American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

by Nate Blakeslee

Yellowstone was even worse. He and his friends called it “the iron curtain” because of all the rules in the park—which fish you could keep, which you had to release, which lures you could use, what kind of hook—and the zeal with which they were enforced. It was against the rules even to drive through the park with harvested game in the back of your truck, unless it was covered. Visitors didn’t want to see dead elk.

reinforces unequal enforcement in different parts of the country by fish and wildlife based on the “importance” (historical or ecological) of certain lands which implies inequity in park funding based on attendance instead of climate purposes

Louie had never lost an animal to a wolf, but he’d seen the aftermath on other people’s ranches: calves so thoroughly shredded that they looked like they’d swallowed dynamite, the snow covered in blood.

The elk closest to the road—and to the back of the pickup, where the carcass had to be lugged—was the right elk.

Even for those who didn’t need the meat or didn’t hunt at all, the size and health of the elk herd was a matter of concern, something to talk about at the grocery store or at church, like hay prices or the performance of the local high school football team.

how does predation interfere with hunting and indigenous cultures? wolves being a demonstration of integrated pest management and its pitfalls and peaks, weigh pros and cons of ipm vs chemical

Cattlemen and hunting guides had made common cause against the wolf, but the truth was that they were far from natural allies.

Wolves were once the most widely distributed land mammal on earth, and every early pastoral civilization in the northern hemisphere outside of Africa competed with them for land on which to run livestock—and for the livestock themselves.

Wolves weren’t special, not in Crandall. Wolves were killers.

O-Six began bark-howling, a high-pitched staccato cry that sounded like a coyote’s alarm call, but her mate, 755,

But the rest of her brood seemed to think the relocation was a game of hide-and-seek, and she was forced to search the entire bowl before she finally cornered them all. The last to be caught refused to be carried, rolling over on his back, snapping his tiny teeth, and kicking at his mother’s open jaws.

One morning as the pups were playing on a fallen log and 754 and 755 were bedded nearby, O-Six walked to the center of the bowl and sat in a field of luxurious grass, surveying the mountainside that dropped away below her. Suddenly she threw her muzzle into the air and howled. The two males roused themselves and trotted to her side to join in. The pups scampered over, confused and startled, looking everywhere for the danger that had prompted their mother to sound this alarm. But there was no danger. There was just warm sunshine and soft grass and the bounty of an enormous territory that belonged only to them. They tilted their tiny heads back and added their voices to the chorus.

After reading Edward Abbey’s memoir Desert Solitaire, about a couple of seasons the ardent conservationist spent as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Park, Rick decided his future was with the National Park Service. His first assignment was as an interpretive ranger at Denali, where once again his job was to talk to visitors about what they were seeing in the wilderness. He began keeping a journal, though he still wasn’t writing much otherwise. In his spare time, however, he began experimenting with wildlife photography and found he had a knack for it. Once he’d mastered the craft, getting good shots was chiefly a matter of patience and dedication, and Rick found he had both in abundance. What began as a pastime quickly grew into an obsession. He published widely, eventually landing his work in National Geographic, the holy grail for wildlife photographers worldwide. He followed a grizzly cub from its early months through adulthood and published a book of photographs documenting the first five years of its life. Eventually his fascination with bears waned, however. They lived a long time, which meant you could follow individuals for years, but they were solitary creatures that seldom interacted with their own kind. That made their behavior, for Rick, somewhat too predictable.

There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too—something more akin to envy: “Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like: the noble qualities imagined; a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”

Finally Seton found the wolf’s weak spot. He trapped Lobo’s naïve young mate, known to ranch hands as Blanca, and dragged her carcass through a field laden with traps, knowing that Lobo’s blind loyalty would drive him to follow her scent heedlessly. When Seton returned to check his handiwork, he found Lobo held fast by traps on three of his legs. Seton had outsmarted him at last. But when the time came, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot Lobo. Something about the nobility of the enormous beast, among the last of his kind, hopelessly ensnared and yet still lunging gamely at his captor—and perhaps the shame of having resorted to such underhanded tactics to catch him—kept Seton from finishing the job. Instead he brought Lobo back to his employer’s ranch, where he chained him up with plenty of food and water nearby. The next morning he was dead—the victim, Seton surmised, of a broken heart.

He sometimes imagined turn-of-the-century readers, nestled in their cozy houses back east, following along as the West’s last remaining wolves were pursued by men on horseback, raptly turning the pages as the stories built toward their climatic final scenes. All of them rooting, just this once, for the wolf.

“This case is critical to both wolf recovery and the continued viability of the Endangered Species Act,” he began. The truth about Fish and Wildlife’s latest delisting rule, he told the court, was that it was based on politics, not on science. The agency’s recovery plan for wolves in the Northern Rockies covered Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, along with portions of Utah, Washington, and Oregon. Before wolves could be declared recovered and removed from federal protection, the plan stipulated that state officials in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana (where the vast majority of wolves were found) would have to come up with management plans of their own that would ensure the continued viability of their respective wolf populations. Idaho and Montana had done that to Fish and Wildlife’s satisfaction, but Wyoming had yet to comply, choosing instead to sue the federal government rather than amend the plan Molloy had rejected in 2008.

How could it be, he asked the court, that a recovered population in that part of the country meant twelve to fourteen hundred wolves, while delisting in the Northern Rockies, with a much greater expanse of suitable habitat on public land, required only three hundred?

Faustian bargain.

The law required Fish and Wildlife to make delisting decisions based on the best possible science at the time such calls are made.

Yet as flawed as the recovery plan might have been from the advocates’ perspective, it also contained a provision that Honnold hoped might be his ace in the hole. Just reaching the three-hundred-wolf threshold wouldn’t be enough to delist the wolf, according to the plan. Evidence of “genetic exchange” among the three separate wolf populations in the Northern Rockies—Greater Yellowstone, central Idaho, and northwestern Montana—would have to be established as well. This meant that Fish and Wildlife needed to document wolves dispersing from one core area to another and breeding in their new homes once they arrived.

Projects like wolf recovery were about restoring ecosystems on a grand scale, not, as he now told the court, creating “postage stamp replicas of a world long gone.”

Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, how environmental decisions driven by economics are short sighted, regardless of the form it comes in. Eco-tourism and hunting exist as economic holds on the country, but do not justify environmental action in and of themselves and thus environmental sanctity should be regarded above all else

You might see a teenager riding horseback down the side of the road, as casual as any kid on a skateboard in southern California, or come upon a Native American butchering an elk in the back of a pickup alongside the highway. Life here was different.

How to economic-environmental ties vary across the country and how does this mirror the green energy movement in West Virginia against coal

Wolves had become one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or gun control or war in the Middle East, about which the country could not seem to reach a consensus.

coal

The real struggle was over public land—what it should be used for and who should have the right to decide.

As a result, the residents of a place like Idaho, where fully two-thirds of the land is federally owned, don’t make decisions about how the resources in their own backyards should be used. Instead agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management call the shots from Washington, and people all over the country—even those who visit a place like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon only once in their lifetimes—feel that they should have a say in how the West is managed, because it belongs to them just as much as anybody who actually lives there.

How does this differ from the level of national interest West Virginia land has with coal? How has West Virginia’s lack of eco tourism changed the national landscape among politicians as a national park was brought in? How do National Parks advocate for the land ethic and in what ways has eco tourism gone against it? Think: Rise in Elk population as a means to draw tourists

Research in Yellowstone had strongly suggested, meanwhile, that unexploited wolf populations, left to their own devices, would eventually level off on their own, without culling of any kind.

population curves for any species

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way. If wolves were hunted like any other animal, then people would begin to think of them as they did any other species in the woods, rather than as objects of resentment.

More than anything, what wolf advocates fought against was the long-held notion that wolves were nothing more than killing machines. They were so much more, as the wolves of Yellowstone had demonstrated time and again to anyone willing to pay attention. But it was also true that they were among the most effective predators the earth had ever seen.

nobody has to be told to love the natural, for whom excellence seems to be a birthright.

If Democrats were going to keep a toehold on power in Congress—if Obamacare was going to live past its infancy—wolves needed to start dying in Montana, in large numbers, and soon.

Trees at higher elevations in the park had been known to simply explode, succumbing to the rapid expansion of their frozen sap.

One morning 776 spotted a bison on its haunches near Soda Butte Creek, surrounded by ravens. She approached with caution—bison were dangerous, even when they were half-starved—but the animal didn’t move. It was dead, frozen in place as it dozed upright in the deep snow. The ravens had done their best, but there was little they could eat until the carcass was properly opened. 776 made a few experimental tugs at the bison’s hide, but the carcass was so stiff that she couldn’t get good purchase. In the end, she decided it wasn’t worth the effort; there was no shortage of food, after all. She left the bison sitting there, still upright, its massive head staring straight ahead at nothing, a strange sentinel in the frozen silence.

Now the valley would be the stage for a new story. O-Six had come home.

they weren’t voting against wolves, they were voting for a budget that their leaders had negotiated, a compromise that represented the best possible deal they could get in the face of a Tea Party–dominated Republican caucus

Environmental lobbyists caught wind of the move shortly before the scheduled vote, however, and spread the word to liberal bloggers, who were outraged. But it was too late. The deal was done, and no hundred-word paragraph—no matter how controversial—was going to be allowed to derail a budget agreement months in the making, sealed just hours before a looming government shutdown was set to begin.

Congress’s action represented “a tearing away, an undermining, and a disrespect for the fundamental idea of the rule of law,” he wrote. And yet his hands were tied.

Not long after wolf reintroduction, Smith noticed that he was finding more and more colonies; from just 49 in 1996, the number had ballooned to 118 by 2009.

What happened next was revelatory. The park’s rodent population, long depressed by years of unchecked predation by ever-present coyotes, rebounded immediately. This meant a sudden increase in the food supply for raptors like owls and hawks.

The science was on Smith’s side, but it didn’t seem to matter to ranchers and hunters, or to state legislators. The debate wasn’t about science anymore, if indeed it ever had been. —

O-Six howled long and low, unaccompanied by the pack. She might have been letting the Junction Butte wolves know that the valley was still hers, despite the Lamars’ long absence. Or, Rick thought, she might have been trying to bring 754 home, summoning him with her call as she had in Little America three years before, when he and his brother were just yearlings, and everything laid out below her still belonged to the Druids.

But what about the money lost when hunters killed wolves like 754? Guides had been bringing paying clients to see the Lamar wolves for years. As many as half a million people might have seen 754 in his lifetime, Varley told Schweber. Who was going to compensate guides like him for the loss, as he put it, of “a million dollar wolf”?

Varley had grown up in Yellowstone, the son of the park’s chief of scientific research, and his opinion carried weight. Still, some of his fellow advocates, mourning the death of a beloved wolf, were taken aback by his effort to put a dollar figure on 754’s life. But not Doug McLaughlin. For years, he’d been trying to convince activists that the only way to get a seat at the table with state game regulators was to speak their language. Elk were a valuable resource, but so were wolves.

“It was a good day in the park, Doug,” he told him softly.

“Let’s send Wyoming, Montana and Idaho the bill for the 117 million dollars US Taxpayers spent to restore the wolves to their original territories!”

She-Wolf,