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.
Reintroduction was at best experimental. But in 1975, there were other reasons the National Park Service would not even come close to approving a reintroduction. Yellowstone was laboring under a heavier burden: recovery of grizzly-bear populations. Sheep ranchers had lost grazing allotments where grizzlies were known to summer, and one rancher near Yellowstone had actually been prosecuted for shooting a bear. Logging and mining operations were modified for the sake of bears, and parts of Yellowstone closed to hikers to keep them from encounters with bears. The park was already embroiled in conflict, and it was no time to invite new controversy.
Cole’s environmental assessment for a wolf release remained unsigned by the regional director of the Park Service. In 1975, Anderson retired and Cole transferred to Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota. John Townsley became the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park. Says Norman Bishop of the National Park Service, “John Townsley said to me in about 1980, ‘We aren’t going to mention wolf recovery until we get the grizzly on a good footing.’ He was very sensitive to the fact that if he even mentioned wolf recovery it could shoot grizzly recovery.”
• • •
In 1977, the first recovery plan for Northern Rocky Mountain wolf populations was written, but it made no specific recommendations for reintroduction. It was argued that a healthy population of wolves existed just across the border, in Canada, and because of that, species that seemed down to their last gasps, such as California condors or whooping cranes, were more deserving of attention. The argument that wolves should be returned to Yellowstone simply to restore the historic fauna was not in itself enough, but the argument would change.
Renée Askins would help to change it. When Askins was a student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan in the 1970s, she wanted to work with wolves. With Erich Klinghammer’s Indiana Wolf Park only two hours away, she arranged to do a behavioral study there. Watching wolves for as many as eighteen hours a day, she saw in them something powerful and moving, something reflective of the human need to balance impulse and order. She wrote a paper about the ways different religious traditions viewed wolves. One day, John Weaver was visiting Wolf Park to talk with Klinghammer about the behavioral implications of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park, and Askins met and talked with him. She visited Yellowstone and realized, “The longer I was with the captive wolves, the more painful and difficult the compromises of seeing them in captivity grew. Wildness joined what I experienced in Yellowstone and what I experienced with wolves in captivity. I made the commitment that I would spend time working to see them in the wild.” In 1981, she moved out west to work toward the return of wolves to Yellowstone.
Askins arrived in Yellowstone at a time when plans for reintroduction were becalmed. The Reagan administration had taken office with a vendetta against anyone who argued for programs which might restrict a private landowner’s property rights or use of public lands. The ranching community of the West was tied both ideologically and politically to the new administration, and ardent preservationists were ferreted out of the Department of the Interior. In 1982, Russell Dickenson, the director of the National Park Service, told Congress that the Park Service had no intention of introducing wolves into Yellowstone.
Askins wanted to get the issue rolling again. She heard about an exhibit prepared by the Science Museum of Minnesota entitled “Wolves and Humans,” a rich celebration of wolf complexity and personality. She decided that bringing it to Yellowstone would help create a broader constituency for wolf reintroduction, and that the exhibit might serve as a platform from which those already supporting reintroduction within the National Park Service could launch a renewed effort. Working with the Yellowstone Library and Museum Association, the National Park Service, and Defenders of Wildlife, she got a grant to bring the exhibit to Yellowstone, and organized a symposium on wolves to coincide with the opening. The Park Service was so impressed with her dedication and effectiveness that it hired her to work for the summer as coordinator of the exhibit. The exhibit was a huge success. Whereas the Park Service had doubted that thirty thousand people would visit the exhibit in the course of its display at Yellowstone, in fact 215,000 came to see it. “We just couldn’t handle them all,” recalls Askins. “We had to let people in fifty at a time.”
Blue-eyed, with long brown hair and a ready smile, Askins conveys at once innocent optimism and youthful enthusiasm. She has an affability and a likeness to people that draws her into conversation and inspires others to listen to her. On Askins’ second day on the job, William Penn Mott came to Yellowstone to be inaugurated as the new director of the National Park Service. After the ceremony, Yellowstone Park Superintendent Robert Barbee introduced Askins to Mott. Askins, unabashedly a persuader, set about convincing Mott not only that wolf reintroduction was ecologically desirable, but that it was an act with far-reaching implications for the human spirit. Mott was especially interested in the way parks might meet spiritual needs. He and Askins talked for an hour. And Mott listened.
Askins perceived that the debate about wolves is not just about historic faunas or ecosystem functions or loss of livestock. She realized that the debate is so laden with hidden meanings that it is almost wholly symbolic. “You can never predict the way people are going to connect to the animal,” she says. “They’re so wholly a metaphorical animal. They are a creature of dawn and dusk. In Minnesota three years ago, I was flying with Dave Mech, and there were thirteen wolves out on the ice on a little peninsula. We came around to see them again and—bump!—they were gone. The closest forest was a mile away—they couldn’t have gotten there. They just disappeared. I think they offer a vehicle for us to talk metaphorically about the things in our lives that are not here or we wish were here.
“Wolves represent something far greater than the consummate predator in an ecosystem,” she says. “When I talk about the wolf issue, I talk about the importance of wildness in our lives. It’s wildness that heals us. We need contact with it, regardless of whether we live in the city or in the Alaskan wilderness.
“Wolves offer that sense of wildness—the way wolves move, the way they play, their unpredictability, their living on the edge of their endurance, savage and surviving out there.” To see such things, she says, helps us to find ourselves.
Askins went on to Yale to earn a graduate degree in wildlife ecology, and twice during that year, Mott spoke at Yale. Both times, Askins lobbied him to work for wolf reintroduction. By the time of their second meeting at Yale, Mott was listing wolf reintroduction as one of his priorities. He had wolf buttons made, and he had gotten the Zion Natural History Association to produce educational materials about wolves. Says Askins, “He made an extraordinary issue out of wolf reintroduction. He started right from the beginning to mention it in his talks and put it on the agenda.” But once Mott put it on his agenda, he was undermined by Congress. When the Park Service sent Yellowstone Park biologist Norman Bishop out to do educational programs about wolves, the Idaho and Wyoming congressional delegations complained to the Reagan appointees at the top of the department, and the Park Service had to reel Bishop back in. When Mott indicated the National Park Service might move forward and write an environmental-impact statement on wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone, Senators Simpson and Wallop of Wyoming and Symms of Idaho prevented it. But Mott kept talking about wolf reintroduction. “He was gutsy,” says Askins.
After Yale, Askins returned to Wyoming. In 1986, she started a project aimed at the restoration of wolves in Yellowstone under the auspices of the Craighead Research Institute. And in 1990, she formed a separate group, the Wolf Fund, which would work toward the goal of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone by seeking out key individuals and convinc
ing them. Askins would meet, for example, with Interior Secretary Donald Hodel or Assistant Secretary William Horn, to try to get them to think about the issue. “We find people who comprise pivotal points in the way things work,” she said. “I think that’s how it’s done. This has to do with people and shifting bedrock. We try to move people.”
People were moving. Three hundred miles to the northwest of Yellowstone, in Missoula, Montana, Hank Fischer, of Defenders of Wildlife, was also working toward the reintroduction of wolves. Fischer had come to Montana from Ohio in the early 1970s, worked for a time as a free-lance writer. He took wildlife-biology courses at the University of Montana and then went to work for Defenders. The National Park Service’s 1980 management policies called for the restoration of species lost to parks through human agencies; that suggested that Yellowstone might be considered as a site for reintroduction. When a series of warm winters in the 1980s dramatically increased the elk herd from twelve to nineteen thousand, that seemed to Fischer to lend weight to the argument that predators were needed to help restore ecological balance. He began attending the meetings of the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Team to urge them to call for specific reintroductions. “Just getting to the point where we had a recovery plan that suggested reintroduction took four or five years. Getting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to sign the recovery plan took another one and a half years.” The revised plan, approved in 1987, called for reestablishment of the wolf in three areas: in Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, in central Idaho, and in Yellowstone National Park. Lacking the wholehearted support of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it was signed not by the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Frank Dunkel, but by John Spinks, deputy regional director.
The Company of Wolves Page 31
