f you’re sleeping in a hotel just outside Yellowstone National Park, you’ll need to set your alarm for 4:00 a.m. If you’re camping inside the park or sleeping at the rustic Roosevelt Lodge, congratulations—you can hit the snooze button and doze until 4:30. But if you want to see what everyone’s talking about, you’ll need to crawl out of bed long before the sun rises, grab a thermos full of coffee, and head for Lamar Valley in the northeast corner of the park, because that’s where all the action is. There’s no need to show your park pass at the gate—it’s so early the park rangers haven’t even reported to work yet. Just follow Route 212 until you see the sign for Slough Creek. A yellow Nissan Xterra marks the spot: Rick McIntyre’s trademark lemon-yellow SUV is a beacon for bleary-eyed wolf watchers, and a sure sign that you’re in the right place.
As a Park Service employee and unofficial leader of the pack, McIntyre hasn’t missed a day behind the ’scope in years. More often than not, he’s joined by dozens of people peering through binoculars in search of the same quarry. Once a wolf is spotted, the crackle of handheld radios relays its location in seconds, and rows of high-powered telescopes mounted on tripods pivot in the same direction, like Rockettes at Radio City. If your old pair of binoculars is making you cross-eyed, don’t worry. Most of these folks are glad to let you glance through their lens. This is a spectacle that’s best shared.
A little more than a decade after the first pack of gray wolves was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park—marking the animal’s return after 70 years—it has become the best place for wolf-watching in all of North America, if not the entire world. Wildlife biologists with the Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) knew the odds of a successful reintroduction were good, given the wolves’ incredible ability to adapt and the immense size and ideal ecology of the Greater Yellowstone area, which includes Grand Teton National Park and several national forests. That prime habitat, combined with a steady diet of elk and political protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act, have yielded 250 wolves and 25 packs in the greater Yellowstone region, at last count. And the wolf watchers have followed, boosting tourism in the region at least $20 million annually, by conservative estimates. Those responsible for the reintroduction never anticipated anything like this.
“Honestly, we were blindsided—none of us ever thought the wolves would be visible,” says Doug Smith, wolf project leader at Yellowstone National Park. “I worked on Isle Royale National Park for 13 years and if I saw one wolf a summer, I was thrilled, but here in Yellowstone, people now expect to see wolves and a lot of them do.”
Wolves are notoriously elusive, and because these packs came from a forested region of Canada, they were expected to seek cover and avoid open spaces, as do wolves in Isle Royale and Denali. But the Yellowstone wolves soon grew accustomed to the roads and the automobile traffic, and quickly learned to tolerate people. As a result, it has been more than four years since a day went by without a single wolf sighting in the park.
Not surprisingly, the local business community and tourism industry have pounced on the opportunity, providing guides who can explain the biological intricacies of wolf behavior and increase the odds that visitors see what they came to see. Hotels now advertise visits to Yellowstone in the spring and fall, times when they generally wouldn’t have bothered; some even rent telescopes and tripods.
“If it weren’t for the wolves, I probably wouldn’t be in business,” says Carl Swoboda, director of operations for Safari Yellowstone, a touring outfit based in Livingston, Montana. “Ninety percent of the people who come here want to see wolves—clients come from as far as Spain, England, Switzerland, and France. Before the wolf reintroduction, our staff included one person who was barely making it, and now we have a staff of three to five, year-round. Ten years ago, a handful of groups were offering these types of trips, now more than 50 different organizations are involved.”
The second incredible consequence of wolf reintroduction is actually dozens of smaller consequences wrapped into one. And it all came to light thanks to an ecologist investigating trees.
In 1997, Bill Ripple, a professor with the Department of Forest Resources at Oregon State University, was researching the decline of aspen in Yellowstone’s northern range when he went out on a limb, so to speak, and theorized that the absence of wolves was the primary reason.
Ripple investigated the theory by first taking core samples of nearly 100 aspen to determine their age. He soon learned that nearly every tree was at least 70 years old. In other words, since the 1920s, aspen had been unable to sprout new specimens that could survive. “When we learned that the last wolves in Yellowstone had been killed in 1926, we hypothesized that wolves might have a significant influence on the growth of aspen through cascading effects,” says Ripple. “Wolves eat elk and elk eat aspen, so we believed that the lack of the wolves actually led to the decimation of aspen.” Although ecologists had long known about cascading effects among spiders and various aquatic species such as sea otters, research on large predators was sparse. But conditions at Yellowstone provided 70 years of ongoing data, and the wolf-reintroduction provided an unfolding story for comparison.
“Since the wolves have come back, we’ve begun to see some of the woody species returning, as we’d expect,” says Ripple. “The first plants to respond were the willows, and we’re just seeing some of the cottonwoods come back as well—we’re pretty sure wolves are playing a big part in all this new growth.” But wait, there’s more.
“Willow regrowth creates opportunities for increased biodiversity in a number of ways,” says Ripple. “Taller willows provide more food for any beaver that are around—since the willow has reappeared, Yellowstone’s northern range has gone from one beaver colony to at least eight beaver colonies. Taller willows and more extensive willow species also provide better habitat for certain bird species and provide for a stream-bank protection, decreased erosion, and additional shade cast on the water, which is good for trout.”
Of course, analyzing ecological connditions such as these is much like analyzing economic conditions: Countless variables make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Some scientists believe that the resurgence of willow is closely related to the severity of winters and seasonal rainfall, along with a new variable—global climate change. What’s more, wolves have only been around for ten years, a blink of an eye in ecological terms.
“We need multiple decades at the minimum to make firm conclusions,” says Ripple, “but during the 70 years without wolves, there were times of drought, severe winters and mild winters, fires and the absence of fires, and none of that made any difference on aspen until wolves came along.”
In fact, wolves may not even need to kill a sizable number of elk to trigger these changes, but by simply being present on the landscape wolves force elk to favor certain areas with better escape terrain. If that hypothesis is true, the impact of wolves should have played out shortly after their reintroduction, and the numbers are already bearing that out. And even if these indirect effects aren’t yet proven, wolves have plenty of direct effects that are more easily discerned. “We all sensed very early on that wolves would restore the normal distribution of scavenge in the park,” says Norm Bishop, a retired Park Service employee who worked closely on the reintroduction effort. “In the absence of wolves there weren’t many carcasses of large ungulates like deer, elk, and bison between December and February. If the ground is frozen or everything is under a foot of snow, what’s left for a raven, eagle, or wolverine to eat? The best bet for a meal is to find something that’s already been killed by another animal. But most large carnivores hibernate in winter or hide their carcasses quite well, so that just leaves wolves.”
A study by Yellowstone biologist Daniel Stahler revealed that before wolves had been returned to the park, an average of four ravens scavenged an individual elk carcass, but after wolf reintroduction, each carcass averaged 29 ravens, and some drew as many as 135, prompting wildlife biologists to wonder how ravens ever survived without wolves.
“What we see happening in Yellowstone won’t necessarily happen somewhere else, so we have to be careful about how far afield we extend these results,” says Mike Phillips, former head of the wolf reintroduction program and now executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund. “It’s very difficult to parse out the variables and describe cause and effect—quite often the best we can hope to do is describe patterns. But Yellowstone has absolutely fascinating implications [for future] policy decisions. This reintroduction has brought us to the point where we must develop an appropriate answer to the question: What is recovery? The Endangered Species Act says, ‘If you give us the support so we can identify, list, and work to recover these species, we’ll succeed,’ but what is success?”
Most people agree that wolves have recovered throughout the northern Rockies, but views differ on whether or not protections should be removed. Although bald eagles have made a dramatic recovery and the American alligator has been delisted, none brings with them the expense and controversy associated with wolves.
Even so, everyone agrees that the animal’s protection must eventually be passed from the federal government to the states bordering Yellowstone. USFWS has already agreed that “substantial information indicates that delisting may be warranted” and has approved the wolf-management plans crafted by Idaho and Montana. But in Wyoming, politics trumped the recommendations of state biologists, yielding an obviously ineffective plan: State law currently categorizes wolves as predatory animals, which means wolves outside of Yellowstone and other protected areas can be killed anytime by anyone by any means, without any limits. The struggle between USFWS and the state of Wyoming is sill playing out in court, and delisting cannot be achieved until all three states’ plans are approved.
In spite of Yellowstone’s success, many people in this country still consider wolves in much the same light as they were viewed 100 years ago, when the animals were first removed to make way for farms and ranches. We’ve succeeded in returning wolves to the American landscape, and we’ve witnessed their ability to return the landscape to its natural balance. But as the protections for these animals are handed over to the states surrounding Yellowstone, many people wonder if wolves will be able to endure the next consequence.
Scott Kirkwood is senior editor for National Parks magazine.
