The year of the wolves

TRANQUILIZED

On Jan. 10, 1995, a 20-person capture crew based out of Alberta’s Switzer Provincial Park started working to capture the first wolves bound for the states. Aerial crews darted 28 wolves from what they believed were 11 different packs during the operation, and Canadian trappers managed to nab more — many of which were collared and returned to the wild to monitor the donor wolf population. By month’s end, 14 wolves had been flown into Montana headed for Yellowstone and another 15 had been flown down to Idaho.

MARK BRUSCINO, WYOMING GAME & FISH DEPARTMENT:

Mark Bruscino retired from a 29-year career with the Wyoming Game & Fish Department in 2013. He had risen through the ranks, starting as a warden, to become the state’s large carnivore supervisor. Bruscino lives in Cody.

I was on the capture crew that went to Hinton, Alberta in 1995 to catch the original wolves. The local people in Alberta … they thought we were loco. “What’s all the controversy about? Wolves are just wolves, they’re just wildlife. You deal with them, you manage them.”

STEVE FRITTS:

The capture operations that I was a part of were just as intense and hectic as could be. I had my hands dirty, too. I think I put the radio collars on every single wolf that was brought to the U.S.

STEVE FRITTS:

In Alberta, we finally got enough wolves for the first shipment to Yellowstone and Idaho. We loaded those boxes of wolves on the Sherpa [airplane], and I watched very intently as that thing taxied down the runway and finally got off the ground and took off and disappeared from sight heading toward the United States. I thought, man, this is a great moment right here, one I’m going to remember until the day I die.

SUZANNE STONE:

One of the first wolves we caught was this absolutely beautiful male wolf. Just stunning. Green eyes. He was just amazing. He was the only one that really didn’t want to be there. He acted so differently than all the rest of them. It’s not that he was aggressive. He was just so desperate to not be captive. When he got to Montana, one of the biologists was opening his cage to put a block of ice in and got bitten on the thumb by this wolf. And they killed him. Yes, what we were doing was important in terms of bringing wolves back. But it wasn’t just the population that matters. It’s the individual wolves that matter as well.

INJUNCTION IMPRISONS WOLVES IN CRATES

With the first eight Yellowstone-bound wolves on U.S. soil, the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation obtained an injunction from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals blocking their release. The animals were being trucked between Great Falls and Gardiner, Montana when the ruling came in from appellate judges, who made it clear the wolves were not to leave their crates. Lacking better options, Yellowstone officials decided to move the wolves into acclimation pens near Crystal Creek, albeit while still in their shipping crates. Because of the stay and a winter storm, the four wolves headed into Idaho were stuck in their crates for nearly 90 hours.

RENEE ASKINS:

Mollie [Beattie] and I came up with the phrase, “Turning crates into coffins.” It was certainly a dicey time. There was a lot of apprehension about the impact on these individual animals.

A memorable moment was the kids coming out from the Gardiner school. There was a lot of controversy. There were a number of teachers and administrators that did not want the kids participating, and the kids just took things into their own hands. They got their coats, and their mittens, and their hats, and they filed out there and applauded. It was just so cool to have the actual trailer with wolves in it coming through the gate and the kids cheering.

DOUG SMITH, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK BIOLOGIST:

Doug Smith led the wolf program in Yellowstone National Park for 29 years until his retirement in 2023. As a biologist, he’s been working with wolves for even longer, studying wolves in Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park before coming west. Smith lives in Bozeman, Montana.

People would run over to horse trailers. Horse trailers! It wasn’t like there were bars that you could see through. They were in crates inside a horse trailer. People would be running up to the horse trailer and having their picture taken next to it, because there’s wolves inside. It’s a picture of them next to a horse trailer. Wolves have a tremendous presence. It was almost like that charismatic person who walks into a room at a party and everybody changes. That’s what it was like bringing them back into Yellowstone.

MIKE PHILLIPS:

We held a press conference [in Yellowstone National Park] right after the wolves had been placed in the pen to appeal to the judges’ sense of humanity.

I suppose at some point, keeping those wolves in the shipping crates was a bit cruel — they were in a very secure pen. And I said during the press conference, “We simply want to let them out of their shipping crates into the pen. This is really bullshit. If [the court] wants to prevent the release, [it] has weeks yet to render that decision.”

JOHN POTTER, ARTIST:

John Potter is an artist and illustrator whose paintings of wildlife and the natural world have been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. He maintains a studio in Red Lodge, Montana, and recently finished illustrating the first of four children’s books written by Rick McIntyre, a former National Park Service ranger who has been chronicling Yellowstone’s wolves for four decades.

I think the Park Service understood the relationship between Natives and wolves, and that’s why they wanted us to include a ceremony for welcoming and adoption.

Scott [Frazier] and I had been doing a lot of ceremonial work together at that time. As I recall, he had a conversation with the park superintendent and historian. Scott then approached me about coming to help him by doing songs.

SCOTT FRAZIER, ENVIRONMENTALIST AND EDUCATOR:

Scott Frazier is the CEO of Project Indigenous, where he works to incorporate Native American perspectives into natural resource management, with a particular interest in buffalo and water issues. An enrolled Crow tribal member, Frazier has a master’s degree in tribal protocol and communication. Frazier lives in Bridger, Montana.

[National Park Service Historian Tom] Tankersley, he said, “OK, I’ll call you two weeks before [they’re brought into the park].” He called me on the two weeks. Then he said, “I’ll call you within four days.” And then it went down to 24 hours. It was really spooky. That was the hardest part: You know you’re going to do something really wonderful for animals, and you have to wait and be quiet.

Tankersley called me and said, “OK, we’re going to do it, but they’re stuck. We’re going to bring you guys down, because they could be released any minute from Great Falls.”

So we went. [My then-wife] Marsha drove. And, God, it was so cold and the roads were so terrible. I mean, they were just terrible — wind blowing the snow. It was a miracle we made it out there. We got out to Crystal Bench in the middle of the night. You could hear coyotes, you could hear things moving around.

JOHN POTTER:

They told us that the wolves’ journey from Canada was held up in Great Falls because of the injunction filed by the [Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation]. We went ahead and did our ceremony anyway, and then when we were done, another [Park Service] ranger pulls up and says, “The injunction has been lifted. They’re coming.”

WOLVES ARRIVE IN YELLOWSTONE, CENTRAL IDAHO

After the verdict changed, the still-crated wolves were freed in the Crystal Creek pen just after midnight on Friday, Jan. 13, 1995. The first four Idaho wolves were freed immediately. Waves of wolves continued to come down from Canada for the remainder of the month, with 14 translocated to Yellowstone and 15 to central Idaho by February. The soft-released Yellowstone wolves would stay in their acclimation pens throughout the winter.

MIKE PHILLIPS:

The thing that actually prompted Doug [Smith] and I to let them go [from the holding pens] was the weight of water. So let’s imagine you and I have got, what would it have been, 14 gray wolves at remote settings in Yellowstone Park in captivity that we have to tend. We’ve got to feed them because they can’t get their own food. We know that in the wild, they do pretty well on five to seven pounds of food per wolf per day, but let’s bump that up a bit. Let’s target 10 pounds per wolf per day. OK, that’s 70 pounds of food each wolf a week. That’s a lot of meat. And you got three different locations, 14 animals, 140 pounds of food a day, that’s 980 pounds a week.

So we were zookeepers. We were husbanding the wolves. That’s fine. We collected a bunch of carcasses, and it wasn’t that big a deal. But as winter gave way to spring, bleeding into March, now temperatures are warming and the snow in the pen was melting. Now we had to start hauling water in addition to the meat. Water weighs eight pounds a gallon. That’s a shitload of water. And I finally said to Doug, “Dude, we gotta let these guys go. Hauling all of this water is going to break our backs. This is too much.”

And of course, as the snow melts, you lose the ability to use the sled pulled by mules to get the food up there. It becomes a logistical challenge that we can’t meet. That was a tremendous impact on my thinking about when to let them go.

And then there were all these people nipping at my heels, “Come on Mike, come on Mike, come on Mike.” And so it was like day 82 or day 83 that we finally let them go.

ED BANGS, U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICES WOLF RECOVERY COORDINATOR:

Ed Bangs wrote the environmental impact statement for wolf reintroduction and led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s gray wolf recovery program. He retired in May of 2011, shortly after Congress delisted wolves. As a retirement gift, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana gave Bangs the delisting bill, which he keeps in the basement of his home in Helena.

In Yellowstone [in January 1995], the secretary of interior and the director of Fish and Wildlife Service and all the bigwigs and members of the media are there drinking champagne and celebrating the wolves and all that kind of stuff. And me and wolf recovery team volunteer John Weaver were in Missoula, Montana, sleeping in an airport hangar with a bunch of wolves in crates [bound for Idaho], putting ice into [the crates] to keep them alive.

We were waiting to put them in the wild of central Idaho. The idea was to fly them into the wilderness with helicopters and turn them loose on some landing strips we could legally use. But the court case kept them in the pen three days longer, and the weather prohibited them from being released for another couple of days.

Finally, we ended up doing a road release in Corn Creek, a tributary of the Salmon River, in January of 1995.

MIKE JIMENEZ, WOLF PROJECT LEADER FOR THE NEZ PERCE TRIBE:

Mike Jimenez was the project leader for Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho’s wolf reintroduction program. He continued to work on wolf issues post-reintroduction, eventually serving as the management and science coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northern Rockies region. He retired in 2016 and lives near Polson, Montana.

Myself and Ed Bangs took off and got halfway there in a helicopter. But it was like a whiteout, so we had to fly back into Missoula.

The way we decided to do it, then, was to take them in the back of a pickup truck. We actually drove them down to the edge of where we were going to release them. This was in the wintertime and the Forest Service helped us out by plowing a dirt road so we could get them back in there a ways toward the wilderness area. It was this very “What do you do to get these animals out in the midst of pretty foul weather’ operation.” It was a little precarious.

ED BANGS:

It was a horror show. There was this raging river nearby and steep mountains and an icy road. It was just a complete messed-up thing. But we had to get them out of the cages — they’d been in there way too long.

SUZANNE STONE:

Multiple times we took wolves in by snowmobile. We tried to really get them as deep as we could back in there [by the wilderness area], because we wanted to make sure they weren’t going to pop back out and come close to a town. We went in at midnight with the wolves in a convoy of snowmobiles. The reason we went in at night is because there were lots of threats, even from the local police. We weren’t sure how safe we were going to be. The first year, we had armed government agents with us.

ED BANGS:

The wolves did fine. That’s mainly wolves — that isn’t because we did anything really great. They’re just really tough animals.

MARK BRUSCINO:

No one really knew how to pull this whole thing off. The soft release in Yellowstone and the hard release in Idaho were experimental, more or less. And both worked. I would say it went incredibly well.