Pack Mentality Eleven Wolves In Captivity On Nez Perce Lands Help Researchers Learn What Makes The Controversial Creatures Tick
Steam lifts from Keith Marshall’s tea cup as he watches Wahoots (“howls a lot”), a full-grown gray wolf, dig a hole in the corner of his 20-acre enclosure. Wet gloves and wool hats dry on clothespins over a woodstove in Marshall’s cabin, which is made from sandbags, Idaho white pine, red fir and cedar. Skulls, jaws and feathers line the walls next to guidebooks and kerosene lanterns.
Outside, snow melts, flake by flake. After a year and a half of sharing this forest with the 11 members of the Sawtooth Pack, Marshall, pack caretaker for the Wolf Education and Research Center in Winchester, Idaho, has finely tuned all his senses to the natural rhythms of bird, weather, and most of all, wolf.
He knows, for instance, that Wahoots’ nervous digging is caused, in part, by the alpha male Kamots (“to go free”), who will often pick on Wahoots and his sister Weyekin (“spirit guide”) in normal pack behavior. Marshall admires Kamots as a strong but just leader who is not afraid to “cut a rug” with other members of the pack.
A 10-foot-high chain-link fence may separate the pack from Marshall, but in his heart, all borders have dissolved.
“You live this job,” he says, of his full-time responsibility for the wolves and the surrounding 300 acres the WERC leases from the Nez Perce Tribe. “I interact with them daily. They provide me with the opportunity to better understand people. Since they are in a social unit, there’s a lot of behavior that is similar to the way people respond to each other. They’ve taught me to be a better person.
“But they are not spiteful like humans. Fur color doesn’t matter, either. They also point out the subtleties and rhythms of nature: where the mice and deer are. Ten years after I leave this place I’ll still be dissecting what I’ve learned.”
For four years, Megan Parker, research biologist at the center, has lived with the wolves. She’s done vocalization research with the pack, along with hierarchy behavior, monitoring and habitat work. She echoes Marshall’s admiration.
“Wolves are an incredible resource here. Being with them is such a privilege. They have taught me how to pay attention. I’m more prepared for even human behaviors and how to respond to a pack dynamic.”
Marshall and Parker’s experiences are what the WERC, in partnership with the Nez Perce tribe, hope visitors will come away with, too, when they hike the trails bordering the wolves’ enclosure and browse the Interpretive Center.
The pack, raised in captivity by filmmaker Jim Dutcher and his caretakers, and brought to Winchester in 1996, are featured in his films “Wolf: Return of a Legend,” and “Wolves at Our Door.” The wolves provide a living and breathing example for the 100,000 supporters of the organization based in Boise whose mission is to “provide public information and scientific research concerning the gray wolf and other endangered species integral to wolf habitat in the Northern Rockies.”
Most of the wolves were purchased from a captive-wolf breeder in Montana who has some wolves that are bred for movies and game parks. The breeder is able to own and breed wolves because she owned them before the Endangered Species Act was adopted and she was grandfathered in.
The Sawtooth females have been surgically prevented from having pups and will never be released into the Idaho wilds.
“We don’t believe in captive propagation and continuing to increase predators in captivity when resources are needed in the wild,” Parker says.
Wolves are a tough sell in Idaho, especially among non-Indians, who have inherited the mythology of the “big, bad wolf” brought to this country by European ancestors. The mythology led to a legacy of extermination and vast killing fields here in the West. More than 80,000 were slaughtered in Montana alone between 1883 and 1918.
By the 1940s wolves were at the brink of extinction through government bounties and remained so until 1973, when the Endangered Species Act mandated their recovery. At present, the 34 wolves released in Idaho have grown to almost 100 individuals in 12 packs.
When Marshall addressed an RV club last summer at Winchester State Park, he got an earful of mostly negative but not atypical opinions: “Humans have dominion over nature. It’s those damn Easterners that want to save them. Our tax dollars used to go to killing them. Now our taxes are going to save them!”
Marshall perhaps didn’t change that audience’s opinion, but he says he softened it.
“If they can’t like wolves, maybe they can like me,” he says. “It’s a start.”
Still, many of the same people that condemn wolf reintroduction own wolf hybrids. Marshall estimates up to 300,000 of these “dogs” exist in the United States, a big mistake, he says.
“What you get is a confused animal, and the wolf is neither misguided or confused,” he says. “We domesticated the dog already. Why are we doing it again with wolves? It’s because we’re not connected to nature. Wolves have lots of qualities to admire. These owners want to harness and control those qualities, just like nature.”
Most of the people who make the trek to Winchester already have an affinity for wolves. Their reaction to finally seeing them in a natural habitat ranges from tears of joy to quiet respect to signing up as volunteers or interns.
Marshall, Parker, other WERC staff and members of the Nez Perce Tribe also visit schools in an attempt to shatter the European myths among a younger generation that can adapt more readily. One program is the “Wolf Box” that reaches 30,000 schoolchildren in Idaho and Montana annually. Put together by the national Wildlife Federation and the Forest Service, this traveling educational kit includes a video, puppets, books, wolf pelts, plaster-cast wolf tracks and actual skulls, and other classroom aids.
Nez Perce tribal member Levi Holt grew up with a different mythology of wolves, an important perspective he brings to the center as area manager. He says Native Americans and wolves share similar histories. Both were persecuted and forced into smaller and smaller habitats. Because of that shared experience, Holt says, Native Americans feel a special affinity with wolves. Today the Nez Perce have the main lead and responsibility for wolf recovery in Idaho.
“Since time immemorial the Nez Perce have watched, observed and learned from the animal world,” Holt says. “The wolves represent to me a reconnection of a lost spirit. The wolf is one of the missing links in the Sacred Circle. It gives all Indian people a newfound energy.”
Holt, whose great-grandparents gave him the name of Black Beaver, is also a student of the wolves.
“One thing that has come into my heart is that in many ways wolves have a healing power,” he says.
Last summer a girl suffering from a fatal nervous disorder contacted the Wishing Star Foundation to request her final days be spent in the company of the Idaho wolves, Holt says. For five days and nights, while housed in a yurt, she laid in illness next to the Sawtooth Pack enclosure. From her bed she could hear the wolves howl.
“The wolves seemed to sense her illness,” Holt says.
After her stay, the little girl’s health improved to the point that her mother remarked to Holt, “She displays and shows a different kind of strength than I’ve ever seen before.”
The girl is still alive. Next summer she plans to return to Winchester to revisit the pack.
Not far from where the girl stayed is an interpretive sign with a quote from Chief Dan George: “If you talk to the animals, they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.”
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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The center The Wolf Education and Research Center, located one mile west of Winchester, Idaho, is closed for the winter. It reopens in May. A voluntary donation is requested of visitors. Call (208) 924-6960 for more information, group reservations and a list of educational programs. The center’s address is P.O. Box 917, Boise, ID, 83701. Its Web site address is www.wolfcenter.org.