Wolves Feeling At Home On The Western Range Yellowstone Packs Thriving, Settling In In To New Digs In Remote Corner Of Park

In a remote corner of this vast Western preserve, the five wolves of the Rose Creek pack work their way through canyons and take up their positions behind a herd of elk grazing on the valley floor.

Before first light arrives, before the stray coyotes come to scavenge, before the dedicated National Park Service biologists tracking them arise from their bunks, the wolves have silently selected an elk calf, chased it down, feasted on their kill and disappeared back into the mountains.

Wolves are back in Yellowstone.

The evidence they have been here is just the faint tick, tick, tick transmitted by their radio collars, a few paw prints in the snow and the awesome sight of the elk carcass, its bones polished white and the marrow sucked out of them.

Two years after Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt committed the Clinton administration to a course of action cheered by wildlife enthusiasts - and denounced by ranchers in Montana and Wyoming - 39 wolves in nine packs are roaming the back country of this 3,500-square-mile park. Another 12 are in pens, ready to be released in the spring.

Other released wolves from Alberta, Canada, are ranging free in Glacier National Park and remote wilderness in central Idaho. Last year, red wolves were reintroduced amid little fanfare in North Carolina and Tennessee. And last month, Albany, N.Y., was host of a conference on reintroducing wolves into the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

The wildlife science it takes to accomplish such feats turns out to be easier to handle than the political hurdles, particularly in the West. In Yellowstone, even after the National Park Service demonstrated that wolves would bring more money in the form of tourism to this job-hungry region than they would ever cost in losses to livestock, it still took 17 years to get the program off the ground.

Along the way, the northern gray wolf, “Canis lupus,” has become a symbol of the land-use battles being fought all over the American West as the 20th century nears its close.

On one side are the ranchers, loggers and longtime residents who ascribe to the attitudes of the “Old West.”

On the other side are the millions of devotees of the “New West,” mainly new arrivals to the 10 states of the mountain West, who cite quality of life issues as the reason they settled here.

Until recently, the political power belonged to the Old West. In Washington, policies ranging from the Homestead Act of 1862 to giveaways of large tracts to the railroads have long been geared toward encouraging the economic exploitation and settlement of the region that demographer Joel Garreau dubbed “The Empty Quarter.”

But all this is changing.

Bill Frey, a population specialist at the University of Michigan, says that since 1970 the population of the mountain West has doubled to some 25 million.

“The ‘Empty Quarter’ isn’t so empty anymore,” Frey says. “It’s filling up.”

And not just with people. In Yellowstone, the vast herds of elk, bison and deer have been joined by nine wolf packs. Eight of them have an alpha male and an alpha female - a breeding pair - and are expected to den in the spring and emerge weeks later with pups.

“A given pack will produce six pups every year,” says L. David Mech, the government biologist considered the dean of wolf experts.

“They grow fast, too. Within six months, they are adult-sized - and within a year they begin dispersing out of the pack.”

This is precisely what concerns the local ranchers, who find it galling to see their tax dollars used to bring back the very predator their grandfathers cleared off the range at the turn of the century.

To that complaint, Michael K. Phillips, the director of the Yellowstone wolf recovery project, answers, “It’s an effort to put something back that should never have been removed in the first place.”

The late 19th-century war against wolves declared on the Western range was the last great crusade against the animal. The reason cited was economic.

In the 1870s and 1880s wolves were a serious threat to ranching. With the buffalo nearly wiped out, and populations of all other game animals drastically reduced by hunting, wolves had little choice but to prey on livestock.

Montana paid bounties for wolves beginning in 1884, and over the next 40 years the state paid them on some 80,000 wolves, most shot, trapped or poisoned.

And yet, another phenomenon typifies Americans’ attitude toward wolves: As soon as they are gone, we start to miss them.

The arguments raised in opposition were familiar ones.

“The wolf is really a vicious predator who, when my grandfather came to this country, was a real threat to livestock,” argued Chuck Rein, a third-generation rancher from Big Timber, Mont.

At meetings in grange halls across the Northern Rockies, similar sentiments were expressed. Yet two events occurred that helped bring wolves back to their ancient haunts in Yellowstone. The first was a private conversation between William Penn Mott Jr., the Reagan appointee who headed the park service, and Hank Fischer, who heads the Montana chapter of Defenders of Wildlife.

“You want to put this issue to rest?” Mott asked Fischer. “Take the economic incentive to oppose (wolf reintroduction) out of it. Don’t wait for the government to do it. Do it yourselves.”

So Defenders, at Fischer’s insistence, raised $100,000 and set up the Wolf Compensation Fund to pay ranchers for livestock killed by wolves.

The idea was implemented just in time because in 1986, as the federal government dallied over its reintroduction plan, a pregnant female wolf from Canada slipped across the U.S. border and denned in Glacier National Park. The wolves were back in the Lower 48 - and by 1987, a few calves and sheep were missing.

The second event that helped the wolves was the election of Bill Clinton as president - and his subsequent selection of Babbitt as Interior secretary. There is no evidence Clinton had ever heard of the stalled Yellowstone reintroduction plans when he ran in 1992, and there is some evidence that the White House let Babbitt implement the plan with reluctance.

The wolves have done their part, too. As it turns out, they prefer wildlife to domestic stock; and with prey now abundant in the park, in 10 years Defenders’ has only had to compensate ranchers for 47 cattle and 51 sheep.