Yellowstone National Park is the largest park of its kind in the world. But it hasn’t always looked the way it does today, and that’s because Yellowstone isn’t just a national park; it’s the site of an extraordinary experiment.
In 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a team of Canadian biologists captured 14 wolves from Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, for reintroduction to Yellowstone. It was the first time that gray wolves had inhabited this terrain since their extermination in 1926.
The National Park Service explains that in the late 1800s, settlers and their livestock moved westward and suddenly had to contend with native predators, such as wolves.
To protect their livestock, settlers practiced “predator control,” and the park lost a huge number of its wolf, cougar, bear, and coyote populations. Gray wolves disappeared completely.
The park was wolf free for seven long decades, but their intentional reintroduction gave scientists the rare opportunity to study what happens when a top predator returns to an ecosystem. The gray wolves were brought in to manage the elk population, which had spiraled out of control since their main predator disappeared, says the BBC. But the wolves ended up achieving that and much, much more.
“Each wolf was radio-collared as it was captured in Canada,” reported the National Park Service. “While temporarily penned, the wolves experienced minimal human contact. Approximately twice a week, they were fed elk, deer, moose, or bison that had died in and around the park.”
The wolves, after getting used to their new surrounds and developing a taste for Yellowstone elk, were released into the park.
“Wolf #10 was the first one to run free in Yellowstone for 70 years,” regaled Kirsty Peake, the UK Wolf Conservation Trust’s advisor, speaking to the BBC. “I can feel the lump in my throat saying that!”
But then, tragedy struck. “As feared,” Yellowstone park officials documented on their website, “#10, the alpha male, almost immediately headed north and crossed the border to Montana. His mate, pregnant with pups, followed him soon after.”
On April 26, 1995, near Red Lodge, Montana, the runaway alpha male wolf was illegally shot and killed. The perpetrator was sent to jail. The wolf’s mate and her puppies, however, were rescued and returned to Yellowstone.
“This couple’s blood line,” say park representatives, “can be traced in the majority of the wolf packs today.”
The gray wolf population rose steadily, and from that moment on, the park started to change in fascinating ways. These “top predators” kept the elk moving; previously overgrazed patches of land had the chance to recover and grow lush again, and an ecological phenomenon known as a “trophic cascade” began to transform the entire ecosystem.
As grazing animals were kept in check, cottonwoods, aspens, and poplar trees grew, lining the rivers and stabilizing the riverbanks like never before. “Beavers came back,” Dr. Sanjayan, lead scientist of the Nature Conservancy, explained to the BBC, “and they came back on their own.” So did a huge congregation of birds and small mammals, invited back by the newly habitable landscape.
There’s little doubt that the Yellowstone gray wolf reintroduction proved that small changes can have a tremendous impact on large ecosystems.
Yet, wildlife ecologist Arthur Middleton from UC Berkeley warns us not to oversimplify. We must be careful not to “distract attention from bigger problems,” he wrote for The New York Times, or “mislead ourselves about the true challenges of managing ecosystems.”
Yet, Yellowstone National Park’s remarkable example, thanks to gray wolves, the new “forest stewards” of Yellowstone, offers a glimmer of hope for future generations and for wild ecosystems everywhere.
Louise Chambers
Author
Louise Chambers is a writer, born and raised in London, England. She covers inspiring news and human interest stories.
