Northwest Wildlife
Restoring Native Species for Healthier Ecosystems
The Northwest Regional Office of NPCA is working to restore the full complement of native wildlife species to our Northwest national parks, with an initial focus on Olympic and North Cascades National Parks.
Olympic National Park has successfully maintained many of its native species, including its endemic species—those animals that only exist in Olympic National Park—including the Olympic marmot, Olympic Yellow-Pine chipmunk, Olympic snow mole, Olympic masama pocket gopher, and the Olympic Ermine. Recent efforts have focused on returning once native species to the park such as the fisher and gray wolf. While we are still working on bringing back the gray wolf, the reintroduction of the fisher has been extremely successful. For more information on this remarkable program, click here.
Also, the park is getting closer to removing two dams on the Elwha River, which will be the largest dam removal in the history of the US. Once these dams are removed, salmon will return to the interior of the park bringing with them a wealth of nutrients vital to a healthy Olympic ecosystem. For more information on this project, click here.
In North Cascades National Park, the focus has been on augmenting the park’s small population of grizzly bears. Currently, there are fewer than 10 grizzly bears that pass between Canada and the north unit of North Cascades National Park. NPCA is working with a coalition of conservation organizations to implement a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to support this grizzly bear population. To learn more about this program, click here.
The gray wolf is native to both parks and is slowly returning to the Northwest from Idaho and British Columbia. This mysterious and often misunderstood predator triggers both excitement and misunderstanding. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is currently working on a Wolf Conservation and Management Plan that will govern the natural return of the gray wolf from neighboring states. NPCA advocates creating a viable and self-sustaining wolf population throughout the state, including healthy packs in Olympic and North Cascades national parks. The gray wolf is the last native species absent from Olympic National Park. For information on how you can become involved in returning the gray wolf to Olympic and North Cascades, click here.
Finally, NPCA’s Northwest Regional Office and its Northern Rockies Regional Office are investigating the opportunities of creating a west to east wildlife corridor connecting the North Cascades National Park with Glacier National Park. This would not be a traditional migration corridor, but instead a wildlife dispersal corridor connecting populations of species such as grizzly bears and gray wolves. To see a draft map of this exciting new corridor connection, click here (PDF, 6 MB).
