On January 12, 1995, 14 Canadian gray wolves were released into a fenced enclosure in Yellowstone National Park, while another 15 were released straight into the wild in Central Idaho.
The releases were the culmination of a long process that started back in the 1980s and proceeded in fits and starts since then. There was nothing at all inevitable or smooth about the project to reintroduce wolves to the Northern Rockies, and even at the last moment a judge enjoined the Yellowstone wolves from being released from their boxes. The wolves accordingly spent their first night in Yellowstone sleeping --or at least lying silently-- in the metal shipping containers in which they'd been transported from Alberta.
What they, the wolves themselves, made of this is anyone's guess. One suspects they were wolfishly aloof and inexpressive, regarding the world with their pale yellow eyes, silently resigned to whatever might come.
The releases were the culmination of a long process that started back in the 1980s and proceeded in fits and starts since then. There was nothing at all inevitable or smooth about the project to reintroduce wolves to the Northern Rockies, and even at the last moment a judge enjoined the Yellowstone wolves from being released from their boxes. The wolves accordingly spent their first night in Yellowstone sleeping --or at least lying silently-- in the metal shipping containers in which they'd been transported from Alberta.
What they, the wolves themselves, made of this is anyone's guess. One suspects they were wolfishly aloof and inexpressive, regarding the world with their pale yellow eyes, silently resigned to whatever might come.
January 1995, the release. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the late Mollie Beattie, then national director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Yellowstone Superintendent Mike Finley take advantage of a photo op to carry in the first group of wolf transplants to their pens in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. Norman Bishop can be seen in the photo at far right.
Jim Peaco/National Park Service.
The science that preceded the reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rockies was meticulous, compendious and not at all controversial. The consensus, dating back to the work of Aldo Leopold --widely regarded as the "father" of wildlife management in the US-- was that wolves had always played a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and that their reintroduction, far from heralding catastrophic consequences for herbivorous prey species, would actually result in a healthier and more resilient ecology in which all species benefited through a predator/prey balance more nearly approximating that which they'd ostensibly evolved to live in.
What wasn't known with any precision was the degree to which wolves would impact adjacent livestock operations. Nor was it clear that wolves would stay in the remote areas of the Northern Rockies to which they'd been reintroduced.
In the event, with the benefit of 25 years of knowledge, we now know that while wolves do occasionally prey on livestock, their impact is minimal and is easily countered through compensation programs paid for by the increase in tourism that the presence of wolves engenders.
As for where wolves go, they have easily outstripped even the most optimistic predictions. No wolf biologist looking at the reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rockies 25-years-ago would or could have predicted that we'd now be at least three years out from a wolf pack having established itself in Northern California, while other packs are primed to move across the Klamath-Siskiyous and into coastal Oregon's lush Coast Range.
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In the summer of 1993 I took a menial kitchen job at Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone National Park. How I got there is a story in and of itself, but one that can be told elsewhere. The upshot is that as a deeply impressionable 19-year-old I found myself living and working in the middle of the world's oldest national park.
I loved it. The pay was pitiful and I had no real plan for what I would do after the job, but to me Yellowstone felt like a sort of semi-mythical paradise. I was an avid outdoorsman and an accomplished backcountry backpacker, but I was also a poor kid who'd never really been outside of Northern California.
I say this to underscore how smitten I was with the park, how formative it was for me, and to hopefully give a sense of the place Yellowstone held, and still holds, in my heart and imagination.
I left the Northern Rockies in the fall of 1994, a few months prior to the release, on January 12, 1995, of 14 Canadian gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and 15 in Central Idaho. I had followed the entire process through local media while I still lived in Wyoming, so even though coverage in Northern California was predictably less thorough, I watched it as closely as I could --in that pre-internet era-- and took a great deal of satisfaction in the event.
I say the above by way of establishing why yesterday is an important anniversary for me. I say this to underscore how smitten I was with the park, how formative it was for me, and to hopefully give a sense of the place Yellowstone held, and still holds, in my heart and imagination.
I left the Northern Rockies in the fall of 1994, a few months prior to the release, on January 12, 1995, of 14 Canadian gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and 15 in Central Idaho. I had followed the entire process through local media while I still lived in Wyoming, so even though coverage in Northern California was predictably less thorough, I watched it as closely as I could --in that pre-internet era-- and took a great deal of satisfaction in the event.
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Related links;
https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/yellowstone-marks-25-years-since-wolves-were-reintroduced
https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=9806A11F-C806-DEED-AD27FE69EDADA0FB
https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-big-scientific-debate-trophic-cascades.htm
https://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/years-later-politics-myths-and-the-reintroduction-of-wolves-to/article_2d9d1687-3ae7-570d-9a59-ff1775d74565.html
https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=9806A11F-C806-DEED-AD27FE69EDADA0FB
https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-big-scientific-debate-trophic-cascades.htm
https://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/years-later-politics-myths-and-the-reintroduction-of-wolves-to/article_2d9d1687-3ae7-570d-9a59-ff1775d74565.html
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