The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  For ten years, Alaskans debated wolf controls. Ed Bangs, who was working in Alaska in the 1980s, recalls how emotional it was. When a small plane crashed in the bush, injuring the Department of Fish and Game personnel aboard, he heard people say, “Good, they deserved it for gunning down wolves.” The issue was so polarized that in 1986, when Cathie Harms, a young biologist in the Department of Fish and Game, proposed to assemble a public advisory committee to write recommendations to deal with this impasse, a nervous superior hushed her, looked apprehensively over his shoulder, and told her not to use the word “wolf” around the office.

  By 1989, a combination of hard winters, dry summers, human hunting pressure, and predators had brought many of Alaska’s moose and caribou populations to levels that game officials found alarmingly low. Declared department biologist Robert Boertje, “Moose will occur in low densities in Alaska unless wolf or bear populations are manipulated.” The department felt something had to be done. The Board of Game appointed a twelve-member panel of Alaskan citizens to look into the wolf issue and come up with a consensus view of the Alaskan wolves. The panel was chosen to represent the various interest groups—from trappers to birdwatchers—that might have a strong opinion about wolves.

  In 1991, the team came up with a report declaring that, as long as this conflict raged, people of extreme views would rush to each new administration to get their interests represented, and there would be no active effort to conserve wolves. It declared, “Wolves have intrinsic value and provide multiple values to society,” that “Wolf populations can sustain harvest, but sustainable harvest levels vary,” and that Alaska has “a special responsibility to ensure that wolves and their habitat are conserved.” It found that wolves can “in some situations keep prey populations at low levels,” and that “human intervention can speed recovery of the prey population in some cases.” It recommended that human harvesting of a declining moose or caribou population should stop before wolf-control programs were put into play, and that management plans be drafted, with population goals for wolves, bears, caribou, and moose, for each of the twenty-six game-management units in Alaska. By the fall of 1992, the department had prepared specific area management plans for the two game management units close to Anchorage and Fairbanks, and it was ready to recommend them to the Board of Game.

  Said David Kelleyhouse, director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation in the Department of Fish and Game, “We have bent over backwards and spent a ton of money incorporating all the views on this. Expectations are high. If this process doesn’t work, there’s no process that will.”

  • • •

  On a snowy night in November 1992, David Kelleyhouse sits at a table in the bar at Fairbanks’ Westmark Hotel, talking with friends about wolf control. Earlier that day, the Alaska Board of Game had begun its deliberations over the first two game-management-unit plans and the proposals contained in them to initiate the first government-operated wolf-removal program in almost ten years. Kelleyhouse is an advocate of predator control, and on the following morning, he will present the proposal to the board. He is feeling expansive. It is clear that he has the votes to win approval.

  Kelleyhouse has a jokester’s grin, a dimpled chin, and a drooping mustache that somewhat masks the smile and makes him look older and more field-worn. He came to Alaska in 1976, having completed a master’s thesis on black-bear ecology at California’s Humboldt State University, and went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, eliminating introduced fur-farm foxes from Aleutian islands to protect endangered Aleutian Canada geese. This project convinced him that by removing predators, managers could increase prey populations. He says today, “I went back after we had removed those foxes and, man, it was like the Garden of Eden as far as birds. There were petrels and puffins and murrelets and gulls, and they were ground-nesting. Flowers were growing up in the fox trails.” He then took a job with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “When I started at Alaska Fish and Game,” he says, “my very, very first assignment was to go deal with a pack of wolves that had followed the wife of my superior and her dogs.” He went on to participate in the studies that concluded wolf controls increased moose and caribou populations. Today, he believes wolf controls are urgently needed. Says Kelleyhouse, “We’ve got a real emergency situation south of Fairbanks. The Delta caribou herd has collapsed 50 percent in the last three years.” The Fortymile caribou herd numbered fewer than twenty-two thousand.

  Fish and Game officials look upon themselves as managers. Though they increasingly understand the need to manage whole ecosystems, most of the effort in game divisions goes to hunted species, because hunters still pay most of the bills. The oil boom of the 1970s brought more hunters to Alaska, but in 1980 the federal Alaska Lands Act set aside one hundred million acres of land as national parks, refuges, and preserves, and gave native Americans priority rights to hunt there. Native corporations also closed their lands to nonnative hunters. Sport and part-time subsistence hunters were squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. The Nelchina Basin—by virtue of its road access and proximity to Anchorage, where 40 percent of Alaska’s population resides—is heavily hunted. In 1991, there were fourteen thousand applications for hunts in the Nelchina Basin, but the department issued only sixty-five hundred permits. Says Oliver Burris, a former department official and now a spokesman for the Alaska Outdoors Council, which favors wolf controls, “In 1991, the total statewide moose harvest was seven thousand. It would not take much effort at all to produce a harvest of six thousand moose out of the Nelchina Basin alone.” Alaskan game officials feel they must do something to increase moose and caribou populations to meet the demand for hunting. And wolf control, they feel, is something they can do.

  To control the wolves, department officials would shoot them from airplanes and helicopters. Though the department has encouraged ground-hunting and trapping, such efforts have never taken more than 15 percent of a wolf population; for control to have an impact, there must be a take of at least 40 percent. Some people argue that it would be more effective and more humane to send department technicians out to remove wolf pups from dens and euthanize them with lethal injections, but the public would not stand for it. Some people suggest a return to poisons. Says Kelleyhouse, “It’s nonselective. I’m not willing to use toxicants.” He would love to be able to use birth control to lower the birth rate of wolves, but there are as yet only unsuccessful efforts to develop a chemical sterilant for dogs; such birth-control technologies for wildlife remain years—perhaps decades—away.

  If the department does nothing, and waits for nature to rebuild the herds, Kelleyhouse is convinced the hunters will act on their own. He points to British Columbia, where public outcry also shut down aerial wolf-control efforts. In the absence of government efforts to remove wolves, says Kelleyhouse, “the local people took it into their hands and started lacing the countryside with poisons. It’s out of control. I had the exact same kind of threats coming out of Alaska. Once the people decide to break the law, you’ve really lost it. You have no management of predators.”

  Kelleyhouse will propose three wolf-control efforts—one in the Nelchina Basin, one in the area of the Fortymile caribou herd, and one in the area of the Delta caribou herd, south of Fairbanks. The plans aim to increase the Delta caribou herd from its current 5,750 animals to between 7,500 and 8,000; increase the Fortymile caribou herd from 20,000 to 60,000 and the Fortymile moose population from 4,000–4,500 to 8,000–10,000; and increase moose in the Nelchina Basin from 22,000 to about 25,000 and to stabilize caribou in the basin at about 40,000 animals, down from its current 45,000. To do this, the department calculates it will have to remove 70 percent of the wolves in each of these areas for three to five years—longer if necessary.

  “The reason you can do wolf control in this state,” Kelleyhouse says, “is, we have an extensive wolf population and it’s like draining water from a well: more will flow in.” Once the moose and caribou populations reach target levels, he says,
the controls will stop. Kelleyhouse is confident that wolf populations would recover in a year or two. He adds that hunts are being considered only in these three areas, and “maybe we’re thinking about a small section in one other area. We don’t want to get into a bunch of wolf control.”

  Kelleyhouse believes that opponents of the plan simply don’t understand either the plan or wolf biology, and says that biologists who have worked sufficiently with wolves will agree with him. “Biologists working in the field tend to agree very closely about how wolves work,” he says. “Dave Mech would be the first one to tell you what he learned in the sixties is still valid—when prey is abundant and aren’t hard-pressed, they aren’t regulated by predators. But he’d be the first one to tell you, when prey isn’t abundant, predators regulate them.

  “There are a few biologists who have not worked with the wolf with hands on who have some opinions, some novel hypotheses, like the multi-equilibrium model of Dr. Haber. Gordon Haber flies over and he looks at these packs, but there’s no study design, there’s no publication. People like that have very strong opinions about wolves and they’ve read a lot of literature about wolves, but they haven’t actually worked with wolves.”

  As he says this, Gordon Haber, who has been sitting on the other side of the barroom, comes over to the table and sits down. Haber is dour and intense, an odd combination of observant and brash. He is not someone who laughs easily.

  Haber was drawn to wolves as a young man by reading Lois Crisler’s Arctic Wild, then grew more interested in them when, between academic years at Northern Michigan University, he worked summers as a fire lookout on Isle Royale. In 1966, he went to Alaska, in part to meet Adolph Murie, and he stayed to study the same wolf packs Murie had studied twenty-five years before. Haber settled into a graduate program at the University of British Columbia and made the Mount McKinley packs the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. He has been following the wolves of Denali National Park ever since.

  Though he hasn’t heard what Kelleyhouse just said, Haber is testy about such criticisms of his work. His research has consisted of observation, rather than manipulation—hence Kelleyhouse’s charges that it has little study design and that he hasn’t “actually worked with wolves.” He hasn’t extensively argued his views in the mainline scientific journals. A good deal of his work has gone into critiques of wolf-control proposals in Alaska and British Columbia. By temperament and his own preference, he is a contrary. “I don’t work for anybody,” he says. Indeed, he funds his own research in Denali National Park. “I’m independent. A lot of what I’m saying is very contrary to the established dogma, but I’m getting all my stuff directly from observation.”

  He says that the combination of Murie’s work and his own constitutes the longest continuous study of a single blood line of wolves, longer even than the study on Isle Royale. “I’ve seen far more of wolves than any other living person,” he says. “That’s a fact. I don’t say that to brag. You look at my Ph.D. thesis and it has 8,279 hours of observation. Since then, I’ve added another 2,000-plus. What I’m talking about is not just what I think happens or what I’ve heard trappers say, but what I’ve seen. In one winter, I covered over 2,665 miles of tracking the two packs. I know not only the kills they made; I know every single encounter they had with live moose and sheep; and I know their behavior. There’s nobody in the business, now or in the past, that has a sample that comes close to that.”

  He seems to enjoy his reputation for being thorny. Of the Park Service he says, “I’ve been their primary critic for twenty-seven years. In 1986, they decided, ‘We’ll get our own wolf-research project so we can get Haber out.” That year, the Park Service invited Mech to begin his Alaska study, and Haber was not asked to collaborate, even though they were studying the same packs. Mech’s study is now winding down, “but,” says Haber, “I’m still there. The Park Service has discovered they’re dealing with a mean son of a bitch. But they haven’t been able to run me out of there.”

  Haber believes most wolf and caribou biologists oversimplify the systems they study. He wants managers to see that nature is far more complex than they think. He believes, for example, that caribou herds expand and contract on cycles that take sixty to ninety years to complete. Herds briefly reach unimaginable numbers, collapse as weather changes and food supplies diminish, and then go through long periods of low density. Haber points out that the Fortymile caribou declined in the late 1800s. “Indians were starving to death there in the late 1800s. No amount of hunting could explain that decline.” And then the population came back to perhaps more than five hundred thousand in the 1920s. The herd doesn’t have a sustainable size, he says: it fluctuates wildly, with or without predation.

  Haber has been hired by Wolf Haven to critique the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s plan for wolf controls. His review of the plan led him to conclude, “The biology doesn’t make any sense, period.” And the essential misunderstanding, he says, is simple: “They feel they can replace the effect of natural predation with human harvest. We can increase the hunting and not have to do any wolf control. None.”

  He believes that the Delta and Fortymile herds are about to stage their own comebacks. The Western Arctic herd now numbers five hundred thousand. As the larger herds reach peak populations, they will connect with smaller herds through migration and range expansion, and infuse new life into them. All Alaska needs to do, he feels, is wait for this natural increase. And moose could be increased by harvesting older moose and encouraging a younger population that would have higher pregnancy and twinning rates and less vulnerability to predators.

  As he sits down across the table from Kelleyhouse, Haber starts right in objecting to the department’s wolf-control proposal, saying that the department’s population objectives for ungulates in the Nelchina Basin are too high. “Game Management 101,” he admonishes Kelleyhouse. It is a shorthand reference to the dome-shaped curve that is taught in wildlife-biology courses and that represents the growth and decline of moose or caribou populations. The highest reproductive rate for ungulates does not come at the top of the dome: reproduction is highest 20 to 40 percent below that peak, because at that level there are more individuals of breeding age. He tells Kelleyhouse, “You’re not going to get those increases at those larger populations; the highest production is farther back on the curve.”

  “You’re right,” says Kelleyhouse. “You want to keep them right up at the top of the curve, or back a bit. I’ve got a $100,000 or $150,000 budget to determine where they are on that curve. What did Tom Bergerud say on that? We’re better off with a herd of five thousand that is producing than with a herd of fifty thousand that’s not.”

  Haber says caribou numbers are already high in the Nelchina Basin. Why kill wolves if the object is to reduce caribou?

  Kelleyhouse responds as though Haber has questioned his professional competence: highlighting his sixteen years of experience with wolves, moose, and caribou, he tells Haber that he urged restoration of natural fires to improve moose habitat long before it became accepted practice in the department, and that he directed wolf-control efforts and participated in the research afterward that showed increasing ungulate numbers. “I’ve spent my whole career working on this,” he says.

  Haber reiterates that Alaska Department of Fish and Game can’t expect to have high production at the large populations the plan calls for. He says Alaska can’t aspire to be like Scandinavia, where there are high moose densities in the absence of wolves.

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” says Kelleyhouse, his conciliatory tone starting to thin. “You can’t have a Scandinavian situation here, because you’re not raising the kind of conifers that the moose like.”

  Haber continues to needle Kelleyhouse. The Fortymile moose numbered ten to twelve thousand in 1965, but dropped to below twenty-five hundred by 1980 due to severe winters and high grizzly-bear and wolf predation. To expect that region to carry ten thousand moose again is, Haber feels, to
ignore weather and other complexities.

  By now, Kelleyhouse has tired of Haber’s assault. “You know, Gordon,” he says, “we had our best talk at Edmonton, telling stories about times in the woods. When we start talking biology, we’ll never get anywhere. It’s like arguing religion or politics.” He says he’d like to relax now, to have a drink with his friends. He does not wish to continue this debate.

  But Haber, deaf to the entreaty, presses his case. “I think the decisions have to be based on some pretty tricky biology. How in the hell can you expect the board to understand it?”

  “My biologist is sitting there with the data when it comes to the cut,” says Kelleyhouse. With this he draws the conversation to a close, refusing to reply to any more of Haber’s arguments.

  There is a moment of uncomfortable silence, and across it stretches a gap that divides Alaska. It is not just wolves that inhabit this silence, but the very identities of Alaskans. Some see Alaska as a last frontier, a place where young Americans can go to find lofty independence in a life framed by adventure, risk, and limitless space. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, however, there is also a more settled Alaska, a place less given to risk and more to order, security, and cautious planning, a place in which wilderness is less a challenge than a reassurance. Haber, for all his hours following wolves, lives in Anchorage and is comfortable in the urban setting. He is apt to see rural hunters as people with little respect for biological complexity and the healing intelligence of nature. Kelleyhouse has for years lived in the small town of Tok, many of whose residents hunt and trap for food and winter cash. He is convinced the newly arrived city dwellers have lost their daily association with wildlife and their understanding of nature. Says Kelleyhouse, “I would say the vast majority of people testifying against this are recent arrivals [to Alaska]. They are urban residents. They don’t understand what life is like for rural residents.”