Authors: Jim Crumley
The Last Wolf (19 page)
My vote doesn’t count in the United States of America, but I have always believed that you protect the strongholds with all the resources you can muster, on the simple principle that
however a particular species fares furth of the strongholds there is always scope for subsequent expansion out from the strongholds if they are in good heart and good health. Delisting obviously
reduces protection outside the national parks, and one newspaper report that came my way noted that between March and May 2008, the number of wolves killed by people in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho
rose sharply to a total of around 70. One official at the Natural Resources Defense Council responded to the revelation thus: ‘There’s much greater public appreciation of the role of
top carnivores. On the other hand, the myth of Little Red Riding Hood just won’t die. It’s amazing the pockets of fear and irrationality that still pervade the wolf debate.’
For all that, Yellowstone is a beacon. It is America’s and the world’s first national park, and celebrated as ‘America’s best idea’. (It was, of course, the idea of
the emigrant Scot John Muir, which rather makes you wonder in a Leopold-at-the-UN kind of way the influences he might have brought to bear on the wild landscapes of Scotland had his father not
decided to emigrate in 1849.) It is also a place of such sensation-rich beauty and tremendousness that whenever television casts its eye over it, as the BBC did in three memorable hour-long
documentaries in the early spring of 2009, matter-of-factly giving the wolves their place amid tumultuous landscapes, the cause of wild wolves leaps effortlessly into the hearts and minds of
millions on my side of the Atlantic Ocean. You watch, you are seduced, and the task of reintroducing wolves into your own country simply becomes an endeavour of the most self-evident wisdom. How
could any clear-thinking person ever imagine that our mountains, forests, lochs, rivers and moors could ever be complete as long as the wolf is absent? And regardless of what new wolf wars may or
may not lie ahead on the map of American domestic politics, Yellowstone has already done that, and people all across the northern hemisphere who crave a closer walk with wildness and wilderness are
grateful.
It is one thing to watch the films. It is, of course, another to make the effort to meet wildness head-on. Doug Smith, leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, voiced his concerns in his
remarkable account of the first ten years of wolf reintroduction,
Decade of the Wolf
:
The vast majority of what people experience of nature these days, after all, comes from television. Entertaining, and even educational, as it may be, television flattens
wildlife watching – purging the physical discomforts, removing all the time normally spent waiting for something to happen. Every inconvenience is left behind on the cutting room floor.
The result is often a kind of tepid album of greatest hits, a non-stop string of events that even most of us working in the field see only a handful of times in our lives. While it’s true
that wolves show themselves frequently at Yellowstone, their appearance is nonetheless still in the context of the larger wild preserve – uncut, unedited. A person has to at least be
willing to make direct contact with nature, to experience an unfolding of life that goes far beyond the animal he’s come to see. In that sense wolf watching in Yellowstone is an
experience of nature much as it has always been . . . As best-selling nineteenth-century author Henry George pointed out, the wild preserves of the West are critical, even for those who never
set eyes on them. The mere thought of them, he suggested, tends to engender ‘a consciousness of freedom’. To that end, the memory of wolves running like the wind through the Lamar
Valley, or sliding down snowfields in fits of play, or even sleeping away a summer afternoon in the tall grass, can be a remarkable touchstone to that which makes our lives and our culture just
a little more fascinating, a little more rich with wonder.
The Yellowstone wolves are the most watched in the world. Wolf-watching ‘hotspots’ have emerged along the road through the Lamar Valley, and the sheer number of visitors resulted in
the Wolf Road Management Project with four objectives – human safety, wolf safety, visitor enjoyment and wolf monitoring and research. In the 117 days of the project from May–September
in 2007, wolves were seen every day. The project team helped 32,600 people to see wolves, by far the highest number in the eight years of the project, but an independent research team from the
University of Montana estimated the number of people actually seeing wolves was almost ten times that figure – 310,046. So watching wolves is not only public relations par excellence for the
cause of wolves in general and wolf reintroduction in particular, it is also a major tourist attraction. The world beats a path to Yellowstone to see wolves, spends its money when it gets there,
and spreads the gospel when it goes home again.
Northern hemisphere wilderness needs Yellowstone as never before, not just for its public relations value in the cause of the wolf, but also because it has created a unique opportunity to study
the wolf. Because there were no wolves there for 70 years before 1995, the land had suffered the effects of that absence. Leopold had articulated the nature of the problem that the Yellow-stone
Project would inherit more 55 years later:
I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze
of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn.
Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much,
bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or moulder under the high-lined junipers.
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a
buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
After seven such decades, Yellowstone’s mountain landscape knew all about that mortal fear. But one thing missing from Leopold’s telling assessment of the problem was any experience
of what would prove to be the solution – putting back the wolves. Almost from the moment the first wolves arrived, the staff of the Yellowstone Project became eye-witnesses to the unfolding
effects of the wolf as a primary influence of biological change, change with an enormous reach down through the many-layered depths of the food chain to the very mountain grasses themselves. The
very presence of wolves on the ground inevitably has a profound effect on prey species, but here was the chance to watch what happened as if it were a demonstration of the very forces that had
shaped Yellowstone long before the white man came. The crucial change came in the behaviour of the huge elk herds. (Of 323 wolf kills detected by project staff in 2007, for example, 272 were
elk.
2
) They began to abandon, or at least linger less long, in favourite grazing areas with no wide view. It had suddenly become important to see the
surrounding land to avoid surprise attacks by wolves. What was happening was that the elk were remembering how to behave like elk again after so many sedentary years. As the northern part of
Yellowstone gradually filled up with wolf pack territories, the elk were compelled to resume a life that is more or less constantly on the move. At a stroke, grazing pressures began to ease, and at
a stroke, nature rushed in to fill the vacancy, unleashing all the diversity in its repertoire.
Willow was the first beneficiary, as willow so often is after ecological upheaval. Its recovery was swift – within the first three years – and decisive. That other great manipulator
of the natural environment, the beaver, followed the willow. A beaver reintroduction scheme just outside the national park assisted a process that would have begun anyway, and beavers migrated into
the park, lured by the abundance of willow. In the first decade of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, the solitary beaver colony in the north of the national park had become nine beaver colonies. What
had begun was a process which, at its most spectacular, is called a trophic cascade, when a fundamental ecological change literally cascades right down the food chain from the top predators to the
lowliest plants. Beavers build ponds, expand – or even create – wetland, a habitat that offers new homes for mammals as large as a moose and as small as a vole, for amphibians and
reptiles, insects and wildfowl and songbirds, acquatic plants, grasses and flowers. These, added to the flowers that have begun to thicken again in regenerating grassland, are the first
brushstrokes. The presence of wolves has begun to paint the mountains in new colours. The change is patchy at first, but once it begins, its progress is undeniable.
Other trees, notably cottonwood and aspen, have also begun to prosper again, more slowly than the willow, but once aspen regenerates in significant numbers, the most beautiful tree of the
northern hemisphere brings all the shades of fire, the most audacious tints of the painter’s palette, to the landscape.
Butterflies and moths and other insects arrive with the invigorated and diversifying vegetation, and song-birds not seen there in half a century contemplate the prospects of a new niche to fill.
Science argues with itself about the point at which it can assert that a trophic cascade is finally and unarguably in place, but the process has begun, and unless America loses its nerve in the
matter of wolves and scraps the Yellowstone Wolf Project that has won the admiration of the watching world, it can only go from strength to strength. This is the power of the wolf. This is how it
paints mountains.
But the wolf has made one more impact on the ecology of Yellowstone, one that took the biologists by surprise. It is simply that wolves provide so much food for non-wolves. In
Decade of the
Wolf
, Smith and Ferguson write:
Thus far we’ve observed no less than twelve different species using prey killed by wolves . . . Biologist John Varley has dubbed this phenomenon ‘food for the
masses’. ‘In all the planning, all the studies,’ says Varley, ‘the one thing we totally underestimated was how many other mouths the wolves would feed. Beetles and flies
and mountain bluebirds – it’s incredible.’
Beetles and flies and bluebirds, and ravens and magpies, black bears and grizzly bears (a grizzly can simply take over an elk carcase that wolves have killed, and often does), coyotes and foxes,
golden eagles and bald eagles . . . and what’s left after that lot have had their fill breaks down and seeps back into the soil as nutrients. There is no end to the benevolence of wolves.
Yellowstone has taught us that too.
Scattered through the pages of
Decade of the Wolf
are portraits of individual wolves that have stood out in the eyes and minds and doubtless the hearts of those charged with operating the
Yellowstone Wolf Project. There were number 14 and Old Blue, for example, in Chapter One, and then there was 293F in Chapter Three, and it is the life and death of that wolf that I return to now as
I consider the potential of Yellowstone to influence the wider world. She was, you may remember, famous for leaving Yellowstone. She was a collared wolf, a two-year-old from the Swan Lake Pack near
Mammoth in the north-west corner of Wyoming. One day in January, 2004, she walked off the radar and kept walking. It may have been that she left in search of a mate of her own and a territory of
her own. It may have been that her lowly ranking in the pack offered her too few opportunities and she was one of those wolves that have what it takes to be a lone wolf for as long as it takes. Or
it may be that she was one of those wolves that I think of as pilgrim wolves because they undertake extraordinary journeys, and at the end of their journey things are not quite the same as they
were before. Perhaps she was just looking for a new mountain to paint.
By the spring of 2004, wolves had been reintroduced not only into Wyoming, Montana and Idaho but also into New Mexico and Arizona. It had begun to look as if Colorado was next. Historically,
Colorado had been an important state for wolves. As the white man opened up the West in the mid-nineteenth century, estimates of almost 40,000 wolves were being bandied about, although there is no
evidence that anyone ever tried to count them. Improbable as the number seems now, the size of the estimate suggests that the settlers were seeing a lot of wolves. A hundred years later there were
none. But, by 2004, wolves were on the agenda in Colorado again, Rocky Mountain National Park was considering them as a solution to problematic numbers of elk and a Colorado Wolf Management Plan
Working Group had been set up. It all seemed only a matter of time.
Then, on 7 June, a vehicle travelling on Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs struck and killed a wolf. It was 293F and she had travelled alone from northern Yellowstone, the better part of 500
miles. So, imagine you are one of the pro-wolf campaigners in Colorado, battle-weary from too many committee meetings, public hearings and the rest; you sit on the Wolf Management Plan Working
Party, endlessly and slowly drafting and redrafting a plan for the distant day when the first reintroduced wolves finally shake off the encumbrances of the bureaucratic process (for all serious
conservation endeavour is endless and slow; I often wonder what it is we are so afraid of). Then one day, a day beginning like any other, a wolf turns up dead on your doorstep having travelled 500
miles for the privilege. Coincidence or omen? Nature doing what nature does, or the divine intervention of some God-of-the-Wilds you didn’t know you believed in until that moment? Perhaps you
remember Frank Lloyd Wright’s words: ‘I do believe in God but I spell it Nature.’ Is this what he meant?