The effort to retire national forest grazing leases around Greater Yellowstone was spearheaded by the National Wildlife Federation. By 2015, the program had retired 750,000 acres, greatly reducing conflicts between wolves and ranchers in the area. Another nonprofit, WildEarth Guardians, worked with ranchers to reduce livestock losses through the use of nonlethal deterrence techniques, including fladry (hanging flapping banners on fences to scare predators) and increased human presence (e.g., hiring range riders).
Epilogue
The account of Rick’s fete at the Range Rider is from my own notes on the event and from my interviews with those present. Rick told the story about the boy whose father had a wolf permit in “06 Female,” Snap Judgment, NPR, May 23, 2014. My account of Rick’s illness is from my interviews with Rick and his friends.
After the death of O-Six, the mantle of world’s most famous wolf fell to a gray female who had been collared by Wyoming game officials near Cody. In October 2014, she showed up at the north rim of the Grand Canyon, the first wolf sighted in the area since the 1940s. Her 750-mile journey made national headlines and inspired conservation groups backing Arizona’s troubled wolf recovery program. Twenty years after they were reintroduced to the state, fewer than one hundred wolves were still confined to a modest tract of national forest land two hundred miles south of the Grand Canyon. The heavily wooded high country around the Grand Canyon had excellent potential as wolf habitat, but over the years any wolf attempting to make the journey north had been either captured and returned or shot, to protect the state’s cattle industry.
Now a wolf had made it to the area at last, albeit from an unexpected direction. Hundreds of schoolchildren from around the world submitted names for the wolf in a contest organized by conservation groups; the winning entry, offered by a ten-year-old from Oregon, was Echo. “Because she came back to the Grand Canyon, like an echo does,” the boy explained.
She didn’t wear the name for long. About two months after her surprise appearance made the papers, she wandered into Utah, where a hunter mistook her for a coyote. The headline tells the story: “Grand Canyon Wolf That Made Epic Journey Shot Dead in Utah,” National Geographic, February 13, 2015.
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American Wolf Page 28
