Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  The National Park Service has petitioned the Board of Game sixty times since 2001 to “exempt hunting practices that unfairly manipulate the predator-prey balance from Alaska’s national preserves. Each time, the board has refused. So again and again, the National Park Service is forced to overrule them.” Even then the winter-kill of wolves goes on. For those of us who have watched Alaska in dismay these past decades, it seems an endless siege, manipulating all wildlife to inflate game herds for hunters. Public protests and threatened tourism boycotts go unheeded. A National Academy of Sciences review of Alaska predator control in 1997 once predicted that wolf control battles were “likely to continue indefinitely.” That prediction still seems apt today.

  “Alaska needs a conservation ethic,” Alaskan federal wildlife official Vic Ballenberghe has argued. “As the stewards of America’s largest wild wolf population, Alaskans simply must find ways to manage and conserve their wolves, in a manner that is in step with the rest of the world, where presently the dominant theme is to conserve wolves where they occur and restore them in areas where they are gone.”

  Along with so many of Alaska’s wolves, one of the wolves’ strongest protectors is also gone. One day in 2009 Gordon Haber’s research plane crashed, bursting into flames and killing the scientist who had devoted four decades to protecting Alaskan wolves. Two longtime Alaska residents heard Haber’s plane circling, then eerie silence. Wolves began to howl and howl. They howled, the people said, longer than they had ever before been heard howling. What might Haber think if he were still alive to hear the news that the East Fork pack of Denali National Park may now all be dead? A spring 2016 report noted that the last radio-collared male wolf was shot when he ventured near a hunting camp. His mate and their two pups have vanished, their den abandoned, “empty and overgrown.”

  This East Fork pack was one of the largest of the nine monitored wolf families in the Denali. “The pack’s decline was fast and drastic,” notes the Washington Post. “About 75 percent of deaths in the East Fork pack in the past year were caused by human trapping and hunting,” explained park biologist Bridget Borg. This loss is so significant because its seventy years of continuous study of large mammal families, beginning in 1939, rivals Jane Goodall’s long-term study of chimpanzees in Gombe.

  The National Park Service has proposed a ban in Alaska on killing wolves with pups. It is also asking for a rule that preemptively forbids managing wolves “with the intent or potential to alter or manipulate natural predator-prey dynamics.” In other words, stop managing wildlife only for game hunters. And the USFW in 2016 banned the hunting of top predators in Alaska’s sixteen wildlife refuges unless needed “in response to a conservation concern.” USFW director Dan Ashe said the new restrictions were a response to the Alaska Board and Game’s continued “intensive predator management.” Ashe explained that Alaska BOG intense predator management was not based on sound science of predator-prey relations. “Over the past several years,” Ashe wrote in an op-ed for The Huffington Post, “the Alaska Board of Game has unleashed a withering attack on bears and wolves that is wholly at odds with America’s long tradition of ethical, sportsmanlike, fair-chase hunting.” He concluded, “There comes a time when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service must stand up for the authorities and principles that underpin our work and say ‘no.’”

  A new governor, independent Bill Walker, is somewhat more ecologically sensitive; he has actually gone on record as opposing open-pit copper mining. He promises that the state will finally face climate change realistically. What will he do with wildlife management in this new century? In a 2015 ceremony the Tlingit and Haida Indian tribes of Alaska adopted Walker into their Kaagwaantaan Clan, which means “Wolf Clan.” It’s a rare honor for Alaskan officials. His honorary clan name is Gooch Waak, which translates as “Wolf Eyes.”

  Will Governor Walker, like the former Democratic governor Tony Knowles, curtail lethal control? Will he ever work more collaboratively with the National Park Service to protect Denali wolves again? More and more Alaskan people are demanding a new way of sharing wilderness with wildlife. When wildlife enthusiasts balance hunting interests, then perhaps wildlife policy in Alaska will finally reflect all of our voices, including those who speak for wolves. Until then Alaska’s Last Frontier is still a taxidermist’s dream. And a nightmare for wolves.

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO I was invited to speak at a conference sponsored by the Center of the American West. On a panel to discuss new ways of looking at wildlife, our moderator was historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, author of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. She asked all panelists this question:

  “If somehow we could go back in history and interview our ancestors in the West from one hundred years ago, we might ask them, ‘What is the most astonishing thing that has happened since your time?’ What might they say?”

  Limerick, a MacArthur Fellow, concluded our panel by answering her own question. “The most radical change is not the inventions such as automobiles or planes nor the amazing technology we take for granted nowadays,” she said. “The most astonishing fact to one of those early settlers or frontiersmen or farm/ranchers would be this: that animals now have lawyers representing their rights. This advocacy would most amaze those of the Old West.”

  At that Alaska Wolf Summit, now almost quarter century ago, we were just on the cusp of wild wolves being reintroduced to the lower forty-eight in Yellowstone, a return of a top predator that a majority of Americans fervently supported then—and now. This rewilding of wolves in America would amaze us all.

  part three

  RECOVERY AND BACKLASH

  5. YELLOWSTONE: “A WOLF’S PARADISE”

  How many people in the whole world ever get to see a wolf in the wild?” a burly man whispered and offered me my turn at the telescope.

  Eagerly reaching for the scope on its tripod, I struggled to keep my balance on the seven-thousand-foot hillside above Yellowstone’s vast Lamar Valley. My ice boots slid on the slick slope. Dawn light was rising, a golden gleam wavering over winter mountains. It was April of 1995, and we were witness to the very first wolves returning to Yellowstone in seventy years. Fourteen wolves from Alberta, Canada, had been captured, radio collared, and moved to acclimation pens in Yellowstone in January. These so-called founder wolves, a mix of adults and pups, began what would come to be recognized as the greatest conservation success story in America.

  Below us six wolves were trotting together across a snow-draped meadow. Most of the wolves were shades of charcoal, but one of the largest was streaked with gray. Single-file, the wolves splashed and swam across the icy Lamar River. On the riverbank four yearlings leapt and chased each other. Tails raised, they wrestled in a rough-and-tumble tussle.

  “It’s the whole darn pack!” exclaimed a woman who had been there every day that winter watching wolves. “They’re playing.”

  Someone gently hushed her. Even though we were a mile away from the wolves, our park ranger, Rick McIntyre, biological technician for the Yellowstone Wolf Project and veteran “wolf interpreter,” had warned us that the wolves could smell, hear, and see us.

  “It’s their decision to allow us to see them,” McIntyre explained, his voice low. “I’m really surprised we get to see all six of the Crystal Creek pack. It’s our great good luck!”

  “I’ve been studying wolves for ten years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” whispered Suzanne Laverty of the Wolf Education and Research Center in Ketchum, Idaho. She stood next to me watching through another telescope. “They’re letting us see their real, everyday family lives.”

  “Right,” McIntyre echoed with a wide smile, his mane of red hair tinged with frost. “That’s something most wildlife biologists don’t even get to see in decades of study.”

  This was no zoo, where wolves were limited to adaptive and captive behaviors. This was the wild, which wolves had once claimed as their territory, to which they now rightfully returned.

  “Y
ou see the large light gray wolf in the center of them all?” McIntyre asked, adjusting my scope. Unlike the yearlings, the tall female was intent, her snout raised high to catch the wind. “This Crystal Creek pack is lucky to be led by a dominant female. We call her F5—that’s her scientific stud name. She and her male mate are older and experienced. That will really help the four younger pups survive here.”

  McIntyre smiled when he told us that F5 had leapt and raced straight out of her shipping kennel when she first arrived at Yellowstone. After nine weeks in their acclimation pens other Crystal Creek wolves—sometimes called the Crystal Bench pack—had been hesitant, even somewhat shy to explore this new wilderness. At the vernal equinox, after their pen was opened and an elk carcass offered for incentive, the Crystal Creek family took ten days to finally leave their pen. They slipped out at night to hunt and then returned to safety. I remembered reading a New York Times article, “Wolves Leave Pens at Yellowstone and Appear to Celebrate,” in which National Park Service senior biologist Douglas Smith described witnessing this Crystal Creek family at last outside their pens. Standing on a hillside, they surveyed their new territory. “They were cavorting, playing, and checking things out,” Smith noted, and their frolicking “suggests recent liberation.”

  “Will these wolves really stay here in Yellowstone?” someone asked McIntyre.

  There was always the fear that these Canadian wolves would leave the park, tracking their way back home. Biologists had fitted them all with radio collars. The hope was that these transplanted Canadian wolves would find mates and produce new generations, returning Yellowstone to its birthright of wild wolves.

  McIntyre smiled, “F5 is a real explorer.”

  Even now in the Lamar Valley she loped a little ahead of the family, focused on finding something our human senses couldn’t identify. But obviously F5 could. She raised her magnificent head, sniffed, and then all but galloped around excitedly.

  “She’s scouting around for a coyote den,” McIntyre whispered. “The female leader makes the big choices for the whole family—when to travel and rest, where to hunt.”

  Two telescopes veered to focus on the beautiful alpha female Number 5. Suddenly she leapt up, then pounced on a small, raised hummock of earth. She dug and clawed furiously until at last she crawled on her belly deep into the den. With tail raised high, back haunches pulling, she backed out slowly with a squiggling furry ball in her teeth. A small coyote.

  “Oh, I can’t watch this!” someone said.

  “We’re not in Disneyland,” another murmured. “It’s like us going to McDonald’s.”

  I ignored the comments, focusing instead on the vivid drama below us. The wolf sank her teeth into the little coyote, whose legs pumped helplessly, still trying to flee. I watched as she dragged out several more coyotes, killed them with an efficient shaking and clamp of her jaw. The four yearling wolf pups watched every move of their alpha female, learning the generational wisdom of the hunt.

  Wolves and coyotes compete in a healthy ecosystem. Usually wolves simply run coyotes off their territory, but sometimes they will kill and eat these smaller canines. For these first wolves to return to Yellowstone, the coyotes were easy prey. They were abundant from decades of living without wolves. In fact, in Yellowstone there was an unusual wealth of prey animals for wolves to choose to hunt—all hoofed animals from elk to deer as well as beaver, hares, and even bison. “The Yellowstone landscape those first animals stumbled into back in 1995 was surely the wolf version of paradise,” notes biologist and author Douglas Smith, who has studied Yellowstone’s wolves since their arrival.

  The presence of these wild wolves now at work and play within our sights also made Yellowstone a paradise for people. “We’ve had more than two thousand people lucky enough to spot wolves so far this first year,” McIntyre told us proudly. “We’re watching history here.”

  For the next two decades of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone this devoted wolf researcher would rarely miss a single day of wolf watching in the park. With his radio antennae held up to track the wolves’ movement and his 3:45 A.M. wake-up calls to wolf watchers, McIntyre was as steady and dependable as Old Faithful itself. McIntyre would document and help thousands of visitors witness wolves every year in Yellowstone National Park. He would become as well known as the wolves themselves. Outside magazine would call him “Pack Man,” and in his best-selling book Beyond Words, Carl Safina profiled Rick McIntyre as the man who “has had his eyes on wild wolves for more hours than any human ever has, quite possibly more than any living creature that isn’t a wolf.”

  That winter in 1995, when the very first wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, McIntyre was already building upon decades of wolf research as well as his own family history. Lean and loquacious, McIntyre’s Scottish heritage showed in his friendly, freckled face and his storytelling skills. McIntyre comes by his wolf bond from generations of Highland ancestors. McIntyre’s Glen Noe ancestors lived in their Highland valley for eight centuries, but when the British threw tenant farmers off their land, they were forced to work as predator-control agents and wolf killers for the conquering upper class. In his preface, “Witness to Ecological Murder,” to his classic book, War Against the Wolf, McIntyre wrote, “The last Highland wolf reportedly was destroyed in 1743.… The thanks my ancestors received for their diligent wolf control work was the loss of their land to sheep.”

  I’d first interviewed McIntyre in 1993 for a Seattle Times article after the Alaska Wolf Summit. McIntyre gave me a story that surprised many readers then but has proven now to be well-documented science.

  “The Portland Zoo had hired a thirteen-year-old girl to observe captive wolves,” McIntyre said. “But her reports enraged the zoo biologist because she noted that the alpha female wolf was actually the leader of the family pack. The biologist was just about to fire the girl. But then he decided to go back into the field and observe with her. Sure enough, the alpha female was leading her pack.”

  At the time there was much less research about how an alpha female leads her family. Most wolf biologists were men like David Mech, Vic Ballenberghe, Rolf Peterson, or Mike Phillips. Diane Boyd, a woman scientist who had studied wolves in the field for two decades in Montana’s Glacier National Park, was a notable exception. “I have struggled with the perceived conflict of objective science vs. advocacy for twenty years,” she admitted. “I have concluded that it is OK to have feelings about the animals you study, without risking damage to your scientific credibility.… Objectivity and passion about study animals are not mutually exclusive; I wouldn’t have devoted my life to studying wolves if I didn’t love them.”

  On that first winter of the wolves reclaiming Yellowstone McIntyre’s stories captivated us so deeply that we forgot about the early-morning chill. Even though our thermos coffee was tepid, our feet numb, our ears crackling with the cold, we wouldn’t budge from the telescopes or our hillside viewpoint. The sunlight now glistened on the snow, glancing off the rapid Lamar River. On the muddy bank the Crystal Creek wolf family lazed together, their hunger sated. Two of the yearling males jaw wrestled, yipping and nipping. The male and female leaders leaned together nearby, watching over their family with the fond indulgence of any parents.

  Before I surrendered my scope to another wolf watcher on the hill I was surprised to see a few huge bison asleep just hundreds of feet from the busy wolf family. The bison snoozed, their shaggy sides heaving blissfully.

  “Why are they so easy with wolves around?” I asked McIntyre.

  Rick grinned, “Unlike us, wolves know when they’ve eaten their fill.” He tapped my shoulder to signal me to glance up from the scope. “Over there by the woods,” he pointed.

  I glued my eye back to the chilly telescope and just caught one of the yearling wolves wagging his tail as an elk chased him up a snow bank. Surely a predator-prey role reversal—and one that both elk and yearling wolf seemed to enjoy.

  “Elk, deer, and pronghorn sheep can all outrun a wo
lf,” McIntyre explained. “Bison can outfight wolves. Sheep can outclimb them. Wolves have to work really hard for their supper. So often they go hungry.”

  The Yellowstone wolves would prove to ace their version of The Hunger Games in this national park. And as they thinned the overpopulated elk and deer, their family numbers would increase, then stabilize, and then level off to a yearly average of 10 percent growth. By May 2016 the wolf population remained stable, with ninety-nine wolves in ten packs. Because usually only the breeding male and female give birth to offspring in any family, wolves are self-regulating. In their own reproductive self-control as well as their hunger, wolves know when and what is enough. They avoid having so many pups that they eat themselves out of den and home. Their long-term survival depends upon this physical prescience. In lean years, when there is little prey, the wolves often can die of hunger; they simply decide not to breed. In Yellowstone wolves mostly prey upon elk, but as bison numbers have increased, the wolves are also scavenging on bison dead from winter-kill and accidents.

  “My turn,” someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder, and I surrendered the telescope to Suzanne Laverty.