upon the removal of the bait stations as a test of the idea that wolves could naturally recolonize. But wolves
didn’t reappear. He concluded, “It kind of looked after a while like reintroduction was the way to go.”

Cole was convinced wolves should be returned to Yellowstone. “It was part of your objective if you were going to follow the congressional mandate to portray a representative fauna,” he says. “It was not so that you could control the elk—the prey controls the predator, rather than the predator controls the prey. The wolf was missing from the system, and it was your mandate to restore it.”

So Cole worked to bring about a public and legal reintroduction. In 1975, he wrote an environmental assessment for a project to “restore a viable wolf population in Yellowstone National Park by introductions.” He proposed: “Between 15 and 20 wolves of the proper subspecies from viable populations in Canada would be introduced in a manner designed to reestablish two or three viable packs.” Whole packs would be released so that they could compete with the coyotes—“I think you could release single wolves in there and you’d never hear from them again,” said Cole. The wolves would be soft-released—kept and fed in enclosures in the Lamar Valley, where they would form social bonds that would keep them together once they were freed. Such wolves would not scatter, as the wolves of 1967 seem to have done. Anticipating that the wolves would probably slip outside the park and kill livestock, Cole suggested that owners of livestock be compensated for losses. He urged “research to determine how both livestock and wolves can occur on these public lands with minimal conflicts.”

Even if the National Park Service had agreed to Cole’s proposal, success would have been far from guaranteed. Wolf releases were still experimental: there had been only four publicly acknowledged attempts, and all had failed. The first failure occurred on Isle Royale in 1952. In 1960, four nineteen-month-old pen-reared wolves were released on Coronation Island in Alaska and they survived to produce at least one litter; but by 1968, they had exterminated the deer on the thirty-square-mile island and died out. In 1972, five pen-reared wolves from Alaska’s Arctic Research Laboratory were released two hundred miles away, near the Colville River. Before the release, experimenters hung dead caribou bulls by wires in a standing position inside their cages to see whether the wolves showed any inclination to hunt. One of the males seized a dead caribou by the rump; that
seemed to suggest they had the instincts to survive. But once they were released, all the wolves returned to civilization. One showed up in the company of a wild wolf at the garbage dump of an oil-drilling camp, twelve days after being released. Two others hung around the village of Umiat’s dump. One was shot near Umiat. Another was shot when it approached a native hunter’s camp near Teshekpuk Lake. None of them showed any ability to catch wild caribou. The fourth release took place in 1974, when the Michigan Department of Natural Resources captured two male and two female wolves near International Falls, Minnesota, and released them near Huron City, Michigan—an experiment to see whether wild-caught wolves would stay and breed where they were released. Three of the wolves departed at once and took up residence fifty miles from the release site. Deer hunters opposed to the release offered a $100 reward to anyone who shot a wolf. Two of the released wolves were shot. One died in a trap. The last was struck and killed by a car on a road.