Denali National Park contains America's best-known and most frequently viewed wolves, and for the last decade, a growing number of people have sought greater protections for these animals.
By Bill Sherwonit
If you want to see a wild, unpenned wolf up close, there is no better place to go in Alaska-and perhaps the world-than Denali National Park and Preserve. This summer, if recent trends held true, some 20,000 to 30,000 people saw Denali wolves without ever leaving their cars or vans or the shuttle and tour buses that travel the park's one road.
On average, about 10 percent of visitors who travel the Denali Park Road see wolves; those are the best odds you can get in any of our nation's parklands. The luckiest tourists may hear wolves howl, or see them nap, stalk and kill prey, or shepherd litters of pups within yards of Denali Park Road. Or even walk upon it.
What makes the Denali experience unusual-some would argue, unique-is the presence of wolves that have become habituated to humans and their vehicles. Anywhere from 50 to 170 wolves have inhabited Denali's 6.2 million acres since the mid-1980s, in a dozen to two dozen packs. But only a small portion of those wolves pass within sight of the park road. Nowadays, two families account for nearly all roadside sightings: the East Fork or Toklat pack and the Margaret pack, named after Mount Margaret.
There's only one problem-but to wolf advocates, it's a big one. The territories of those two packs extend beyond Denali's boundaries onto state land, and when they venture outside the park, America's best-known and most frequently viewed wolves are sometimes killed by hunters and trappers. Occasionally in the past, entire packs have been decimated.
From a population-biology perspective, the human take of a few Denali wolves, or even an entire pack, is not cause for concern. Research done between 1986 and 2002 showed that Denali's parkwide wolf population is "vigorous and viable," as L. David Mech and his team of scientists reported in their 1998 book, The Wolves of Denali. It is also in constant flux. During that 15-year period, biologists identified 44 different packs; most lasted three years or less. Twenty-five packs "died out" from natural causes, while only two were destroyed by human harvest.
"There's constant turnover, of both individual wolves and packs," says Layne Adams, who worked on the project from its start and was its leader from 1993 through 2002. "As some packs die out, others are forming."
Overall, researchers say, humans annually kill about 3 percent of Denali's wolves. A much higher percentage die from other "natural" causes: avalanches, drownings, starvation, disease, old age, and, above all, other wolves. About 60 percent of the wolves that die are killed by neighboring packs.
"As a scientist, my stand has always been that human harvest is largely insignificant to the functioning of wolf packs park-wide," Adams says. "There's simply no biological reason to give Denali's wolves additional protection. I recognize that other values and arguments come into play; it's just not my job to enter that philosophical realm."
Other Alaskans who've watched and studied Denali's wolves are less hesitant to mix ethics, philosophies, and value judgments with science.
Since the early 1990s, a growing number of residents, including NPCA's Alaska-based staff, have sought greater protection for Denali's highest-profile wolves. As regional director Jim Stratton says, "Where else can the average visitor hope to see wolves? It's obvious these wolves have great value. We need to do what we can to protect them."
In 1992 the Alaska Board of Game approved a 600-square-mile, no-harvest wolf "buffer" zone around Denali, as part of a statewide plan to balance consumptive and non-consumptive uses of wolves. But the board quickly rescinded its action when a proposed wolf-control program elsewhere in Alaska was abandoned because of public opposition and tourism-boycott threats.
Despite repeated requests, the Board of Game refused to consider new buffer proposals until November 2000, when it approved a 19-square-mile closure near Denali's northeast corner to protect the East Fork wolves. It expanded that closure to 89 square miles in May 2001, but with a condition: The buffer would terminate in March 2003, unless extended.
Last October, the pro-wolf Alaska Wildlife Alliance returned with new proposals that would eliminate the sunset clause; double the size of the northern buffer; and add a second, 146-square-mile buffer along Denali's eastern edge, to protect the Margaret wolves when they leave the park. By a 4-2 vote, the board settled on a compromise: 53 square miles would be closed to hunting and trapping along the park's eastern boundary, and both buffer areas would become permanent.
Initially, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance seemed satisfied by the action. In an email to supporters, the group proclaimed, "WE DID IT," and thanked those who'd helped to send "over 8,000 petitions, faxes, emails, and letters" to the board. (At that meeting, NPCA's Durelle Smith reported that the association had received another 4,300 signed petitions and 2,000 emails supporting the buffer.) The alliance also thanked the Park Service, which "spoke out eloquently on behalf of these wolves." More recently, however, the group's conservation biologist, Paul Joslin, has admitted the buffer is "far less than ideal. It doesn't do what we'd hoped."
Other wolf supporters have been far more critical. Professional wildlife photographer and wolf activist Dorothy Keeler came to the board seeking "full and complete protection for the Toklat and Margaret wolves," while hauling 2,600 letters of support from all 50 states and 57 countries. She left the meeting "shocked and terribly disappointed" by the compromise. "That chopped-up buffer is wholly inadequate," Keeler explains. "It's only a matter of time before the Margaret pack is eradicated, just like the ones before it."
First identified by researchers in 2000, the Margaret pack is the fifth to inhabit Denali park's entrance area since the early 1980s. Its territory, like those of the four previous families-the Savage, Headquarters, Jenny Creek, and Sanctuary packs-stretches onto state land east of the park. Experience suggests that some Margaret wolves are likely to be trapped. And that human kill may contribute to the pack's ruin.
"The packs that occupy the eastern end of the park have a proven history of being trapped and shot, of being eliminated," says Vic Van Ballenberghe. A wildlife biologist who's studied Denali's mammals, primarily moose, since 1980, Van Ballenberghe was among the Board of Game members to seek maximum protections for the Margaret pack.
"If there's any pack that deserves protection, it's this one," he says. "These are the wolves that people see along the first 15 miles of road [open to private vehicle traffic]. The benefits of preserving that experience are enormous, while the costs are minimal; only a few trappers would be affected. But we kept paring the buffer down, until we got something less than what's needed to do the job right."
Van Ballenberghe agrees that, in the bigger, park-wide picture, the loss of the Margaret pack would not be terribly significant because eventually other wolves would fill the void. But he believes that more than population biology must be considered. In the early 1990s, when the Headquarters pack was at its peak, its members were frequently seen along the park road. After the pack disintegrated in 1995, wolves were rarely spotted along that 15-mile stretch for several years. "Clearly," he says, "pack disruption affected the wolves' viewability."
Most arguments for a buffer center around that "viewability," including its economic effects. With more than 300,000 visitors annually, Denali National Park is one of Alaska's prime visitor attractions, and most people travel there for two main reasons: to see Mount McKinley and to watch wildlife. As a citizens advisory group reported to the Board of Game in October 2000, "Wolves are one of the most highly sought species of wildlife by visitors to the park…if just each wolf sighting were valued at one dollar, then the value of these wolves for viewing vastly outweighs their value as furbearers for trappers and hunters."
In fact, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game study done in the early 1990s showed that visitors place great economic value on wolf viewing. On average, nonresidents indicated a willingness to spend $212 for a day trip to see a pack of wolves. And where would they go, except Denali? Economically, it's no contest: viewable Denali wolves bring in lots more dollars to Alaska than trapped or hunted ones.
There are other, more philosophical, arguments for no-harvest buffers. In sharp contrast to Mech and Adams, Gordon Haber insists that certain wolf families-most notably the East Fork-are scientifically invaluable. (Haber dislikes the use of "pack"; "family," he says, is the proper scientific term.) Besides being the world's most-viewed wolves, the East Fork or Toklat pack, says Haber, "is the world's oldest known family lineage of any nonhuman social vertebrate in the wild and by far the longest studied among wolves."
An independent wildlife scientist, Haber has followed the East Fork wolves since 1966. There's been plenty of turnover in those 37 years, but the East Fork family has never disintegrated, though during the winter of 1997-98 it shrank to only two members, in part because of trapping. Haber believes the family group he's tracked for nearly four decades is descended from the East Fork pack that naturalist Adolph Murie studied intensively from 1939 to 1941 and later described in his wildlife classic, The Wolves of Mount McKinley.
In his introduction to The Wolves of Denali, David Mech praises Murie as "the legendary pioneer of wolf studies…Murie actually observed a pack of wolves around its den, a rare feat even to this day, and watched individually recognizable pack members interact with each other. He also recorded their interactions with prey, and with other community fauna." Among other contributions, Murie "laid the foundation for understanding the wolf pack as basically a family."
Mech and Adams agree with Haber that today's East Fork pack inhabits the same area it did in Murie's time and carries "the legacy of Murie's study and writing." But they don't buy his notion of a long-lived family lineage. "There's no evidence of any genetic link to Murie's East Fork pack," Adams says. "Gordon's contentions just don't hold up against the preponderance of evidence that we've accumulated."
Haber replies that he's never claimed the lineage is genetic; rather, it's based on learned behavior and traditions. "I'm talking about a social group that has persisted in a cultural sense," he says, "in much the same way that generations of an established Nebraska family have continued to work an old farmstead. There's so much to be learned from a family lineage that's existed for up to 60 years or more." For that reason and others, Haber advocates "full, 100 percent protection" for the East Fork [as well as the Margaret] wolves. Anything less is "a feel-good, but ultimately useless strategy."
Though the park's wolf-research team has rejected Haber's ideas, others say they have merit. "The way I see it, Layne [Adams] and Mech are presenting one view, that emphasizes population biology, while Gordon offers a different, but legitimate, scientific argument," Van Ballenberghe says. "The idea of long-term cultural transmission of behaviors seems valid."
Denali superintendent Paul Anderson remains unconvinced, however. He stands firmly behind the conclusions of Mech's team: From a parkwide perspective, the human kill of Denali wolves is not a problem. "The research of the past 16 years and other work before that," says Anderson, "have shown that things are in pretty good shape." And no pack merits special protection, because none is unique. Anderson also questions whether a buffer will actually enhance visitors' chances of seeing wolves. So he, like past superintendent Steve Martin, has stayed neutral on the buffer issue.
Anderson, it turns out, is bothered by a different worry: that Denali's wolves have become too comfortable around people. "Contrary to what Gordon Haber and some others have to say, I don't agree that habituation is good," Anderson says. "I'll be the one held accountable if someone is threatened or harmed, and we have to kill a wolf."
In the end, it seems almost no one is happy with the current buffer. Wolf advocates say it's too small to be effective; others, including trappers and some Alaska sportsmen's groups, argue that wolves are overly protected, at the expense of moose, caribou, and traditional rural lifestyles.
The ongoing buffer debate is likely to take a new turn in March 2004, when Denali's wolves will again be on the Board of Game's agenda. Alaska's new governor, Frank Murkowski, has appointed several new members to the board, and its current make-up is decidedly less friendly toward wolves; already the board has approved new wolf-control programs in three different areas. People on all sides of the issue are predicting the buffer will be removed. If that happens, vows photographer-activist Dorothy Keeler, "All hell will break loose."
