 I'm the staff math fellows here. I hear the speaker tonight is great, so I hope you enjoy it. I get to introduce myself. Before we get started though, a couple of announcements is North Branch is going to Yellowstone with me in the end of May, May 20th to 27th, and there's one space left on the train. So if you aren't already convinced that Yellowstone's an amazing place, you will be convinced in an hour from now. So keep that in the back of your mind if all of this gets me really excited to head out in the wilderness. So in addition to being the math fellows here, I come here from having worked as a wolf guide in Yellowstone Park for years, and I still go back there every year to lead a couple trips. I'll be heading out there next week for the better part of the month to lead winter wolf-watching expeditions out in the park. So before we dive into the story, a couple of announcements related to this is that there are some pictures from graphic images of carcasses and that kind of thing. If I remember, I will tell you in advance of those and they come up, but just be forewarned. Nothing too crazy, but there's a little bit of blood here and there. And the other thing I want to apologize for up front is that I'm going to get your political hackles up. And that's only because I've been talking about wolves for years and years, and I've realized that there's no way to talk about these animals effectively without it eventually touching on politics here and there. And I'm the last person in the world that likes to talk about politics and religion and all that kind of stuff. That's not okay, dinnertime conversation. And so just know that when you feel your hackles getting up, I'm doing that intentionally for a reason and selectively. And so just know that I'm throwing those punches very selectively throughout for particular reasons. So just trust that when hackles go up, they'll hopefully go back down and have a method to that and that. And the last announcement too is that this isn't really going to be a talk about biology and figures and I'm not going to be up here. So my background has a wildlife scientist necessarily because you can't tell the story of wolves without really speaking to their emotions and the decisions that they make. But all the reasons why wolves and humans are really similar. And so my biology teachers growing up and going through school would always say, we can't anthropomorphize. How can we know this animal is feeling love or joy or sadness or sorrow or all these other animals or all these other emotions. And then you see a wolf and you realize there's no way to actually describe what's going on without drawing on those sorts of emotions and those sorts of descriptions. I think our biggest failing perhaps, one of them as a human species is thinking that we have the monopoly on this wide range of intentions and feelings and emotions and spans of perceptions and all these things that we call human. Well, a lot of animals are doing this all the time as you'll see. So I guess my warning there is I'm going to anthropomorphize a lot so just deal with it. Just the white switch on the right hand. So tonight's really about storytelling. It's about telling the stories of these amazing animals, all the things that they do, all the controversies that happen in order to get them to the Yellowstone landscape in the first place. And this is a story that's going to be in several different parts. Part one is going to be just introducing you into this ecosystem where these animals live and kind of setting the stage and having you join me on a wolf-watching trip out in Yellowstone. The second part of the story is the story of our relationship with these animals over the years and how our feelings about them have really spanned the spectrum of the worst of the worst and the best of the best and just our relationship with wolves. The third part is going to be about the reintroduction, about the monumental moment in 1995 when we decided to put wolves back onto the Western landscape and how that worked and why that happened. And then the last part of this story is the story of the saga of a particular wolf dynasty in Yellowstone and tracking the lives of a particular family of wolves from the very reintroduction all the way up until about two weeks ago and showing the dramatic differences in personalities and life stories of these animals. So that's what we got going on. So where we're talking about is a place called the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This is an area that is really big. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is the largest intact ecosystem in the lower 48. It is 18 million acres large and to put that in perspective, Vermont plus New Hampshire plus Massachusetts is a little bit less than 18 million acres. It's a tremendous amount of space. This is the state of Wyoming of Montana to the North Idaho to the West and this is what we call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It's kind of this blob I'm putting over here. It has within it Yellowstone National Park and this piece in dark green attachment is Grand Teton National Park. It makes it about three million acres. And surrounding that is all sorts of national forests and BLM lands and other sorts of public lands and private lands. But it's all fine to look at a map but this is what it really looks like. This is what this landscape looks like. It is really big and it is wild. And it's a place that's big enough to house our imaginations. It wasn't that long ago that Westerners actually figured out that this place existed. Lewis and Clark when they were moving across the West in 1803 they kind of sidestepped this ecosystem. There was a point where they could look south and they could see some of these mountains from where their travels were and they just thought I wonder what's over there. And it wasn't another 80 years until a government expedition actually came in and surveyed this area. So it's huge. So if you think about what it was like when explorers were charting maps of the world what did they do when they came across areas that they hadn't been to? What do you draw on that map? Well that's where you put your imagination. The blank spaces on our world maps used to be full of dragons and unicorns and palaces and, you know, key guns that were just totally imaginary places where rivers ran with gold, all of this kind of stuff. And this is one of those places. This is a blank spot on the map where we put our imagination. The thing about Yellowstone is what's actually there is sometimes crazier where the imagination can actually come. Places where water is rocketing out of the ground, boiling hundreds of feet in the air where steam clouds rise half a mile high. Where the churning of boiling water under your feet actually feels, you know, you can feel the vibration of that. It sounds like you're in the middle of a combustion engine, right? Places where fur trappers back in the day would say that it's so wild and the mountains were so tall that if you were a bird, you wouldn't know what to do. And it's a place where, as Lewis and Clark were traveling out at the foothills of the Rockies, they looked around at massive herds of bison that were so numerous that they called them the moving multitude that darkened the plains. And so, also in those blank spots on the map, that's where we put the things that we'd rather not think about. The things that we think don't really belong in the mapped places, the things that are our fears, the pieces of ourselves that we wish we didn't really have, right? The things that don't belong, we kind of squirrel away on these unmarked places on the map. So it's very fitting that this ecosystem is the place where we go to to talk about and think about wolves on the landscape. And what I think is remarkable about this Yellowstone ecosystem, about wolves, is that nowadays we have to see reality, to really understand what's real, right? We have all these layers of technology and economics and politics and this and that and all the other things that go on in our day-to-day, and sometimes it's hard to remember what's beneath all of that, what's really down at the core of all that. And that's what people find when they come here to this place, and particularly when they see this animal. These are animals that are living wild so so welcome to our Yellowstone wolf-watching exhibition. I want to introduce you to somebody else that's on the trip with us. Her name is Carol and Carol is a woman from Ohio and Carol is 77 years old and Carol before she retired she worked her whole life as a kindergarten teacher. And Carol her mission in her work, one of them was to paint wolves as the protagonists instead of the antagonists. So she had stuffed wolves in her classroom she incorporated wolves into the stories and the activities that kids did and after she retired she wrote children's books about wolves, where the wolves are the good guys. Well Carol got some really unfortunate medical news and she learned that she wasn't going to really be able to be around for a heck of a while longer and though Carol had been a lifelong advocate for wolves, she had never seen a wolf in the wild and so she spent every last time for life savings to come on a wolf-watching trip to try to see a wolf in the wild here in Yellowstone. And so we traveled around this ecosystem of that 18 million acres we were kind of focusing in on about 3 million acres of that that we spent 7 days in monumental landscape, absolutely massive absolutely fridged, we think it's pulled outside right now yesterday on Yellowstone in that where this shot was taken it was 30 degrees below zero that's like a regular day for a wolf too so massive landscape and we had been out for 4 days 5 days, 6 days we had seen all sorts of amazing things we had seen things like magpies riding on the back of a bison we had seen big corn sheep ramming their heads together we had seen bison snow climbing through 4 feet of snow we had seen otters and coyotes pouncing on stuff like foxes and all this but we hadn't seen a wolf and it was approaching the last day of the entire trip and so the last morning we wake up and at the end of the day we're going to end up at the airport to go home this is our last shot to see a wolf and we wake up and it is a howling lizard and the visibility is zero right and so Carol is crushed, I of course am crushed and so we head out into the Lamar Valley which is one of the major spots that people go towards the wolves and we waited and waited for the weather to clear just a little bit and when the weather cleared we noticed that there were these tracks in the ground that crossed the road and headed off towards the backside of this to the foothills of these mountains and as the weather cleared we looked to the distance one coming in from the left, one coming in from the right and they landed in the same place and we put up our spotting scopes on that and we saw this wolf 926 was her name, 926 so I shouldn't mention that so remember I said it was her name it morphizes a lot right biologists when they radio call her a wolf it is given a number and that number is kind of co-opted by people who follow these wolves and that just kind of becomes this name that wolf's name is 926 and biologists give numbers to animals that they just we think of them as units in a population where this animal is the same as that animal it's just all numbers that doesn't work with wolves so this wolf's name is 926 and I'll be using a lot of numbers today so it's not to bore you with math or anything it's that these wolves have names that we use to keep track of who's and this is 926 so 926 is the alpha female of this pack called the Lamar Canyon pack and we got to watch them leave this car kiss we only saw it for a few minutes but that any sighting of a wolf in the wild is a remarkable sighting this is something that most people don't ever get to see so the snow is still coming down a little bit every so often we have to go and we have to brush our the snow off the spawning scopes the kerala scope we have to go over we have to wipe tears off the eye so we headed out and headed home this wolf 926 is my favorite wolf and I have one frame photograph of a wolf in our house and it's 926 when she was a year old because this wolf has saved me just like this on so many wildlife watching experience this is the last day of the trip and we've been looking and looking and looking glasses the hills forever we're looking over the course of 3 million acres for what amounts to about 30 or 40 wolves that are between 4 or 5 packs imagine looking across all of northern Vermont for 40 pieties it's not easy I'm not a particularly spiritual religious person necessarily but 926 has really made me think long and hard about what's out there because she is karma in a nutshell she appears for people who really deserve to see her put in her work to see a wolf for the right reasons right so that's our first part that's our wolf watching trip to Yellowstone so that's how we responded to this situation of seeing a wolf in the wild and for probably most of you for me that's a really beautiful story it's amazing to witness her reaction to have such a glowing positive reaction of seeing this animal in the wild the wolf is a lot more than just it's fur right it's more than it's everything else that is combined into this that all of the sentiment that people have had around wolves over the years is a 1,120 pound animal so everybody's got an opinion about wolves and that's their biggest problem so of course western Native American tribes a lot of them feel that wolves are kind of their spirit brothers they recognize that wolves hunt the same thing that we do they hunt the elk they hunt the bison right and not only do they do we share the same but we also share a lot of the same faults and the same tendencies and watching wolves long enough you realize that oh I recognize what that wolf is doing in my own family or something like that and so this was not lost on Native American tribes but that was not necessarily the case with westerners with western Europeans from the very beginning wolves were seen in western cultures literally the antichrist from all the way back wolves were seen as literally the embodiment of Satan as the devil's dogs all the things that we don't like about ourselves we have scapegoated into wolves I don't understand that phrase scapegoat because for all reasons you should be scapewolf is the term so starting the beginning we had so much animosity towards wolves and that that came with us when we landed on this continent and started spreading westward as Americans settling the plans and settling the prairies and so we systematically eradicated wolves from from the United States from this landscape and it was done for a bunch of reasons the first one was an extension of our manifest destiny where we were moving on the heels of the homestead acts we were heading out west we were setting up shop raising cattle proving up land building homesteads farmsteads and cabins across the west and cattlemen were complaining that it was far too hard to raise livestock in a landscape full of all these predators and so cattlemen killed off every single wolf that was they would be confined and government officials were hired to come here and trap and kill all of the rest so it was seen as an opportunity for us to stake a claim and to pacify the wilderness to kill off all these predators to make it easier for us to live there right so that was kind of the original reason why we were eradicating wolves off the landscape but it went farther than that you might recognize this hat gear with that type of hat that's a national park service flat camp right so back in those days in the late 1800s all the way through the mid 1900s our understanding of ecology was essentially non-existent we didn't think about ecosystems and systems and how one animal influences another we thought that what could be better if we wanted to be good stewards of elk say the big horn sheep or bison what could be better for elk than not getting eaten by a wolf right and so we thought it was an act of good stewardship and good shepherding of our natural resources to kill off as many predators as possible right and this is a field in stream covered from 1955 which is not that all that long ago for our attitudes around ecology to be so wildly different the term ecology didn't really even come onto the radar screen until the 60s this is a really famous photo of the very last wolves to set foot in Yellowstone Park for 70 years because National Park Service as their duty to manage that landscape to what we thought was the right way to do things was to kill off all the predators and to kill off all the wolves and so this is the last litter of pups the adults of this pack were already killed off the pups were rounded up and brought up to slaughter but before being slaughtered the public was offering visitor centered in northwest corner of the park which is what this building is behind it behind this valley is a park supervisor and you know the public was allowed to play with these wolf pups all day before they were taken away these were the very last wolves in Yellowstone this picture was taken in 1926 to their house so the fascinating thing I think about all this is not so much that we were killing wolves we were doing it this is going to be a couple of pictures that might get your apples up a little bit no other animal in the history of the world has received the same level of vengeance no animals had so much hatred and animosity applied towards them as wolves it's not good enough to kill them but you have to make them suffer and so there were all sorts these are animals that were embodiments of the devil all the things that we hated these were evil animals and so by making them suffer this is payback for what they had done to the elk and all the things that they had eaten over the course of their lives so it's not that they were just shot and trapped but they were shot in the guts so that they would die slowly over the course of the week the carcasses that they took down were baited to strict nines so they died violent deaths from neurotoxin the pups were used to bait to catch the adults they would put pups in as bait in big neck traps to catch the adults that were trying to get them out they would bait fish hooks with meat and put it outside the den so the pumps didn't swallow the fish hooks they would blow the lower jaws off these wolves they would wire them shut all this sentiment too was happening all the way through the 50s so after we got back from World War II a lot of the soldiers who had been fighting these over the in that theater came back many of them worked for the government after their service in the format of these game management agencies the park service, the forest service or whatever and when they went out to control the privateers to kill the wolves they actually called it going out and hunting Nazis but the other side of this which I think is so important to remember is that for every person that's out there that absolutely hates wolves that they're absolutely core there's somebody else out there that thinks that wolves like breathe rainbows and fart glitter and that everything is wonderful and that wolves are the greatest thing to ever happen to ecology and to us and all of this and I think what that misses is that these animals are violent predators they take down prey on a daily basis or every other day or their bouts and when they do so best case scenario if you're an elk and you're being attacked by a wolf best case scenario is that you're suffocated to death from the 1200 pound PSI strength that's twice the bite strength of the german shepherd the crushing bite on your throat from one of these wolves and you die over the course of 10 minutes the pack are eating the other half of you that's the best case scenario and so imagine being out there and seeing this as a rancher as a hunter, as somebody out there on this landscape and actually coming across this that doesn't, that means something that's significant and when that is applied towards when that violence is applied towards your own livestock it adds another level to this there's a couple of major lobbies of groups that are very anti-wolf out west and one of them is the livestock industry and the other one is the elk hunting industry hunting industry and I'm not going to get into the elk hunting industry at all in the course of this talk because that's kind of worms that I can I'll talk about next year for next naturals because there's a lot of data there and there's a lot of graphs and figures and reasons why elk hunters and wolves can get along but if you are a rancher and you live on the back door of the Yellowstone Park and of these ecosystems this is a real threat that you have wolves do kill things and it's not pretty and if you walk out to your your cattle they may be grazing in public land which is its own kind of worms to talk about whether or not that's something that should happen or not happen but you walk out to your cow or your horse and this is what you find that's a problem and I'm just going to take that slide away for a second so it doesn't happen very often in Wyoming last year there was 150 livestock decorations by wolves in all of Wyoming there's 4 million cattle in Wyoming so that gives you an idea of the proportion of this problem unfortunately speaking it's very very very rare but if it happens to you it's a really big deal and so there's a lot of animosity not so much because there's a guaranteed risk of your cows getting eaten but because if you're a rancher and you're on the doorsteps of the Yellowstone ecosystem this is what your backyard looks like this is the Paradise Valley of Montana all of that is the edge of the National Park and the edge of the Zorica National Forest where there's healthy populations of wolves there and right here you're trying to raise your cattle on your land and you may or may not actually have wolves coming and eating your cows but you're awake every night wondering if your cows are okay you're paying extra money to have a cowboy out there with your cows on grazing land to make sure that wolves aren't taking your cattle you are constantly thinking about this actual threat if you allow me to get your hackles up even further right now I would like this to think about a similar situation in our culture the likelihood of a person being killed by a murderer is extremely low but it's something that is a serious thing that we think about in our culture and so if you are raising cattle and you have personally delivered that calf from that cow on a January day two years ago and you wake up and it's being eaten by a wolf that's a valid reason to not really like these animals very much right so that's the political landscape I guess or the cultural landscape behind that I was underpinning this idea to reintroduce these animals into Yellowstone in the first place in 1995 there were challenges involved in trying to get a reintroduction off the ground when that is the prevailing attitude in the western states it's incredible that it happened at all it took over 20 years to actually happen so what happened from between the 60's and the mid 90's when the wolves were introduced was a major change in our understanding of ecology it used to be that what would be better for a wolf than not getting eaten by a wolf it changed to our idea of understanding ecosystems and understanding keystone predators and understanding that healthy predator populations keep pre-animals in check keep the entire ecosystem healthy this idea of having all of the pieces of the puzzle in play allows for a healthy ecosystem and that's where our understanding has evolved to in the last 30 years or 40 years or so that enabled this interest in reintroducing wolves so now the question is if you want to reintroduce wolves where do you get your wolves from if they're all exterminated there's wolves in Canada but do you think that Canadian culture around wolves is really any different than Americans culture around wolves no, they're hunted and persecuted up there just like down here and so the park service in 1995 went to Canadian trappers and they said how much do you get wolf help? $500 for a good wolf help? okay, we'll give you $1,500 and you can bring us a wolf alive to which basically they all said the only good wolf is a dominant, right and so the government had really not made much headway in actually getting wolves from Canada so that's where this guy showed up this guy's name is Carter Emeier and he grew up hunting, fishing, trapping all this stuff worked for wildlife services for the better part of his career he was thoroughly steeped in predator control and management killing coyotes, all this kind of stuff and he was sent up to by the park service up to Canada and they told him go up there and don't come back without a whole bunch of wolves and so he went up to the door of the main trapper who they had been liaising with this guy named Barry knocked on Barry's door he said I'm here to give you money for live wolves and Barry took him around behind the house and showed him two dead wolves in the truck and said most of the only wolves I'm bringing you and so they got talking and heated words I'm sure for a while and then Barry thought this guy all he was was some Yankee Yahoo from the city that was coming up didn't know anything about western culture and what these trappers were really feeling and what this was all about and so Barry said alright I'll tell you what so he takes the two wolves out of the truck and drags them into his living room throws them down right on the carpet in the middle of the living room and says if you can skin out your wolf faster than me I'll get you your wolves and so the reason that we have wolves in the Yellowstone is because this guy feeds this guy in a skinning contest 2 to 3 in the wolf what Barry didn't know is that this guy had skinned about 6,000 coyotes and we could do it blindfolded so he gave them 6 ways to Sunday and Barry was impressed and said alright I'll get you your wolves so fast forward a few weeks they capture a bunch of wolves and traps they collar them, they let the collar wolves go back out in the wild so that they would find their packs when they came over to helicopters following those radio collars these are tranquilized enough they tranquilize all the wolves that they could in each pack move them to Yellowstone to the Gardner Airstrike outside of the park and this was the famous day in 1995 where these wolves were brought back into Yellowstone through this sacred archway on the backside of this arch this is called the Roosevelt Arch it says the National Park Service Model which is for the benefit and enjoyment of some of the people so take this however you want so so the wolves are in these vehicles here and you can imagine everybody on the inside of this gate is cheering and hurray and all this on the outside of this gate is a large kind of protest of all this of people up in arms literally without all these wolves you can imagine the security detail involved in transporting these wolves and these kennels across the Paradise Valley and into Yellowstone so they brought these wolves in these kennels and they set them down to these to re-acclamation pens there were three acclimation pens in the park and they brought in one pack of each one of these acclimation pens in each one of the years and the reason for this is that wolves have no problem getting up and walking a thousand miles if they feel like it so their biggest fear was that they would let these wolves out and they would walk right back to your northern Alberta and so instead they put them into these these acclimation pens that were very tall with fences that curled on the top and they went way into the ground so they couldn't dig underneath them and there they stayed for 10 weeks looking out through the chain-linked fence at Elk walking around the hillside smelling a bison on the hillside the park service would bring in carcasses of animals so they could feed and then 10 weeks later they placed the fences cut open and they went out under the landscape and this is what was worried would happen was that these wolves would immediately take off go over the park line and just cause havoc among the ranching community immediately but what actually happened was from the most part these wolves that were reintroduced to the park set up shop right there in Yellowstone right around that acclimation pen so let's add some names I should say maybe some numbers to this story this is where our dynasty is going to begin this is wolf number 9 and number 9 was among the first wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone park in 1995 this whole reintroduction there's only 31 wolves all this fuss that we have today about the wolves in Yellowstone and the whole wolf population down west this was sparked by the reintroduction of just 31 wolves and number 9 was one of the very first ones we brought in in those kennels she was in one of those kennels in that picture that I showed before so number 9 and her mate number 10 were reintroduced into this pen together when they cut open the pen 9 and 10 immediately left the park and they went here they went 20 miles outside of the park to the eastern side of the baritid mountain which on the one hand is extremely wild extremely remote on the other hand has none of the protections afforded by being inside the national park and furthermore the other side of this you know if you kept going across the road and down you'd end up in Billings Montana so you are actually as far as the west is concerned you're a pretty populated place where there's a lot of people that aren't too happy about wolves so of course number 9 and number 10 they leave the park they go over there and that gives birth to a whole bunch of pups in the den that she has dug way over on the eastern side of the baritid mountains with the lights of Billings off in the distance and the park service says oh no but then it gets even worse because immediately after that number 10 is poached number 9 loses her alpha male and so here's number 9 with pups and as a female has just given birth to pups they're packed of green food back to you and feed you and feed your pups and so without another adult wolf around to provide those pups are doomed maybe number 9 would be doomed too so the park service said well this is not good we better go get her and so they went out there and they set a pad leg hold trap to try to catch number 9 and they literally sat outside of the motel room in Billings with their radio telemetry antenna towards the mountains because when the leg hold trap triggered it would have made a signal and so they're just waiting for this trap to get triggered so the signal goes off they go out so they get number 9 and they go to pick up the pups and there's no pups there so they look and they look and they look and the pups are found three quarters of a mile away in a tall slope on the side of the mountain a place that number 9 had brought her pups to and stashed them there and sent to that trapper setting the trap to catch her so the park services up there in the tall slope they're hanging down to their ankles in talls with leatherman pliers reaching down as far as they can pulling out wolf pups by the ear because there's so much more down in there but they get them all and they put them back into the re-acclamation pens and the park service sits down and thinks ok now what do we do but before they could really get their wits about them the park service that is a storm comes through and 10 trees are fell over the top of this acclimatization pen fence and almost all of the pups get up and walk the trees and jump over and the pups are now stranded on the outside of the fence and number 9 is stranded by yourself with one other pup inside the fence and the park services out there trying to catch wolf pups and big nets and they're way too wily and fast and so the park service is like there's nothing we can do now except to just cut the fence open and let number 9 out and just hope it works out the park service goes out there on the data cut open the fence they had the big cable cutters and they look and just next to the acclimatization pen is another wolf out of nowhere wolf number 8 and number 8 was reintroduced into a different acclimatization pen earlier on he left his pack wandering across the landscape looking for makes who knows and he came across number 9 in this acclimatization site and in this situation anything could happen right this is a big alpha male who is coming across a bunch of pups that are genetically not related to him and female inside that pen that could become a potential mate and so the park service is like oh what's going to happen here and number 8 goes over and starts playing with the pups and starts rolling over on his belly and the pups are jumping all over him it's very happy and fun and number 8 goes to the fence number 9 goes to the fence and they're kind of and all of this and so everything seems great and so the park service cuts open the fence number 9 leaves number 8 and number 9 become a famous alpha male and alpha female pair of a rose creek pack and together they raise litter after litter after litter of pups and by I think 2004-2005 about 75% of wolves in Yellowstone had some genetics related to wolf number 9 he's in a very famous matriarch so that's the first generation of this story remember that one pup that didn't leave the acclimatization pen that stayed in there with mom that was wolf number 21 the next wolf you're gonna learn wolf number 21 and 21 from a very early age was different than the rest he was regarded as a strong, brave, confident powerful wolf even as a pup when the park service would come and they would put in carcasses into the acclimatization pen all the wolves would always go to the other side of the pen and just cower against the edge number 21 would stand there between the family and the park service and just growl fending his pack and when all the other pups left the acclimatization said he stayed in there to defend mom right a couple of years after the acclimatization pen part of his life and he was just kind of a subordinate member of the Rose Creek pack the druid peak pack which was the next pack over the next territory over the druids were perhaps Yellowstone's most famous pack of wolves in history largely because of the 21 which you'll learn about in a second the alpha male the druid peak pack was approached shot by somebody just over the border outside of the park and so it left a big power vacuum in the druid peak pack and number 21 leaves his pack leaves the Rose Creek pack and walks straight into the druid territory and right into the pack and says I renew alpha male and that is one of the most brazen things a wolf could possibly do the only cause of death for wolves is death by the other wolf if you walk in another pack you have a very good chance of being immediately torn to shreds by the other wolves there but here's 21 who walks right in he senses that there is a need for leadership for leadership and he watched him and immediately they see the power right to him and it becomes the alpha the alpha male of the druid peak pack now 21 is regarded as as like a super wolf a lot of folks say that he's like a fictional character but he was actually real because he was extremely strong he was an extremely good fighter he was known to be able to fend off six other intruding wolves all by himself and he had done it on multiple occasions fighting off wolves like Muhammad Ali or something like that but for as tough and as strong as he was his favorite thing to do was play with the pups and he loved to let his pups roll over him and he loved losing play fights to his pups so he would pretend to fall down and let the pups grab him by the neck and all his kind of stuff and he would admit defeat and he just loved doing that so that was kind of his kind of fatherly expression but into strength and his sensitivity he was also regarded as magnetics because he never lost a single fight in his entire life but he also never killed an opponent in his entire life either which was really, really unusual so on one occasion there was this wolf called 302 302 we gave a better name called Casanova and it's called Casanova because it was this beautiful jet black nail and it was wandering around and the Druid Peak Pack now is pretty much 21, his mate and a whole bunch of daughters and Casanova would kind of hang out in the periphery of the pack howling up to the daughters like Don Juan like serenading them and the daughters would kind of come over and check them out and oftentimes if another male that's outside the pack comes in that's another good reason for the Alphas to come and just kill you on the spot because the only members of that pack are the alpha male and the alpha female and all the other wolves kind of take care of the pups of the alpha pair so the Alphas have a lot of interest in making sure that other wolves of the pack are not diluting the pack's ability to take care of their pups so 302 wears out his welcome a little bit with 21 and 21 runs him down 130 pounds, big huge broad shoulders like a linebacker tearing him apart the rest of the druid pack comes in and is attacking him and fighting him and then out of nowhere 21 stops and he backs off and he kind of just looks at 302 and the rest of the pack stops and looks at 21 like wait I thought we were supposed to kill this guy and 21 lets him go and 302 just slinks off so one of the directors of the all stone bull recovery projects named Rick McIntyre when he tells this story at this point you like to say why did Batman never kill Joker now if you're answering that as a human you'd say because it's very impressive if you as the victor vanquish your enemy and you kill your enemy that's impressive but what's even more impressive is if you let that survive it shows an incredible amount of confidence and mercy that you can let your enemies go okay I'll circle back to that in a second so 21 and his mate 42 he used to say that 42 is twice the wolf that 21 there was 42 was a remarkable alpha female she was an extremely good mother 21 and 42 together they reigned the Lamar valley for years and years they grew their pack up to 37 members it was the largest wolf pack ever in recorded history in 37 and that was an artificially inflated pack size because there was a really really high prey base in that northern range of Yellowstone where these wolves hung out there was about 17,000 elk wandering the northern range the carrying capacity for that habitat so in the absence of wolves and the absence of grizzly bears and the absence of mountain lions the elk population in this ecosystem had really gone through the roof and after the reintroduction of wolves wolves could just look anywhere and there's an elk and there's an elk and there's an elk and so it was an easy pick for me for a long time so here's the druid peak pack 21 42 with just an endless supply of food there in Lamar valley one day the pack is traveling towards the edge of their territory and an invading pack comes in and 42 made of 21 is killed by the rather pack she's ripped to shreds by the Molly's pack and the rather pack and 21 sits down and howls for like two straight days it had never been seen to do that ever before I don't know how a wolf howl like that if that's not warning, I don't know what it is a few weeks after that now number 9 number 21 is 9 years old that is like ancient for a wolf the average lifespan of a wolf is like 4 to 5 years and because living as a wolf is tough around every corner you're getting kicked in the head by an elk or getting attacked by another wolf there's all sorts of things out there 21, he was 9 years old and one day wolf number 21 the pack was out hunting elk and number 21 just sits down the rest of his pack goes off without him he turns around and he starts walking in the direction and he walks up under the very tip top of this mountain right here this is the Lamar valley that we're looking down and it took a while to get up there because he was arthritic and moving slow he's made it just been killed a couple weeks before when he sits down there on top of that mountain and looks out over this territory that he had been the alpha male of for so long and off on one direction towards us was the reacclamation pen that he could see that was still there from when he was first released into the park as a pup 9 years ago and off in the other direction he could look down and see his dense site where he had raised so many lives in pops of 42 and lived out so much of his life and so sitting there on top of that and looking out at this landscape he also has a nose full of the scent of 42 the scent was lingering in the sagebrush on the trees and on the trail from having walked through there only a couple weeks before and he curls up under a tree and he dies in his own terms after 9 years of living out life as a wolf you almost know shortly after that the the jurid peak pack more or less falls apart without that leadership the pack goes and cycles through a couple of leaders and Casanova comes back into the picture and now those daughters have no attachment to this pack Casanova comes in and 21's daughters lead with Casanova and they go off and they start their own pack the black tail pack which continued on for about 15 more years the black tail pack and Casanova actually become a really great alpha male very protective, great leader all of this and the question is back on that day when 21 let him go he knew that it was because one day he wasn't going to be around anymore and that by letting him live he knew that well Casanova not interested in him right now but one day he'd be a great mate for my daughters and take that however you want but number 21's genetics lived on through his daughters because of the pack big moment Casanova after his death so there's the emotional way we can describe this there's also something that's seeded deeply in evolution where there's a resistance to killing that wolf so now we're going to switch to another wolf this is wolf number 26 sorry 926 and we're fast-forwarding a little bit this is the granddaughter of 21 so the great granddaughter of number 9 and 926 lived a very different life 21 was a fictional character but he also lived in a fictional Yellowstone where elk populations were artificially inflated where there was food everywhere the ecosystem hadn't really come back into balance in terms of prey populations versus predator populations but also wolves at the time of 21 were protected under the Nature Species Act number 926 was born into a world after the wolves were delisted in 2011 and born into a world of wolf hunting and a world where instead of there being 17,000 elk there was 3,000 elk around her area so in the first year of her life she was born in 2011 in the first year of her life she watched her mother who was at the time the most famous wolf in the world a few years back about a famous wolf in Yellowstone getting killed by a hunter her name was 06 she was also 832 whatever so 926 in the same year in just her very first winter of life her mother shot by a hunter and watched her uncle this is a strange pack where her mother had scraped together her own pack by her own will she had found two brothers and made them both her alpha male because one wasn't good enough for her and so 926 kind of grew up early on with these kind of two fathers and one mother and in her first year of life watched mom get shot and watched one of her father and her uncle get shot after that happened the pack kind of disintegrated there was a power backing that was left there was an intense amount of sibling rivalry that cropped up throughout this period without this leadership so 926 had three older sisters that were kind of the generation above her they were born in the previous year and they all descended into a bunch of sibling rivalry two of the sisters killed one of the others meanwhile the surviving alpha male he went out and found a new mate to try to restabilize the pack and he brought his new mate back to the rest of the pack and the sisters immediately killed her and ousted the alpha male who gave up and he walked 15 miles south through a different valley the other side of Yellowstone and started a whole new life just started over 926 this is her first year of life mother killed, uncle killed father ousted, sister killed by her mother's sisters just amazing differences between that and 21's life and because of this she just became known as the little wolf that could she had a remarkable amount of tenacity so wolf watchers started at one point calling her spitfire because she was brazen and she was just faced with so much adversity every turn that she had no choice but to just face the bison head on and let it chase her away in time and time again so she was a um let this go for a second there's a grizzly bear over here too by the way wait really what is it is it just one again so 926 the Holomar Canyon pack her pack's name was the Holomar Canyon pack it replaced the Druid Peak pack still had a lot of genetics from 21 of course and the Holomar Canyon pack just kind of disappeared off the radar screen for a while and wolf watchers and yellows don't want to really bite their nails it was tough as a guide because we go out there knowing that there are no wolves in this valley right now so it's going to be hard to find them because we know that they're not there they're outside the park and it comes back into the park with this guy a wolf called 925 but before he had a collar we called him Big Gray and Big Gray was a big wolf from an outside pack and they together got together in 925 and 926 had the pups and they regain a toehold in the Holomar Valley after a couple of years other being very, very scarce out there so now 925 and 926 have been together for a year they went out on male hunt and it was 925 and 926 and all of their yearling pups they had been born just a little less than a year before and yearlings are pretty useless they're not experienced enough to fight they don't know how to kill anything they're not good hunters yet they're basically just kind of dead weight when it comes to the pack so here's 925 and 926 they basically find themselves in terms of actually experienced wolves and they're having the search farther and wider for prey because there's just less up to go around so they walk west and they walk out of the Lamar Valley and they walk out of their territory and they walk squarely into the territory of the Prospect Peak Pack and they're by a ride and there they find an elk and there's a dramatic chase that ensues 925 and 926 are heading after this elk the elk is perched up on the very very edge of a very tall cliff and often elk will put themselves in that situation and backed up to a big cliff so that nothing can get around behind them and the elk will defend itself with its front feet 926 is about 90 pounds or so and 925 is probably 120 pounds or so and a folder on a female elk is about 500 pounds and wolves that are going after bull elk are like 750 so these are animals that are like 6 or 7 times bigger than them but the elk slips and it falls off of the cliff and it lands at the bottom of the cliff squarely into the territory of the Prospect Peak Pack so shortly after they have gorged and filled their bellies the Prospect Peak Pack catches something strange on the wind and it's the sense that all of them are canyon wolves in their territory and so the Prospect Peak Pack is 12 wolves strong almost all of them were big strong adults and here's 925 and 926 full from a big huge meal with a bunch of these geelying pups they are outnumbered and outgunned and all these Prospects are running at them and so 925 926 the rest of the pack they take off running the Prospects they're getting closer and closer and the Lamarrs are losing ground and for reasons that were hard to imagine 925 stops dead and he turns around and just stands there well 926 and the pups just take off he had let himself be taken down as bait by the Prospects so that the rest of the pack could escape the Prospect is sent on him they tear him to ribbons there some of the pups kind of circle around and try to draw off some of the Prospect males it doesn't work 925 was basically dead by the end of the day but in doing so 926 all the pups survived they continued running for 5 miles before they slowed down and made it all the way back to their dense site and now all of the wolf watches were thinking probably the same thing that 926 was which is 926 was pregnant and she was about to give birth to another litter of pups and she just lost her alpha male just like her great grandmother so long ago, number 9 and so we're wondering what could possibly happen 926 is doomed her pups are doomed just one week later this is looking down to the north end of Lamarr Valley the dense site is basically over here we hear howling coming from up in the mountains and we look up and on this side right here on this cliff band, way up high there's 926 and her pups way up there just hanging out on top of the cliff why not and we look up though and they're not howling somebody else that's howling and they are deep low baritone howls that alpha female a bunch of pups wouldn't be able to make and we look over 926 also where's that howling coming from hearing howling coming from your territory when you're the only wolf we thought you were the only wolf in your territory is a little alarming and then we train our scopes right over here to the other side of this canyon and there are four big huge male prospect wolves four of the same wolves that had just killed her alpha male just a couple of days before and they are locked under her and they see her and there's a whole bunch of yearling pups there that are not related to those wolves and 926 is about to give birth to a bunch of pups that aren't that don't belong to these prospect males and so it's getting dark we're all butting our nails 926 sees them and her and the pups take off running down the cliff and disappear into these trees and the prospect males run down the cliff and disappear into the exact same spot and then it gets too dark to see and so like it was a very quiet dinner that night we were wondering what was going to happen to 926 oh my gosh can she not check to break and we wake up in the morning we go out looking for 926 and this is what we find we find her with the four prospects this is not you know what those wagging tails mean right sorry for that home video quality of this thing but this is the four males and 926 they had come looking for a new friend but all four of these males were trying to compete with each other for which one 926 was not the best and so this is a wolf called 965 this beautiful white one who was dominating one of his brothers called twin well 926 right here is not paying attention to it and so you know basically 926 picks one of these males comes to me off a female has pups you want that story to end happily but over the next year one by one all four of these males die one dies to disease one dies in a battle with a rival pack one just disappears off the map entirely one is shot by a hunter and now it's 926 alone again the next season she goes out she brings back another alpha female or alpha male her third alpha male a brother was tagging along and so she's like okay this is my chance they have pups together all the pups die of mange that male she brought back dies of canine distemper now it's just her one daughter that managed to survive and this brother that tagged along with the other alpha male and that's it so 926 has lost three alpha males her father was ousted from the pack her uncle was killed her mother was killed her sister was killed by others just can't possibly catch a break what happened to the youngsters all the pups basically died every litter of pups that she had died mostly due to disease the yearlings that when these four prospect males showed up were hanging around the daughters didn't mind them at all the huge handsome male wolves but the male yearlings of 926, her sons they weren't very interested in those prospects being the new stepdads and so they left the pack left the park and were shot on the other end of the board so then it's 926 it's that male brother of 926 who's now a couple years old and they kind of just disappeared off the radar screen kind of thought that they were dead they didn't know what would happen on the rare occasion that we did see them we didn't see any pups with them we thought that this pack was just basically just on its way out and then in the middle of October we're just now a month ago a couple months ago this October wolf watchers go out and they see 926's daughter in the front of the pack they're all walking across the Lamar Valley the daughter in the front is behind her is that other brother and behind them is a whole bunch of pups and behind them is 926 and so now 926 is no longer the alpha female she gave her she kind of seeded her power to the daughter and now 926 the grandma I know that's really how you want to start it and that's not how it ends though so when I was preparing this talk when I started to think about how I want to do this talk 926 was still alive just about three weeks ago 926 and her pack left the park just over the border and 926 was shot and woke up one morning to this in the headlines right so oh my gosh so unfortunate that that happened but for this particular wolf is a really surprising that at the end of the day this is how she met her and one more of these big struggles like this right but you know in terms of the big picture she had lived through everything and what she finally got to see happen before she was killed was she got to see she got to become a grandmother she got to see her daughter give birth to pups and continue the lineage of the Samar Canyon pack that started way back with number 9 and then with number 21 and then through 06 into 926 and her daughter and now these pups are still out there when I had to yell a stone in a couple weeks from now when we go out looking we're going to be looking for these pups and we're going to be looking for the daughter and then her mate so watching wolves is it's heartbreaking sometimes right we want our stories to end nice and happily the thing about watching wolves is that it's not you know it's in a way it's watching a soap opera right it's watching a play or opera or something like that but the stories that we write tend to always have a nice clean tidy package where you wrap things up and we move on and that's not what happens because they live real lives right and they are honest lives and when we watch their stories we haven't prescribed what the end is going to be and in a way that's a much more useful story because that's what life is actually like for us every single one of our struggles that we have is hard earned and you know failure to be around any corner and you know it's it's not always a happy picture and all of this so I want to just kind of button things up by putting this story of this dynasty of wolves into the larger picture so that we don't see 926's death by bullet as this tremendous tragedy that it seems like on the surface and instead look at it at the larger perspective so first of all I save all my graphs and maps and stuff to the very end when it all started there was 31 wolves that were introduced now there's 1700 wolves throughout Northwest Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana each one of these circles is a known wolf pack their introduction ecologically speaking by all measures has been a tremendous success and the presence of wolves in the landscape has surpassed the expectations of a lot of the biologists who originally did this in the first place wolves are hunted now right? they're no longer in the endangered species act the states in this area, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming are not fond of wolves and are doing their darnedest to eradicate as many of them as possible but the thing is wolves are here to stay because the endangered species act basically stipulates that that if a population recovers to a certain degree then the federal government stops managing that population and states can gain the rights to continue managing that what that often means is that's when hunting starts but the caveat is that there's a threshold number of wolves that has to remain in the landscape and if that threshold fails to be met then the federal government regains control of the management of that species and for as much as folks in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in the political side of things are really against wolves the one thing that they hate more than wolves is the federal government taking over their ability to manage those wolves and so wolves are here to stay and despite the intense hunting pressure although hunting pressure on these wolves changes their pack dynamics dramatically think about what a hunter's bullet did to fracture the Lamar canning pack see 926's mother and what it did when she was shot it changes the dynamics of packs but overall the numbers of wolves have remained remarkably steady no matter how many of them end up getting shot this is the numbers from Idaho wolf hunting started in Idaho in like 2010 or 2009 over there and there's a few hundred wolves shot every year in Idaho and this is the wolf population it is kind of rock solid right in the 700's wolves are resilient and wolves are wolves are very good at controlling their own numbers much better than we are wolves are a lot better at finding each other than hunters and trappers are and if wolves start eking into each other's territory they kill each other and they spread out and become more territory as necessary so they edit and flow and take care of their own numbers and if there's a vacancy in an area then gosh there's a lot more pups that survive the next year and so the wolf populations are very steady and not going anywhere so that's kind of the upshot of the numbers side of the game of the wolf reintroduction and ecologically speaking the reintroduction has been a few success as well and this blurry graph here you don't need to read you just have to see the shape this is years down here this starts in the 60's and it goes up basically to today and what this is showing is the number of elk in the northern range of Yellowstone way up here at 20,000 and then down here at 4,000 here and what you see is that in the absence of wolves wolves are eradicated from the ecosystem in barrens and mountain lions and there's a sky rock wolves are reintroduced to the ecosystem right about here and you can see the elk population has come down since now a really important takeaway is that wolves get all the blame for killing all the elk every time people think that wolves have killed all the elk oh my god there's not going to be any elk left because all the wolves kill them all and while the wolves have contributed to the decline in the elk population from this artificially inflated number down to the carrying capacity simultaneously with the wolf introduction has been a dramatic increase in the number of grizzly bears in the population the number of mountain lions both of which contribute more to elk mortality than wolves do so it's a whole ecological system that's at play here is the reintroduction of all the predators and the stability of all the predators now just wolves and elk numbers such that we're seeing changes in the landscape now if you've seen this video that's going around called how wolves change rivers and the video goes something like there was a time back in the dark ages when wolves were all killed and everything was horrible and then the wolves were brought back and the elk came back and the skies cleared up and the waters flowed clean and the meters returned and the trunculatory is spattered on the ground and the narrative of that is that wolves have fixed everything immediately in the last 20 years of their introduction and as you suspect it's never that simple and wolves haven't fixed anything this is a big big there are major changes to the ecosystem in the absence of all of these in the absence of the predators and that can't be fixed in 20 years but things are moving in the right direction this is a shot of the confluence of the Lamar river in 2000 or something like that and this is that same area last year there's a moose for scale so so the fact that there's so many willows regenerating here is really promising return of riparian vegetation in an area that has been heavily browsed down to the extent that moose can actually come back into the northern range of Yellowstone and the numbers that they haven't really been able to for quite some time going back this is a shot of a particular aspen grove in 2006 and again in 2010 showing that with fewer mouths feeding on vegetation a lot of these aspen stands that have been having a harder time regenerating are now able to reproduce those up above the brows line so we're seeing trends in the right direction not quite like the magical unicorns and rainbows thing that you see but we're moving in that direction which is really, really great and then in terms of our relationship with moose this reintroduction has changed that a bit too we never expected that there would be a wolf watching economy in Yellowstone biologists thought that we'd really reintroduce wolves into the landscape and that's the last we'd see of them because they don't like people it's a tremendously huge place and we thought they would live out their lives in climate and what was never expected is that they would live out their epic lives right in front of us for us to be able to watch and as a result people like Carol can come to Yellowstone and become inspired to write children's books and people in Vermont on a cold day can come and learn about wolves and imagine what it was like for them to be out there or for wolves to be here for that matter and we're just bouncing back also we're trying to we're getting better at figuring out how to handle the relationships between the different factions of people that do and do not like wolves we're paying out large sums of money to livestock ranchers who lose their cattle or sheep due to wolf depredations defenders of wildlife management agencies spend hundreds of thousand dollars a year paying out livestock losses and why don't they pay ranchers seven to one for what the cow was worth at the time that it died and so the financial loss of wolf livestock conflict is becoming more and more moods there's obviously a lot buried in that wolf point that we don't have time to unpack but suffice it to say that we're learning how to figure out this conflict this is one of my favorite shots of wolves in Yellowstone this is wolf called 889 I'm not going to tell you anything about her other than that she is the descendant of the Crystal Creek wolf pack the very very first pack to be reintroduced her ancestor was the first pot to be put down after 70 years absence in Yellowstone that happened right there so here is this wolf six or seven generations out from when her ancestors were released on a landscape where you can see this tremendous amount of aspen regeneration right here in between where she is now and where her family came from so what's the upshot of this and why do we care so much about watching wolves again we really want that story of 926 to end happily and it doesn't but that's significant for all that 926 went through in her life she really demonstrated that for wolves the attitude is looking forward looking ahead and saying what's next what problem can I overcome today and perseverance is really the currency of survival right and wolves are not really measured in a single day by what happens to one pup or with one bullet or something like that but it's measured over really long periods of time the fact that 926 was shot how lucky are we that there was a wolf there to be shot in the first place in a sense wolves had been exterminated and now they're not now they're here to stay and that's a victory maybe as an ecologist the takeaway that I have from watching wolves is something that applies so poignantly to our lives as humans is that the landscape that is the healthiest is often the one that contains the most amount of conflict in it and that seen over long periods of time in the overall trajectory of history that's how you measure victories and I think that's what Aldo Leopold is getting at back in the 1960s he had the first inklings, the first thoughts of reintroducing wolves and he said only the mountain has really lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf thank you you're welcome to have an answer as many questions as you have though Ken you want to hit the lights back there? I have two questions are llamas used at all in the ends of the first one is the second question is have you seen any noticeable impacts of global climate change? oh that's okay so we're going to remember those questions long enough to answer both so the first question was are llamas being used as guard animals essentially unlike sheep herds and stuff llamas make better guard dogs than dogs you didn't know that and guard llamas are being used to have seen them out there and it's really fun to go buy a herd of sheep and double take and say they're very defensive of their pack but even guard animals get killed by wolves once in a while so guard dog and guard llamas it's not a surefire thing really what has been a surefire thing is the concept of ranger riders that are known as cowboys paying a ranch hand to go out there and be with your cattle sometimes these livestock interactions between wolves are happening not on the ranchers back step but out on public land land that belongs to all of us where ranchers are paying a couple dollars ahead for a cow to put them out there and leave them there and pick them up in the fall when they're nice and fat and so we could talk for days about the politics of that and whether that's antiquated and how we should change these laws and that's been very effective instead of just kicking your cows out the door and bringing them back in the fall to pay a ranch hand a cowboy to go out there and stay with them and just the presence of humans around those cattle it is almost a surefire way to prevent livestock migration the second question we had was about climate change in relation to wolves and one really intensely right now through the University of Wyoming fellow named Arthur Middleton has been doing a ton of research on this that's been picked up by National Geographic a lot it has to do with elk populations and so what was it as do the elk go to the wolves or something like that the elk populations are using the landscape very differently than they once did or have different pressures than they once did the northern range of Yellowstone which is where the Lamar Valley is that's not a place where prey species spend their whole lives they go up this high country summer rain nice fresh beautiful grass in late May and June and July and so they'll migrate there to be there to feed on it and then leave the northern range of Yellowstone is 8 degrees Fahrenheit on average and it was just 25 years ago and as a result the amount of time in which grass is actually green there is a lot less by the order of a few weeks so if you've spent much time in Wyoming or Montana it's like winter winter winter spring summer fall winter winter winter and so you don't have very many weeks to fit in all the feeding you need to do for the next winter so the loss of 3 weeks of nice green forage makes a big difference and so that has implications for the survivorship of elk therefore the numbers of elk that are in the ecosystem to be preyed upon and also has elk shift their distribution that shifts the distribution of where wolves have to spend their time and when I don't know that the thread of how wolves have been affected by that has been fully elicited but there has been tremendous impacts to the elk by warming temperatures in the northern ancient thanks I was curious about when you said that when you had that chart the population of the elk I was wondering if there was impact of just overpopulation and disease as well as grizzly bears and other predators almost like a boom bust thing where at some point if there's too many elk then there's going to be massive starving die-offs and I think that population did fluctuate a lot because they were so far over the capacity that in cold winter there would be massive die-offs that you don't necessarily get from the smaller populations I don't know if there has been a lot of studies looking at whether the overpopulation itself was a cause of their decline but the key takeaway for that research and that time period when the populations did start to decline is that those numbers were coming down as a result of predators being back in the landscape to higher numbers and major changes in the regulations around elk hunting that number when the elk that that graph spiked way up in the beginning in the 60s that was because we were actually managing elk basically in the same way that we managed cattle right you're raising elk to go shoot them and so our philosophies around game management have also changed over the years and so there's a lot more complicated than just you know there were no wolves therefore the graph goes up and then there were wolves and then therefore the graph goes down it's a great area you said with wolves of Hatterstack and then your point about the federal government acting as a deterrent of states because they don't want to lose control over the wolves for the federal government how much does that have to change under administration that kind of thing I mean the Endangered Species Act so far has held on and that's really the floodgate which changed everything the most important piece of environmental law that is out there period is the Endangered Species Act if you're wondering how you can do your part to support wolves or support wildlife in general and just support responsible wildlife management and all these things defending the Endangered Species Act is a really good place to start right now because that is being destroyed right so if there's no Endangered Species Act then there's no more a disincentive for the states to not kill all of their delisted species so keep an eye on Endangered Species Act and when you see that in the news pay attention to that and that's a really good place to invest your attention if you're wildlife would it be right now call our representatives support? I think that's a really smart idea I think that a lot of folks don't understand the power that the Endangered Species Act actually has it's an environmental law that has a lot of teeth and it muddles up a lot of government progress in a very good way for the benefit of things like wolves and bears and all that but that's not something that's necessarily recognized by politicians who usually environmental issues are not their very top priority and I think that you understood that the Endangered Species Act it's not just one of the many acts out there it's like the thing that is the most important act for wildlife preservation at least Endangered Species I don't know I think that would be a wise thing to do All the watchers of the wolves don't the wolves then learn to be unwary of humans so that when they water out of the park they're basically sitting ducks Before I answer that question it reminds me to remind you to check out in the back corner of the lobby out there are a whole bunch of articles that I put out half of them are articles about the that were published in the early 1990s before the reintroduction actually happened about what was going on politically what was the scene, what was the culture around this they're all local papers from Montana and out of Wyoming another stack of papers is all modern headlines about what's going on a couple of those papers address your question which is from a population standpoint a wolf is a wolf a wolf in Yellowstone is no more important ecologically speaking than a wolf that's in the Baratheon National Forest but a wolf is not a wolf when it comes to the amount of tourism dollars that that wolf brings in for instance should we treat the wolves in Yellowstone differently from a management perspective than wolves outside of the park and the other piece that's really important to think about is the behavior of wolves different in Yellowstone because they have grown up essentially around people the Lamaritan in Dent's site is like an eighth of a mile away from a road and so anytime the wolves want to bring food back and forth between pups and elsewhere they have to cross the road they spend all day long with a thousand people standing on these weird strips of asphalt pointing big telescopes up at them and that is just part of their life they get used to that that said wolves generally don't want anything to do with us and if you're out in Yellowstone and you leave that asphalt and start walking towards the wolves they'll get up and walk half a mile away but there are plenty of times where wolves walk right in front of a car and they don't nearly have the fear of humans that wolves outside the park do because they haven't grown up with them and so 926 when she was shot was basically walking right down the road near Cook City so to her what's the difference between walking down the road there and walking down the road five miles back near Dent's site and that brings into question one of the tenants of hunting is the idea of fair chase if you're going to hunt an animal it has to be a hunt and not just going to the grocery store and picking up your wolf next to the pork aisle there has to be an element of actual challenge to this and it has to be a fair fight and are the wolves in Yellowstone sufficiently different that it's no longer fair chase to hunt them at the borders of Yellowstone because the wolf that's walked over the boundary of Yellowstone is going to behave differently than a wolf that grew up living outside of the National Forest away from people so it's not an answer question it's the short answer of all of that there is to be seen one thing that did happen after wolves were delisted and then 06 most known as wolf and roll was shot within a couple of weeks is there's a huge amount of pressure so even if hunting couldn't be closed at the border the harvest numbers could be reduced so now along the northern edge of the park the quota is off the northeastern side the quota is two wolves off the northwestern side is two wolves and two wolves is a lot better than unlimited quotas but two is enough for 926 to get shot for instance so it's a good step in the right direction and I see it as a great act of compromise yeah several how many people work in Yellowstone on wolf dynamics and does every wolf that's born in Yellowstone get numbers not every wolf about 30% of wolves in the park wear radio collars at some point in their life wolves that don't wear radio collars don't get numbers but often there's an effort to radio collars the alphas of the pack because if you follow the alphas around you're likely to have most of the rest of the pack around as well there are some great crews of people who do amazing aren't any of you here tonight any wolf crew of people let me talk in some of the okay so let's do one of the fact check me there are some absolutely remarkable wolf crew technicians that go out every winter and they spend there's some focus wolf studies where there's a crew of people that go out and there's a team of three people that's assigned to every single pack in the park and and they spend basically sun up to sun down every single day regardless of the weather regardless of the temperature with eyeballs through spying scopes on those wolves if they're in view recording every little movement they make everything they do there's a ton of time invested in watching that and then collating that and above all that there is a team of national park service biologists who are kind of collating that data is Doug Smith who you've seen a guy in the Edelman mustache with a park service hat talking about wolves as Doug Smith and there's a couple other people that are also head biologists on all this but it's a fairly small crew other than that in addition to the national park service there's you know the US Fish and Wildlife Service has their wolf people and USGS it's their wolf people on the state game agencies have their people and so there's a big you know collaborative network of wolf biologists that work together on this stuff another long answer to what should have been a short one I don't know I'm glad you're the one already other healthy wolf pack areas in the states besides the yellow stuff so Minnesota Wisconsin Michigan have larger wolf populations than the west states you don't hear about it because you never see them that you know the area is forested you can't just go out and set up a spotting scope and look over five miles of the landscape until you find them which makes it sound easier than it actually is but yeah those states Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan they never actually lost their wolf they're never extirpated they're always there all along they have been harvested down to the brink of extinction I believe but they returned on their own through exchange from Canada so it's a continuous population from Canada down in and there's essentially a continuous population now in the west from Canada down into Montana and all the way through the wolf that was United States already a wolf that was trapped in northwest Wyoming we just found at the edge of the Grand Canyon a couple years ago so when I said that wolves can get up and walk a thousand miles like that's an example of it walking from Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon any in name? I don't think they're any in name I think it's a matter of time the wolf conversation is tricky because a lot of our coyotes have a lot of wolf genetics in them and and that's an ongoing area of research to figure out what does that actually mean is it that wolves and coyotes are actually interbreeding somewhere or is it that these are self breeding populations of these things that at one point got wolf genetics mixed in but there are wolves in Ontario they're not very far away and some I do wonder if they show up now and again I think it's just a matter of time until they might be found more regularly I think that wolf I think it's unreal a lot of debate around this is there a place for wolves in the Northeast in the Adirondacks in Maine and I'll share our opinions on that forever I think that wolves are hard to live with and if they're hard to live without west where there's nobody anywhere not there I think they would be impossible to live here they might do fine hunting white tail deer in the Adirondacks we could have a population but I think is it worth the incredible amount of headache that would cause I think the stories out west would be a drop in the bucket compared to having wolves in our own backyards you know I'm hungry now I'm just kind of speculating so I don't have time to worry about that no one has a question about a slide for your first slide it's back wolf that you said was your favorite photo yeah yeah does it look fair and then there's something more oh good I see if you can tell me what that is oh what's up there yeah there's a bison right there oh yeah you saw it bison there's a marinal do you explain how the loss of one individual population really had an effect are there any studies we conducted about the original Canadian population that these wolves were taken from and how that has changed as a result of their introduction yeah there's like a whole other side of this whole reintroduction story it's this beautiful game to the Yellowstone ecosystem but like up in Canada somebody is missing some wolves up there and I don't think there's been any study at all on what that process did to that those local areas wolves were taken from essentially the edge of Boudffala National Park Boudffala National Park Canadian National Park Boudffala National Park and there was 31 wolves taken from that so that's not a huge number considering when there's hundreds and hundreds of wolves harvested in legal hunts down here 31 is in the sense of dropping the bucket unless it was part of your pack so I don't know I was actually really curious about that myself as I was putting all this together I was thinking wait a minute no one ever said what would happen to the rest of the wolves I'm curious as well yeah do people who shoot wolves do they do anything with them can you use a pelter how can you eat them you can't really eat them it's a trophy so you're hunting it for the pelter for the taxidermy or something like that and man and shooting a wolf is not just shooting wolf it's like there's a lot of different reasons why one might shoot a wolf but like I said before a wolf is more than just something with a whole bunch of fur on it it's more than just 100 pounds of meat in front of it it's symbolic and in the early days of wolf hunting when they were delisting that first hunt happened there was a surprising statistically significant amount of yellowstone wolves that were harvested right over the border the number of wolves that were wearing radio collars in the yellowstone as I said is about 30% more than half of the wolves that were harvested that were yellowstone wolves were wearing radio collars and instead of very well a disproportionately large number of the yellowstone wolves that were shot over the border were wearing collars so the question is were those wolves actually targeted all these wolves to choose from throughout the northern Iraqis are folks going out to target colored yellowstone wolves because shooting that wolf means something different as a statement so add another layer to the complexity of our feelings around wolves and think about the dynamics of yellowstone wolves that were shot can the hunters pack into the the falls? not easily but yeah there's definitely a wolf hunting website that said as much as if you have the ability to turn on a radio receiver tune your channels to this range to the frequency and start scanning and so I think it's very I don't want to I certainly don't want to paint every wolf hunter in that light there's a lot of folks that I think are really good people that hunt wolves I don't agree with them but they're nice people and everybody has their own reason for doing things one of the things I really don't understand is that you've been a radio antenna to the frequency of a wolf so no fair chase there and that's never been officially confirmed but it happened but you're only coloring the alphas and the alphas are the clear ones right? well so you said that you're calling an alphas the alphas are bigger so wouldn't that be a better trophy the only thing that matters is the pelts when you wear a collar it wears all the fur on your neck so the pelts is actually ruined you can't get anything for a pelt that's been wearing a radio collar because the fur is not intact in the neck and so it's a choice to shoot a collar wolf or a non-collar wolf and if you're shooting one with the collar assuming you're a little there you need a decision to do that and it does cost researchers a lot of money you know each one of those radio each one of the telemetry radio collars the ones that just submit a fee $4,000 when all of a sudden they're done to put on an animal GPS collars that they wear cost about $20,000 when all of a sudden they're done to put on a machine the technology, hiring a helicopter the ketamine tranquilizer, all of that stuff that goes into the whole process of the collar and operation it's a lot of money to invest in these collars so it's a big hit to research when we lose collar wolves why was there a data gap in the 80s on our I think there was just a couple of years where they couldn't do that survey I don't know if it was just bad weather or if it was something else but I think it was just lack of data because they couldn't get out and do the alternative lack of funding or something so there were no didn't something go down to zero it was just that there was no there was no survey nothing down here so I'll dismiss class and have a good chat with you afterwards if you have a question I'll remind you that we still have one more space in our Yellowstone trip in May if you're curious about that send me an email and then please do check out all the wolf literature and stuff in the back corner I think it will be a little more enlightening after knowing what you know about moving thank you all for coming out tonight thank you