The year of the wolves

Thirty years ago this month, gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. Today, the people who made it happen remember the mayhem and magic of one of the 20th century’s most controversial acts of ecosystem management.

By the 1930s, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s wolves had been systematically hunted and trapped out of existence. In their absence, it didn’t take long for humankind to rethink the wisdom of eradicating the ecosystem’s apex canine predator.  

Aldo Leopold, a visionary conservationist, thought of reversing course as early as 1944. “Why, in the necessary process of extirpating wolves from livestock ranges of Wyoming and Montana, were not some of the uninjured animals used to restock Yellowstone?” the icon of the environmental movement wrote in the Journal of Forestry. 

Leopold didn’t live to see that vision fulfilled, not even close. It took a full half-century before wolves returned to the world’s first national park. 

Canis lupus may have found their own way back eventually — natural reoccupation was likely, some experts believed, though how soon was uncertain. The federal government didn’t want to wait to find out. By the 1990s, public interest in a reintroduction of the federally protected animals met the necessary political will. Then, 30 years ago this month, amid global fanfare, federal biologists turned 14 adult wolves — wild animals captured and transplanted from the Canadian Rockies — loose in Yellowstone National Park. READ MORE…