when we lost track of many of the un-collared wolves, due to death or dispersal. Eventually the system was changed so that only collared animals were given numbers. As wolves settled in sections of Wyoming and Montana adjacent to the park, we shared our numbering system with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. If they planned a new round of wolf collaring, they would contact our office, find out the last number we had used, and assign the next consecutive numbers to the wolves they captured. The collars allowed us to get a signal from a wolf from as far away as ten miles if it was on a high ridge. If the wolf was behind a ridge, the signal would be blocked and probably would not be picked up even as close as half a mile away.
In September, I twice helped Mark Johnson, the project veterinarian, when he went into the pen to feed the wolves. We carried meat up to the pen, opened the gate, dropped off the pieces, then left as quickly as we could to reduce the chances the wolves would get used to our presence or associate people with the sudden appearance of food. When we entered the pen, the mother and pups ran to the far end of the enclosure, then raced back and forth, trying to get farther away from us. After we left, they soon calmed down. As they walked around the pen, they discovered the meat and fed on it as they would on finding a carcass in the wild.
During my moments in the pen, I briefly glanced at the mother wolf and pups, then concentrated on getting out. The first time I was in the pen I saw a big black wolf I assumed was the adult female. Then I saw a bigger black that was obviously the mother and realized my mistake. The other big black wolf was a really large pup. After Mark and I left the pen, we looked around for the two pups still at large but did not find them. When we went back to feed the wolves a week later, I spotted several large wolf droppings outside the pen that looked old. They were probably from alpha male 10 when he had waited patiently for the two females to leave the pen and join him.
Mark fed the wolves far more often than I did. Years later he told me a story that profoundly affected me. He had gone into the pen to leave meat for the pack. After dropping off the meat, he noticed that one of the black pups was acting differently from the other wolves, who were running around at the far end of the pen. That pup positioned himself halfway between Mark and the rest of the family, then repeatedly circled around him. To Mark, it looked like the young pup was acting like the pack’s alpha male, protecting his mother and siblings from a threat. The pup never approached him, and Mark did not feel threatened, but the message was clear: do not come closer.
Mark realized that he had seen that behavior before. When the original three wolves had been in the pen the previous winter, the big male would get between Mark and the two females, then circle around him in a calm and confident manner. That black pup had never known his father but was behaving the same way the alpha male had to protect his family. The pup was literally walking in his father’s footsteps, doing what his father would have done if he had still been alive. As I mentioned earlier, Mark is an expert at identifying dogs and wolves as they get older. He finished his story by telling me he believed the brave pup who took on the responsibility of defending his pack was 21, who would grow up to be the park’s heavyweight champion. I then realized that the big black pup I had seen when I had been in the pen was also 21.
THE STORY OF the Rose Creek wolves, the killing of wolf 10, and the return of the mother wolf and her eight pups to the pen became well known to the public through many reports in the media. In late August, President Clinton and his family were vacationing in Jackson, Wyoming. It was his administration that had approved Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction proposal. White House staff had contacted the park superintendent and asked if the Clintons could come to Lamar Valley and see the Rose Creek wolves. On August 25, I drove by the Yellowstone Institute and saw the presidential helicopters parked nearby. Mike and Doug took the first family up to the pen, and the Clintons helped bring in meat for the other famous family: wolf 9 and her eight pups.
Because of all the media coverage, there was tremendous public interest in the wolf acclimation pens. In addition to helping visitors see wolves in Lamar Valley, doing roving interpretation there, and giving my evening slide shows in park campgrounds, I also led twice-weekly hikes to the Crystal Creek acclimation pen. Normally, ten to thirty people show up for park ranger–led hikes. I had up to 165 visitors join me on the pen walk. I had done so many nature walks during my Park Service career that I was confident managing the large crowds that came with me. On the way to the pen, I paused periodically and told the wolf reintroduction story in stages. I always stopped at an old aspen grove and had people look at the hundreds of shoots coming up from the roots. Aspens usually regenerate from roots of existing trees rather than from seeds, and I pointed out how every shoot had been browsed to death by hungry elk in the winter months.
We now know that after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed off in 1926, the elk population skyrocketed, because one of their main controlling factors had been eliminated. (Cougars also prey on elk, and the rangers killed them off during that time as well.) In the early 1960s, the Park Service brought in range management experts to analyze the vegetation in the northern section of the park, an area known as the Northern Range. In their 1963 report, they estimated that the carrying capacity for elk wintering in that region was about five thousand, well below the number living there at the time.
Going all the way back to the 1920s, the Park Service live-trapped and shipped out Yellowstone elk to any state or Canadian province or zoo that wanted them. Rangers also shot elk to reduce the overpopulation. Due to the controversy over shooting elk, that program ended in 1968. The capture program was also shut down. By that time, 26,400 elk had been removed from the park, either dead or alive. The elk population rapidly increased from that point on. Just prior to the arrival of the wolves from Canada in 1995, there were 19,000 elk wintering in the Northern Range, nearly four times the estimated carrying capacity of the area. The overpopulation led to extreme overbrowsing of aspen shoots, extensive damage to willows growing along creeks and rivers, and erosion along waterways due to loss of vegetation.
As we approached the pen area, I finished the story of how the wolves had been placed in the acclimation pens and later released into the wild. Then I said we would go around a nearby rocky knoll to a point where they could see the pen. I added that I would not talk when we got to that viewpoint, because I wanted each person to have a quiet moment to see the pen and think of its significance. We silently walked around that knoll, and the hikers finally saw the pen. After hearing so much about it, seeing the pen was an emotional event for visitors, especially when they noticed the panel where the exit hole had been cut. That was the exact spot where the first pack of wolves had come out of the pen to become permanent Yellowstone residents. It was the wolf equivalent of Plymouth Rock.
Due partly to the return of wolves, and partly to other factors such as rising numbers of mountain lions and bears, increased human hunting north of the nearby park border, competition from larger numbers of bison, and climatic changes, winter elk numbers in the northern section of the park dropped in the coming years. They eventually stabilized in the six thousand to seven thousand range, a level more sustainable for the ecosystem.
As the wolf packs became more settled in the park, I continued to lead hikes up to the pen site and often hiked up there on my own. Within a few years the aspen trees near the pen site were producing tens of thousands of surviving shoots each spring, which soon formed a forest nearly as dense as a bamboo thicket. Willows also began to flourish along Crystal Creek, and beaver, which need aspen trees and willows for food and building materials, moved in and colonized the area. When documentary filmmakers come to Yellowstone to do stories on the wolf reintroduction, Doug Smith takes them to that creek to point out the amazing recovery of the ecosystem.
My Park Service job ended in early September, but I stayed on in the park to look for wolves. That fall I got together a group of volunteers, and we helped Doug carry fence panels to a new acclimation pen site in the Blacktail Plateau area, about ten miles west of Tower. Mike and Doug planned on bringing in four more packs from Canada, and two new pens needed to be constructed. The Rose Creek and Crystal Creek pens would be reused for the other two packs.
