The year of the wolves

By the 1930s, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s wolves had been systematically hunted and trapped out of existence. In their absence, it didn’t take long for humankind to rethink the wisdom of eradicating the ecosystem’s apex canine predator.

Aldo Leopold, a visionary conservationist, thought of reversing course as early as 1944. “Why, in the necessary process of extirpating wolves from livestock ranges of Wyoming and Montana, were not some of the uninjured animals used to restock Yellowstone?” the icon of the environmental movement wrote in the Journal of Forestry.

Leopold didn’t live to see that vision fulfilled, not even close. It took a full half-century before wolves returned to the world’s first national park.

Canis lupus may have found their own way back eventually — natural reoccupation was likely, some experts believed, though how soon was uncertain. The federal government didn’t want to wait to find out. By the 1990s, public interest in a reintroduction of the federally protected animals met the necessary political will. Then, 30 years ago this month, amid global fanfare, federal biologists turned 14 adult wolves — wild animals captured and transplanted from the Canadian Rockies — loose in Yellowstone National Park.

To commemorate the anniversary, WyoFile and Montana Free Press are sharing the stories of wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho’s wilderness complex — and what that effort has meant to Northern Rockies communities wary of wolves’ return. Emotions around the issue ran hot in 1995 — both among those who revere the large canines and those who revile them — and they haven’t cooled much since.

Drawing from interviews conducted by WyoFile and MTFP, the Jackson Hole News’ archives and biologist Doug Smith’s 2020 book “Yellowstone Wolves,” we’ve woven together the story of the exceptionally controversial, yet successful, restoration of wolves to the Northern Rockies in the words of the activists, bureaucrats, biologists and politicians who were there.

The memories and viewpoints presented have been organized and edited for brevity and clarity.

ORIGINS OF REINTRODUCTION

In 1988, Congress charged federal wildlife managers with studying a reintroduction of wolves, which were added to the endangered species list in 1974. A 592-page report, “Wolves for Yellowstone?,” arrived in Congress two years later. Funding for another extensive study that would actually OK moving wolves — an environmental impact statement — came two years later, in 1992. In the ensuing two years, federal officials held 130 public meetings and analyzed 180,000 comments. By 1994, the plan was decided: Establish a “nonessential, experimental” population of wolves in Yellowstone and central Idaho.

MARC RACICOT:

Marc Racicot served as governor of Montana from 1993 until 2001. Prior to that, he was the state’s attorney general. A former chair of the Republican National Committee and current advisory board member of the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana, Racicot remains active in political issues from his home in Helena.

There was resistance on the side of those who opposed reintroduction, and there was enthusiasm on the other side. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it was a very difficult series of questions with a very small margin for error.

It actually was quite pitched — there was an intensity to it. But those days were different than they are now, and even though it was frank, and candid, and to the point, it was also constructive.

RENEE ASKINS, FOUNDER OF THE WOLF FUND:

Renee Askins, founder of the Wolf Fund, was a crucial advocate for the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Outside magazine wrote that Askins was “to wolves what Jane Goodall was to chimpanzees.” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt called her the “den mother” of reintroduction. She lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The purpose of the Wolf Fund was the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and essentially the coordination of both private and governmental entities and agencies.

Our regional and local [advocacy] efforts were vital, but it was creating the national momentum and interest that would essentially give cover to [Bruce Babbitt] the head of Interior [and] the head of the Park Service, William Penn Mott. He made this personal, he made it his goal for his tenure as director of the National Park Service to achieve that. It wouldn’t have happened without the tacit approval of people like [Wyoming Sen. Al] Simpson.

MARC RACICOT:

Efforts were made to try and contribute in good faith to a holistic discussion of the issue and come to a conclusion that was not based on anything other than strong factual evidence. The backdrop for the discussion was a strong position of opposition by the agricultural communities across the state.

JIM MAGAGNA, WYOMING LIVESTOCK LOBBYIST:

Jim Magagna, of Sweetwater County, serves as the executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and has been lobbying on behalf of livestock interests in Wyoming for 49 years. He’s a lifelong sheep rancher, attorney by training and former Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments director.

There was certainly strong opposition in the ranching community and in all of the states, particularly in Wyoming. I do know that the Wyoming Farm Bureau took the initiative and filed litigation designed to stop the introduction from taking place. There was litigation filed on the other side by some of the environmental groups.

SUZANNE STONE, WOLF RECOVERY FOUNDATION:

Suzanne Stone, of Boise, has advocated for wolves her entire adult life. After working with the Wolf Recovery Foundation, she co-founded the Wood River Wolf Project and went on to lead the International Wildlife Coexistence Network.

In 1995 I was on the ground in Idaho, part of the field team to help support their arrival in the state. There were signs around town saying, “Kill all the wolves and all people who bring them here.” So it was a very tense period.

Renee [Askins] was my role model. She was just a force of nature, and she was so wonderful. I remember going to some of the early meetings where she presided. I just thought, “Gosh, when I grow up, I want to be her.”

RENEE ASKINS:

I spoke everywhere from Dubois, Cody, Gardiner, Livingston — the whole focus of the Wolf Fund was the Yellowstone ecosystem. My role was not to go into these communities and tell them or try to convince them, but really to listen to them and their concerns. Then try to respond to those concerns. I was very interested in what the questions were, what the fears were.

PLANNING FOR THE UNPRECEDENTED

Translating the environmental impact statement into a workable plan took months of intense organizing in 1994. Worried that the homing instinct of relocated wolves could foil the plan if they were sourced from too close, the reintroduction team looked to Canada. They secured permissions to capture wolves from two distinct populations — one in Alberta, another in British Columbia — to boost genetic diversity. The November before reintroduction, American biologists went north and worked with the Canadians to collar wolves in the donor population, greasing the skids for capturing their packmates the coming winter.

STEVE FRITTS, CHIEF SCIENTIST FOR THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE

Steve Fritts has been called the “architect of the wolf reintroduction.” At the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he wore two main hats during the reintroduction era: wolf recovery coordinator and later chief scientist. He lives on the Colorado Front Range.

There’s never been a successful introduction of wolves to the wild before, and so we were confronted with a whole lot of questions. I was responsible for coming up with answers to at least the major ones: Where to obtain the wolves? How to capture them? How to hold them in captivity? How to transport them? How to release them?

It was my responsibility to make sure all this was based on the best science that we could come up with, although there was an awful lot of uncertainty in the entire thing. We made some of the best guesses that we could, based upon the information out there and the experiences that I’d had with translocating wolves in Minnesota.

Through the published literature and my own experience, we came up with a basic framework with the whole thing. It was going to be a soft release of, ideally, family groups in Yellowstone, and a hard release of sub-adult wolves in Idaho.

MIKE PHILLIPS, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK BIOLOGIST

Mike Phillips is a wildlife biologist who led Yellowstone National Park’s gray wolf recovery program from 1994 to 1997, when he left the Park Service to found the Turner Endangered Species Fund. A former Montana state lawmaker with a particular interest in climate change and biodiversity, Phillips lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Here’s the best way to look at it, a soft release is conducted when there’s no human stimulation present. When the animal in question gets to make its own decision: You’re not around, and it can run off and do whatever it wants. In a hard release, we’re right there. We’re shaking it out of a box, and it’s responding as much, probably, to us as anything.

STEVE FRITTS:

In four out of seven cases, we had to put together adult breeding wolves from different packs because out in the field we couldn’t capture the breeding male and the breeding female from the same pack. We had to adapt. And we knew all along we’d have to adapt — you can plan and plan and plan and plan — but sometimes you just have to adapt on the fly. That’s what we did. It worked out pretty well. We weren’t sure they were going to pair bond and breed, but they did, in most cases.