channel and the PBS program Nature, including many on the wolves of Yellowstone. The plan that summer was that I would put Bob’s footage up on a monitor, describe the behavior of the wolves, and then talk about the proposed wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone.
Most of my time would be devoted to what the Park Service calls “roving interpretation.” That involves going to where the biggest crowds are and informally talking to as many people as possible. Only a small percentage of park visitors go to scheduled ranger programs, so there is a need to reach the many people who do not attend any of our talks. It is like being a street preacher, rather than a minister giving a sermon in church.
I borrowed a wolf pelt for the summer and tried to figure out how to attract the attention of visitors so I could tell them the reintroduction story. I remember the first time I stopped in the parking lot at Tower Fall. I put on my park ranger hat, checked my uniform, took out the wolf pelt, and started to walk toward a crowd of people. I was immediately surrounded by scores of visitors who all asked about the pelt.
I developed a talk where in a few minutes I explained that wolves were native to Yellowstone but had been killed off by the early rangers. The Park Service later realized what a mistake we had made and now hoped to reintroduce wolves to the park by bringing animals in from Canada. I talked to one cluster of people, then moved on to the next group. I could get my message out to about three hundred people an hour that way. Most of them would never have gone to any of the park’s formal programs. To add variety to my work, I went into gift shops with the pelt and strolled through the aisles. As they had done in the parking lots, people rushed over to see what I was carrying. I then went through my short talk before switching over to the next aisle.
In midsummer we got word that the park’s wolf reintroduction proposal had been approved by Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s secretary of the interior. From that point on I revised my talks to say we would be bringing the wolves back during the coming winter. By the end of the season, I estimated that I had talked to over 25,000 park visitors about wolves and the plan to reintroduce them to Yellowstone.
That summer I finished work on my second wolf book, War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf. It was a collection of historical documents going back to colonial days that traced the origins of anti-wolf bias in America and the reasons our country was determined to kill off all the wolves, even in national parks. The book also reprinted some of the early writings that began to portray wolves in a more positive light, such as Ernest Thompson Seton’s Lobo the King of Currumpaw. It finished with the current plans to bring wolves back to the Northern Rockies and the Southwest. I commissioned wolf biologists and wolf advocates to write new articles for the book and wrote several new essays myself on wolf recovery and the plans for Yellowstone. The book came out in the spring of 1995.
My job as wolf interpreter ended in September, the traditional time when park visitation dropped off. I had been invited to go on a speaking tour of Ireland and England that fall, and I left the park to talk about wolves and the Yellowstone reintroduction in Belfast, London, and several other cities. One of my lectures was to the Royal Zoological Society. I also was interviewed several times by BBC radio stations. The wolf reintroduction program was capturing international attention.
That fall I thought a lot about the summer I had spent in Yellowstone. A comment made by Henry David Thoreau, who grew up just a few miles from where I did in Massachusetts, came to mind. He was born in 1817, much too late to see wolves as he walked through the woods of New England. In an 1856 journal entry, he expressed his sadness over the extermination of wolves and other native animals in his area. He felt he lived in a tamed and emasculated country. Thoreau spoke of the sounds and notes of the natural world no longer in his woods and mourned that he had to live in an incomplete land. He went on to say, “I listen to a concert in which so many parts are missing.” The most prominent of those missing sounds was the howling of wolves. Yellowstone in 1994 was in the same state as Thoreau’s native land of Massachusetts. There was an unnatural silence in the park, a silence uninterrupted by the sound of wolves. But that silence was about to be broken. Wolves were coming back.
2
Wolves Arrive in Yellowstone
AFTER MY TRIP overseas I returned to Big Bend for my second winter season. That fall Yellowstone hired two wolf biologists to plan the reintroduction and to monitor and research the wolves after their release: Mike Phillips and Doug Smith. Mike, the only biologist in the country with wolf reintroduction experience, was designated the project leader. He had worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service as the Red Wolf Recovery Program coordinator and had overseen the reintroduction of that species in North Carolina.
Doug had spent many years researching wolves in Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior under the supervision of Rolf Peterson of Michigan Tech. He later did wolf studies in northern Minnesota for the US Fish and Wildlife Service under Dave Mech, who was also a professor at the University of Minnesota. Dave had helped Durward Allen of Purdue University start up the Isle Royale wolf study back in 1958. It became the longest-running wolf research project ever undertaken. Rolf took over supervision of the study in 1974. Doug’s experience with Dave and Rolf meant that he was trained by two of the top wolf biologists in the world. Mike had worked on Isle Royale with Doug, so they knew each other.
In January of 1995, I went on another speaking tour, this time in Ohio. That happened to be the same time the wolves arrived in Yellowstone. Fourteen wild wolves, members of three packs and one lone male, had been captured in Alberta, about 550 miles north of Yellowstone. They arrived in the park in a horse trailer on January 12, and I watched the CNN television coverage of the event.
When I got back to Big Bend, I got more detailed information from friends in Yellowstone. The three packs had been put in separate acclimation pens in the northern section of the park near where I had been based at Tower Junction. That was an area with a high density of elk, the primary prey species for the original Yellowstone wolves, as well as for the packs newly arrived from Alberta. Each pen was about an acre in size.
The first two wolves captured were a mother and her female pup from the McLeod pack. Another female pup from that family had just been shot and all the other members of that pack, including the alpha male, likely were dead, killed by hunters and trappers. The mother (designated as wolf 9) and pup (wolf 7) were the only known survivors. They were placed in a pen built in Lamar Valley behind the Yellowstone Institute. Because the pack did not have a breeding male, a wolf captured as a lone male was also put in that pen. He was given the number 10. The group was named the Rose Creek pack.
The pack described in the prologue ended up in a pen six miles east of Tower Junction and became known as the Crystal Creek pack. The alpha pair (female 5 and male 4) and their four male pups were the wolves television crews filmed when rangers and other park staff unloaded their metal cages from the truck and took them up to the pen on a sled pulled by mules. The pup designated as wolf 8 was the little gray in the prologue. At 72 pounds, he was the smallest of the four brothers and of all the fourteen wolves brought in from Canada. The last one in his pack to be captured, he almost got left behind.
The five members of the Soda Butte pack, known in Canada as the Berland pack, ended up in a pen in Lamar Valley, east of the Yellowstone Institute.
As death threats had been made against the wolves, armed law-enforcement rangers guarded the packs twenty-four hours a day while they were in the pens. Those rangers, who trudged through deep snow in subzero temperatures throughout the long Wyoming winter nights, were the unsung heroes of the story. Thanks to their dedicated work, no wolves were harmed while in their pens.
During the ten weeks the wolves
