Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  Even a formidable fighter like 06 could not survive so many attackers. Through his telescope McIntyre watched the battle unfolding below with resignation. McIntyre believed 06 was doomed, that he was “going to see her torn apart.” Then 06 sprinted down a narrow gulley, invisible to the Mollies. They couldn’t follow 06, but they could follow 06’s scent back to her den and simply destroy all of her newborn pups.

  What happened next, McIntyre said, shows that “all those years of training that she put into her family finally paid off.” One of 06’s well-trained older daughters suddenly stepped out of the forest to reveal herself to the Mollies. A decoy. Distraction. Also, a possible self-sacrifice. Like her mother, 06’s daughter was extremely fleet footed. But would she be fast enough to escape sixteen wolves biting at her heels? The Mollies veered away from 06’s defenseless den and sped after 06’s daughter. They all raced east, yipping and growling. But 06’s daughter “just left them in the dust,” said McIntyre. “The Mollies’ wolves gave up in frustration. Went home. And they never bothered 06’s family again.”

  That might have been the happy ending for 06, her motley mates, and her strong offspring. But 06 had more to contend with than just rival wolves. She had us humans. Her fame had spread worldwide, thanks to stories retold by wolf watchers and social media. Before reintroduction biologists believed wolves would be mostly hidden from view. But wolf families often chose dens near the roads, near throngs of people with telescopes. Wolves carried on their mesmerizing daily lives for thousands to witness. It was better than any miniseries or movie, these complex episodes of territorial wars, death-defying hunts, and always the timeless and familiar struggle of caretaking their young. Soon 06 was beloved not only in Yellowstone but also all over America, Europe, and Asia. She was a legend. And some legends don’t outlive their stories.

  DID HER FAME make 06 more vulnerable? Was it our rapt attention that so singled her out that made her life much riskier—like any public figure or rock star whose popularity also exposes them to danger? Douglas Smith, a Yellowstone biologist who, like McIntyre, has studied these wolves since reintroduction, told NPR about the moral dilemma he faced when trying to attach a radio collar to 06 and so make her even more visible. For three years Smith had tried to chase down 06 from a helicopter, dart her with a tranquilizer, and fit her with a radio collar for science. The goal is not only to protect but also to study wild wolves to better understand their behavior, biology, and natures. But 06 managed to outwit Smith every time he tried to spot her. She’d disappear suddenly into a forest or leap into underbrush.

  “She would look at me with disdain,” Smith said. “Most other wolves just ran. But she would look at me and our eyes would connect. And the look she would give would be, ‘I don’t like you at all, and I’m going to outsmart you.’”

  Just as 06 had outsmarted the Mollies, she also outwitted the radio collaring. Until one day she didn’t. Ironically, by that time Smith had quit wanting to capture 06, even for the minutes it took to strap a radio collar around her neck. “When you get to know another species like we all did her, you just begin to kind of respect that individual,” he said.

  But at last 06 made a mistake and let herself be caught. At first Smith didn’t realize it was 06 he’d darted with the tranquilizer gun. He thought he’d caught up with 06’s swift daughter. But once she was lying on the ground Smith realized this was the iconic Lamar Canyon breeding female. “I didn’t want to collar her. I dreaded it,” he explained. “But there was just so much at stake because from the perspective of science… of learning about these animals that we so much want to help, this is the number one wolf you want to get.”

  Even with the ungainly radio collar, 06 was still a beauty. Her middle-aged teeth were still “clean, sharp, and fully intact.” She was so healthy and strong that it was easy to see how 06 had passed for one of her daughters. Several days after 06 was mistakenly radio collared, the alpha female led her family to face off again with the Mollies. The long-standing battle for territory between 06’s Lamar Canyon family and the Mollies erupted in a full-scale battle. One of the wolf watchers, Dr. Nathan Varley, witnessed the life-and-death struggle. Like two small armies, the Mollies and the Lamars galloped straight toward each other, clashing headlong in a furry blur of bared teeth, pummeling paws, and massive shoulders. From a nearby viewpoint wolf watchers were mesmerized by the violence and skill of these rival families as they fought for their lives and territory.

  Finally 06’s family was “crushed, driven before a superior force that scattered its opponents in chaos.” One of 06’s pups was overwhelmed by the Mollies, and onlookers feared they were witnessing a death in the Lamar Canyon family. After seventeen years of wolves in Yellowstone, elk populations were not as high as those first years when Yellowstone was “a wolf’s paradise.” Wolf predation on other wolves is another way population growth is regulated in any territory. But the wounded wolf pup in 06’s group did somehow survive the Mollies’ attack and fled away with his family. Varley concludes his report, “With the fury with which these two big wolf packs clashed, I felt like there would be few survivors. Yet, they are as always, resilient animals.”

  Veteran wolf observer Rick Lamplugh, author of In the Temple of the Wolves, has written about Yellowstone’s fascinating families. He describes how they leave scent marks to ward off rival wolves, setting a firm boundary for these animals whose sense of smell is one hundred times that of humans. He chronicled another epic battle between 06’s Lamar Canyon family and a solitary wolf who either missed their scent marks or was attempting to join their pack. It is always risky for a lone wolf to disperse from his or her own family and go in search of a mate, especially if that mate is already part of a tight-knit group. The biological drive in wolves, as in humans, is to find a mate, territory, and family. Like us, wolves are hard-wired for community. Yet they also are wary of outsiders.

  06’s companion males, the brothers 754M and 755M, immediately spot the lone wolf approaching their hillside. The now-mature males protectively plunge down through the snow banks, their charcoal mantles rising and falling as they run toward the solitary stranger. Backing them up are the Lamar Canyon pups, two males and two females. At the rear, keeping her eye out for any other wolves, is 06. The lone wolf waits, standing his ground, and the Lamar Canyon brothers suddenly stop, tentative. In the snow one wolf faces seven Lamars in a tense silence. Will there be an attack or an acceptance of this new wolf? Onlookers hold their breaths collectively in the chill air.

  “Suddenly,” Lamplugh writes, “the brothers attack the lone wolf with no mercy. The pups join in, with the males more active than the females. 06 joins the fray and all seven wolves ravage the loner, now on his back in the snow, his body covered by a writhing mass of biting wolves.”

  The lone wolf somehow manages to grip one of 06’s pups with his fierce, razor-like teeth—and suddenly the melee is over. The pups back off from the battle, leaving only the two brothers to finish the fight. 06 was not very active in the struggle, as she’d been continually scanning for any other rival wolves. The solitary wolf stands in the snow, shakes himself off, and simply walks away from the Lamar Canyon family. Very little blood, but later researchers will discover he hemorrhaged from puncture wounds from canine teeth. Still, he is lucky to survive at all.

  Wolf-on-wolf aggression in Yellowstone has been documented by researchers like Kira Cassidy of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, who videotaped this whole encounter between the lone wolf and 06’s family. Cassidy’s research between 1995 and 2011 documented 292 “aggressive chases” between wolves, 72 of which “escalated to physical attack.” But in only 13 of these attacks was a wolf actually killed. In the case of the lone wolf vs. the Lamar Canyon family, this particular wolf did indeed survive his wounds and was later seen wandering around Yellowstone. His search for a mate and family continued.

  The Lamar Canyon family also continued to grow until, at the age of six, 06 was a formidable matriarch. Usually wild wolves
live about eight to ten years. The matriarch’s successful mothering of so many pups made her the wolf to witness in Yellowstone. Of the thousands of park visitors, many came in the hope of catching just a glimpse of 06 and her flourishing family. Some visitors made yearly visits to Yellowstone, and the wolves’ lives became intertwined with their own. Anne and Douglas Griggs first visited Yellowstone in the early 1990s and returned annually, but after the reintroduction of wolves to the park in 1995 the Griggs began visiting Yellowstone twice a year. “Our visits were always at the end of May,” Anne told me. Not only were the wolves a touchstone for this couple, they also made many friends among the wolf enthusiasts, nature photographers, and naturalists from all over the world. These friendships spanned countries and languages.

  Two of Anne’s favorite wolves were 06 and 42F, the Cinderella female wolf of the ancestral Druid pack and grandmother to 06 and her Agate family. “One of my favorite memories,” Anne recalled, “was seeing almost all of the Druids in their rendezvous site, the puppies in a great pile.” This memorable sighting was just before Anne’s husband, Douglas, a cardiologist, learned he had liver cancer. In the spring of 2008 Anne and her sons and sister climbed that very hill in the Lamar Valley to scatter Douglas’s ashes. She wrote me about their ceremony: “Clouds lowered and snow threatened. All was quiet, except for the call of ravens and the sounds of the Lamar River. At the crest of the hill there was a single wolf paw print. Returning to the Lamar Valley has become a pilgrimage for me.”

  In letters, blogs, website posts, Facebook pages, and tweets too numerous to name, lives of the Yellowstone wolves have become intimately interwoven with human stories. This intimacy with a wild animal is what makes the seemingly endless struggle for wolf recovery take on such a personal nature. Well-known and loved wolves become extended family.

  SOMETIMES PEOPLE CAN GO A LITTLE WILD with their collected wolf swag—T-shirts, car bumper decals, baseball hats, coffee mugs, paintings, and, of course, tattoos. At a wolf event I once met a very large woman who was tattooed from neck to toe in elaborate wolf images. Her skin was like a living mural featuring on her back a blue planet held aloft by a howling wolf, on her arm a huge wolf paw, and finally, over her chest, a black wolf portrait that pulsed with her every heartbeat. I was a little taken aback when she invited me into the restroom to view other wolf tattoos hidden under her skimpy, sleeveless scarlet dress.

  What happens when affection and sometimes-intense identification with wild animals clashes with the fear that makes others see the return of a wolf as a threat to their own lives? This territorial battle is taking place not only in the human heart and imagination but also in public wild lands.

  In the spring of 2011 a political rider to delist wolves from the Endangered Species List in Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Northern Utah was attached to a piece of unrelated congressional legislation. It passed, setting a disturbing precedent. This was the first time since the passage of the Endangered Species Act that politics, not science, succeeded in determining the fate of wild wolves on public lands. Denying wolves previous federal protection meant that the states bordering Yellowstone took over wolf recovery. Usually with any ESA delisting there is a sixty-day period for public comment and litigation. But within days of the wolf delisting, Idaho’s governor, Butch Otter, signed a bill declaring populations of gray wolves a “disaster emergency,” giving him more authority over his own state if wolves were ever relisted as endangered. Other states, like Montana, followed suit and sanctioned legal wolf hunts. These hunts were very popular with those who had always resisted returning wolves, and it was dreaded by those who cherished wild wolves returning to their native territories.

  At first none of these political wars made a difference for Yellowstone wolves. They recognized no boundaries except those they marked as their own. 06 and her Lamar Canyon family rarely ventured out of the park. But during the late fall of 2012, when the elk populations were again dwindling, 06 led her family out of the protected land to hunt. It must have seemed to wolves like stumbling onto another planet—asphalt roads, ranch houses, the choke of automobile exhaust, and, most of all, the scent of humans. The Lamar Canyon wolves had scented humans from the road, from the helicopters, from the valleys all their lives. Until this moment they had no reason to fear us. Humans had always existed near wolves in Yellowstone.

  So 06, always walking point ahead of her pack, ventured into this alien wilderness outside Yellowstone. Suddenly the forest throbbed with a crackling explosion. Had 06 ever heard a gunshot? Her sharp ears could pick up sound from six miles away. But as Rick McIntyre poignantly noted, Yellowstone wolves “didn’t know the difference between the click of a camera and the click of a gun.”

  If she didn’t understand human hunting now, 06 instantly recognized a fellow predator as 754M fell down, wounded. No rival pack, no fierce fangs or hot fur or the thud and growl of bodies hurled against each other. The charcoal wolf simply dropped to the ground as if struck by lightning or some other invisible force. This doting uncle, 754M, who had played with and protected so many of 06’s many pups, was dead. Quickly 06’s family fled back into Yellowstone.

  Douglas Smith and other biologists hoped that 06 and her Lamar Canyon family had “learned their lesson.” Smith explained, “I thought she was immune. But it’s naïve to think that we have a wolf running around in Yellowstone that’s untouched by humans.”

  One December day in 2012 hunger again drove 06 to lead her mate, 755M, and family seventeen miles outside the park. There she too met a bullet. In an instant this majestic matriarch, who had inspired such devotion, was gone. Legally shot down by a hunter. He refused to be identified to the public or to claim his wolf trophy because he had killed the world’s most famous and beloved wolf. As some of the protests said, “One hunter now has a trophy, while 100,000 wolf watchers and visitors mourn her death.”

  Reaction was instantaneous and mostly negative. The New York Times eulogized 06 as “beloved by many tourists and valued by scientists.” She was the eighth radio-collared wolf killed by state-sanctioned hunts. Many people questioned whether the $4,000 radio collar she wore made 06 a susceptible and valuable target for antiwolf factions. Of the total ten Yellowstone wolves killed that year outside the park, five wore expensive research collars.

  Editorials and social media weighed in with the suspicion that wolf hunters had unfairly targeted wolves with radio collars. Yellowstone Wolf Project volunteer Laurie Lyman told reporters, “I’ve been standing on the side of the road watching wolves and had people pull up and say to me, ‘Lady, you better take a picture of those wolves because they’re the last you’re ever going to see.’”

  Many veteran wolf watchers believe the hunters targeted 06 because she was so famous. Scoring a kill on such a well-known wolf was a kind of coup for antiwolf protesters. For evidence of this unethical tracking via radio collars by nonscientists, Outside magazine reprinted a 2010 post (now withdrawn) from the website www.huntwolves.com.

  The post advised wolf hunters to hunt late into the night and scan for collars at a specific frequency. Although biologists made those wolf frequencies classified, it was not difficult to illegally hack into the radio-collar research and exactly locate a wolf. The post also explained how to turn off a radio collar by using a strong magnet. Destroying the radio collars of dead wolves meant that scientists also lost vital research.

  The revival of legal wolf hunts and the loss of 06 sparked international outcry. There was such universal dismay about 06’s death that Montana’s wildlife agency briefly suspended hunting and the imminent trapping season. Many wolf advocates wanted to expand the park’s boundaries to give wolves more protection. But others resisted giving wolves any more room to roam. Legal wolf hunting now continues in states bordering Yellowstone, with official kill quotas set for each Wolf Management Unit. In 2012, the year 06 was shot, the quota for wolf kills was thirty, about one-third of the eighty wolves who still survived in Yellowstone. That sam
e year the Montana State House of Representatives voted one hundred-to-zero against creating buffer zones around the park to protect wolves from traps and guns. So the wolf hunts go on. In 2016 the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission considered a request to increase wolf killing quotas from two wolves to six in one of the Yellowstone management units that borders Yellowstone, an area that has seen many wolves killed or poached.

  FOR THE BIOLOGISTS who have studied Yellowstone wolves for two decades, the loss of even a single wolf, especially one as much cherished and documented as 06, is profound. We are just beginning to understand wolf biology. Douglas Smith, the director of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, notes that studies of the social life of wolves are vital and still in the early stages. “Social means you have leaders and subordinates,” he explains. “We’re now looking at what the impacts are of a lead wolf dying vs. a subordinate wolf. Because wolves are social, one wolf is more important than another.… What happens to the pack after that leader is lost?”

  After 06 was shot, her mate, 755M, left his family. He’d not spent a single day without his brother, whom he’d lost only weeks before. Animals mourn. We know that now from much-documented research about animal emotions and behavior. Elephants will stand over a slain matriarch, touching her body with their sensitive trunks in what appears to be funeral rites; dolphin mothers will carry a stillborn, nudging and balancing the tiny offspring, until the baby disintegrates; gorillas, like the famous KoKo, now have the sign language to express delight over a pet kitten and then sorrow over her loss. Wolves, one of the most social animals of all, grieve over the death of a family member by howling alone. According to evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, wolves mourning a death often lose their spirit of playfulness, lowering their tails and heads when they near a place where one of their own was killed. Like our domesticated dogs, wolves’ expressions clearly show their emotions—from grief to pleasure.