Ep. 37: The Wolf Returns to the West

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Speaker 1: The return of gray wolves, Mexican wolves, and red wolves to the West is an unfolding history yet to play out, but it’s a watershed in the Western story. I’m dan Flores, and this is the American West. The wolf returns to the West. Stepping ashore in the early sixteen hundreds, we old worlders were bitter to discover wolves were abundant in America. That’s truly curious if you know human history, since thousands of generations of us had watched and learned from wolves for half a million years or more. Domesticated wolves were our first companion animals, our oldest animal helpmates, our templates for domestication, because as hunters, both humans and wolves saw so much of themselves in the other. But there were handed down memories that were more recent in Eurasia. Wild wolves ceased to be our blood brothers when seven to eight thousand years ago we started taming and herding undulates. Native people in America never took that step with bison or bighorn sheep or prong horns, and consequently they lived among wolves without animals, continuing to admire and learn from them, seeking them as totems. But Europeans landed in America with all their past centuries of wolf hatred at full boil, plus a recent memory of success at eradicating wolves in places like the British Isles. There was also that shepherd’s religion we brought with us, which calls something else into play. Inferences from the Bible were that wolves were a part of the fallen earth Adam and his progeny inherited when he was expelled from the garden. Looking deeply into a wolf’s eyes could also be a disconcerting reminder of something good Judaeo Christians tried their best to avoid thinking about. To paraphrase the British ecologist Melanie Challenger, the earth was now dominated by an animal who was doing his best to convince himself and everyone else that he was not actually an animal. That animal origin we share with wolves is one reason they make us so anxious. In his nineteen twenties novel Steppenwolf, the German writer Hermann Hesse put the matter this way. He calls himself part wolf park man. With the man he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated, are even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf, all that is instinctive, savage, chaotic. As a good European, Hesse didn’t understand enough about wolves to reference their real emotional lives, their loyalty and tenderness to packs and mates in offspring. But he knew that wolves remind us of the animal nature we humans deny or believe we’ve escaped. That was a problem for us, but much more of a problem for wolves, except in Alaska. By the mid twentieth century, we Americans had endangered all our wolves everywhere. Federal wolf killers Stanley Young and Ea Goldman’s famous book The Wolves of North America proudly proclaimed victory by the nineteen forties. By then, wolves were entirely gone on in the East, from New England to Virginia. The Rocky Mountain states, with all their public lands, barely held one hundred wolves. California’s last wolves were down to fewer than fifty. There were only sixty Mexican wolves left. In the Southwest. The only places in the lower forty eighth that still had sizable wolf populations were the Upper Great Lakes Country and the mid South. By the mid twentieth century, the Upper Midwest still had fourteen hundred gray wolves, and the Mid South four hundred and fifty red wolves, but those numbers were all quickly falling. For Americans born after World War II, living in a country without wolves now became normal. That was certainly the case for me from a generation born in in America. With no wild buffalo on the prairies, no passenger pigeon in the skies, no wolves in the forest. The wolf warriors were finally succeeding in making America over in the image of England or France. Centuries of unquestioned wolf hatred had worked, so called civilization was now at hand. There was one exception to this sad tale of wolf disappearance in the lower forty eight. Back in nineteen fifty nine, inspired by Adolph Mury’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley, a young graduate student from working class roots named David Meck conducted the first of three winners of field trips to a two hundred ten square mile island in Lake Superior. Ile Royal had become a National park in nineteen forty and Mech’s project was to study an ongoing natural history experiment there. In the early nineteen hundreds, moose had swum from lake shorelines out to the island. Lacking predators, their numbers predictably underwent two massive eruptions and then die offs. Then in nineteen forty nine, gray wolves somehow got to Isle Royl from the mainland, probably by crossing the winter frozen lake. Like Adolph Murray, Meck did the kind of wolf study others dreamed of getting to see firsthand an evolving ecological interaction. At the time, a few hundred wolves remained in the Upper Midwest, most of them in Minnesota. The Fish and Wildlife Service would declare this Midwestern wolf population officially threatened by nineteen seventy eight. When mechs The Wolves of Isle Royal appeared as a National Park’s publication in nineteen sixty six, his insights spread through the scientific community. Adolf Murror had been right. Wolves mostly killed the young, the injured, and the very old of their prey, but there was more. Meck was the first naturalist to report how difficult the life of a wolf really was. Although Ile Royals wolves killed in ate beavers, almost their entire focus was on big ungulates. Wolves did not survive on rabbits or mice, yet, of the moose they pursued. Even big wolf packs succeeded in making kills only eight percent of the time. For many readers, Mech’s Insides induced a new found understanding and compassion for the life of a wolf. For ecology, Mech’s ile Royal study was one more piece of hard evidence buttressing the scientific view that wolves were critical to healthy ecologies. So by the nineteen sixties, our best natural scientists were telling us we’d been wrong to impose a myopic Old World wolf war in America. The science of ecology was showing that the continent’s ancient top predators had shaped everything about America’s natural history, from the way other predators like cougars or coyotes or foxes functioned, to what kinds of prey animals there were and how many, down to the numbers of beavers in the streams, the songbirds in the valleys, the kinds of trees and grass that grew. If America’s valued and wanted modern, healthy versions of old time America’s ecologies, we were going to have to take a number of measures, from creating a wilderness preservation system to bringing wolves back. Ecologist Aldo Leopold’s land ethic almost came down to a single, delimited insight. Imagining a biologically healthy America meant we had to start thinking like wild mountains that had wolves in them Again. In nineteen sixty seven, with the Endangered Species Act of nineteen sixty six on the books, both the Eastern timberwolf and the red wolf, ancient native animals whose genetics and cultural knowledge we were in danger of losing, were listed as endangered species. The Western gray wolf was also listed in nineteen sixty seven, then relisted in nineteen seventy three when Congress passed and Richard Nixon signed into law the Grand Endangered Species Act of that year. US Fish and Wildlife also relisted both eastern and red wolves. Within a week of the nineteen seventy three Act taking effect, the south western subspecies of gray wolf, the by then perilously scarce Mexican wolf, acquired its listing as a US Endangered species in nineteen seventy six. Listing was the prelude to recovery. In the nineteen eighties, the Fish and Wildlife Service began to finalize plans for restoring wolves to the lower forty eighth Western public lands under the umbrella of the Endangered Species Acts. Recovery mandate by then, a majority of Americans was beginning to internalize a changing attitude towards wolves. Wealthier, better educated, and younger Americans, Westerners and Alaskans among them, were becoming wolf advocates, and the wake of Canadian writer Farley Moat’s book Never Cry Wolf and the charming movie Disney made of it, many became downright enchanted with wolves, even if biologists snickered that no wolves actually lived the way Never cry Wolf’s animals did. Ranchers, older Americans, people without college degrees, folks who lived rurally, and many hunters who for decades had grown used to artificial, incomplete ecologies that left them as the only predators. Thought the idea of recovering wolves was batshit crazy. The animal’s knew human allies must be little more than wolf loving hippies. They thought this was a divide that predicted a politicized future in a West that was fast sifting itself out as an Old West and a New West, each with very different values. America’s wolf recovery moment everywhere fail, these complications both practical and bizarre. For starters. There were those who didn’t believe either red wolves or Mexican gray wolves. Actually existed. The red wolf, an animal whose range began in the western parts of Texas and Oklahoma and extended eastward and northward to Florida and New England, looked suspiciously like a long legged coyote. Was it merely a gray wolf coyote hybrid. As for the Mexican wolf, it seemed barely distinguishable among the bewildering two dozen wolf subspecies. Twentieth century canid zoology had offered up but early in the twenty first century, the genetic revolution changed what we thought we knew about wolves, and biologists drastically pruned the caned tree. In twenty twelve, US Fish and Wildlife issued a peer reviewed monograph offering an entire rethinking of speciation among America’s wolves. An account of the taxonomy of North American wolves claimed that the red wolves and timber wolves of Eastern America were not gray wolves, but ancient continental wolves out of an indigenous line that had also produced coyotes. Coyotes. Canus rufus and Canus like chaon are modern representatives of a major and diverse clade that evolved within North America. The monograph read. The new study concluded that modern gray wolves returned to their evolutionary home in America from Eurasia some twenty thousand years ago, arriving here in three different waves, the last wave of which had brought Mexican wolves to the Southwest. This taxonomy finally explained a phenomenon biologists had first confronted in the nineteen sixties. In the West, gray wolf coyote hybridization was rare, if it occurred at all. The animals seemed to detest one another. But as the West Predator War drove coyotes to colonize across the country, canid stand offishness in the West turned into hook up willingness in the East. In Louisiana and Texas and along the Canadian border, coyotes interbreeding with remnant wolves produced a new quite successful Eastern canid many would call Koi wolves. Maybe the appearance of animals like this in the East really was, as one New Yorker put it, the end of civilization. But coyote wolf hybridization was making a version of wolf recovery possible in an East that had lacked wolves since the nineteen thirties. Coyote hybridization with red wolves in places like Texas however, threatened to become an eesa crisis. What if the red wolf wasn’t actually a species, but just a coyote with gray wolf genes. In my early teens, I was lucky enough to witness what were unmistakably coyotes arriving in the Red River Valley of Louisiana. But on two occasions I came face to face with leggy, golden eyed animals that looked awfully wolfy to a fifteen year old, If coyotes and red wolf coyote hybrids were swamping red wolf genetics, much as we humans had once done with Neanderthals, that mixture sure made for beautiful animals, But by nineteen seventy, Ron Nowak, another Louisiana in who eventually became Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species Guru, figured that from Texas eastward there were at most only three hundred red wolves left. After blessedly rejecting a dog fence hundreds of miles long, reminiscent of the dingo fence across Australia for keeping migrating hybrids and coyotes away from red wolves. In nineteen seventy three, biologist Curtis Carly the field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Team, tried another approach to save red wolves. Carly came up with a template using skeletal morphology and recorded howls to try to identify actual red wolves for placement and a captive breeding program. His method for identifying a true red wolf wasn’t exactly rocket science, but in nineteen seventy four, the recovery team set up facilities at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington to breed the wolves kids selected to save the red wolf from extinction. Carly’s team had examined animals believed to be red wolves in fifty different zoos and had identified but a single animal they thought was a pure red wolf. They then shocked zoo personnel by insisting that every animal they had catalog as a coyote red wolf hybrid ought to be destroyed. Carly’s trappers caught another four hundred canaans in the wild, but of those only ten percent made the cut. Ultimately, they concluded they had found just fourteen animals out of four hundred and fifty to begin red wolf recovery. All those others betrayed by the sin of miscegenation and coyote blood were destroyed, but red wolf recovery was now underway in places far from coyotes, and in nineteen eighty seven, red wolves were in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Routinely shot and hit by cars, red wolves were soon removed from Great Smoky Mountains Park, while they’re still present on the Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, the wild population today has dropped to a mere twenty five animals, making America’s red wolves the most endangered wolf species on earth. Returning them to their original range in the West now seems remote. Recently, though, researchers have discovered wild canids on the Louisiana Texas border that still carry as much as ten percent red wolf ancestry and infrequently as much as seventy five percent. These so called ghost wolves include red wolf genetics not found in the fourteen animals that founded the Carolina lines. It gives me a secret thrill, I’ll confess to know that those long legged, yellow eyed hybrids I saw as a teenager are still out there. With luck, we may be able to add in their genes to create healthier red wolves. As for Mexican wolves, their recovery commenced in the late nineteen seventies with issues that seemed similarly unsurmountable. The problem was that we’d been too effective in wiping them out. There were almost no Mexican wolves left, certainly no packs that might be captured and transplanted. The best guess was that maybe five wild Mexican wolves remained alive on either side of the border in the nineteen seventies, But between nineteen seventy eight and nineteen eighty a federal predator hunter named Roy McBride working in Mexico managed to capture three males, and, in a wild stroke of luck, a ten year old pregnant female he named Nina. Eventually, the breeding program acquired two more wolflines from captive animals, the Ghost Ranch and Aragon lineages, but Mexican wolf recovery faced the hurdle of a genetic bottleneck of only three lines of animals, so trappers scoured nearby Mexico for a few more animals to try to diversify this small gene pool. When Fish and Wildlife released its recovery plan in nineteen eighty two, a new problem surfaced. No one in the Southwest seemed to want the animals. The Reagan administration actually told target states they could say no, and it at least one state did so. Big Band National Park was a prime release site, but Texas leaped at a chance to make wolves forever unwelcome in the lone Star state. The best New Mexico could do was to offer up the military bombing range north of White Sands National Monument, or at least it did so until stock interests persuaded the state to withdraw even that possibility. But after first equivocating, Arizona eventually proffered the Blue Range, a large national forest primitive area east of Phoenix that merged into the famous Heilo Wilderness in New Mexico, a wild locale that satisfied both Southwestern states. A key move in releasing Mexican wolves into the wild was labeling the population experimental and non essential, meaning the wolves would not have full endangered species protections. Another key move came when Hank Fisher of Defenders of Wildlife told Southwestern stockman that his group would pay market compensation for any livestock wolves killed, so the nearly unbelievable moment came in March of nineteen ninety eight, when released pandors High in the Blue Mountains opened and eleven Mexican wolves loped off to be wild wolves once more. Amidst all the sound and fury, at least wolves were finally back in the evolutionary homeland of Earth’s canids. In twenty eighteen, a genetic tour to Fours by the National Academy of Sciences finally gave both Mexican and red wolves full legitimacy, the Mexican wolf as a viable subspecies distinct from other gray wolves, and the red wolf as a true ancient species and not merely a coyote gray wolf hybrid. While Mexican wolf recovery struggle for years and their genetic diversity is still not high, in twenty twenty six, there are nearly three hundred wild Mexican wolves roaming the Southwest. In twenty fifteen, a new ESA rule enlarged their recovery zone to extend to the boundaries of Texas and California on east and west. Then strangely chose Interstate forty, which tracks across the southwest from Amarillo to Kingman, Arizona, as the northern perimeter. A new recovery plan in twenty seventeen confirmed those boundaries and set the maximum Mexican wolf population at three one hundred and twenty five animals. A couple of years ago, I asked Dave Parsons, Mexican wolf recovery coordinator from nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety nine, for his thoughts on the future of Mexican wolves. Dave essentially agreed with the Center for Biological Diversity Mexican wolves ought to be allowed to expand their range to the Grand Canyon and into the southern Rockies for a healthy Mexican wolf population of seven hundred and fifty animals across the Southwest, But as he put it, I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime. The wolf recovery that thrilled people across the world unspooled to international headlines in the northern Rocky Mountains. I was living in Montana at the time it happened, with a girlfriend who worked for Hank Fisher and Defenders of Wildlife, so I had a front row seat for what seemed the game of the century. Prior to this moment, the last time anyone had seen a wolf even in our one wildlife park, Yellowstone was nineteen twenty six, but soon after endangered species legislation passed in the nineteen sixties, biologists in various agencies and universities began conferring about how to get wolves back. The nineteen seventy five Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan identified Yellowstone and Glacier Parks, along with the biggest wilderness area in the lower forty eight Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains west Endo, Idaho, as the logical recovery zones. The plan released fifteen wolves a year for five years until there were at least ten breeding pairs in each zone. Before human assisted wolf recovery in the Rocky Mountains preceded, though, something happened that has now become a general principle of Western wolf recovery. On their own, wolves began recolonizing the West. The Canadian War on Wolves had not pursued every wolf in its vast wildlands, and in nineteen seventy nine, a Canadian female wolf researchers named Kishinina established a territory on the northwest edge of Glacier Park. The next year, a big male called the bearpaw wolf created consternation on Montana’s Rocky Mountain front, and a Montana hunter quickly killed that wolf dead. But in nineteen eighty six, Glaciers wolves, the American press named the Magic Pack, whelped the first litter of wolf pups born in a western US National park since the nineteen twenties. In the early nineteen nineties, wolves denned farther south in the Nine Mile Valley near Missoula, Montana. Someone promptly shot the radio collared female. The surviving male managed to get their pups to almost six months old before he was hit by a car on the nearby interstate. These colonizing wolves complicated recovery plans as much as rancher outrage did, since wolves recovering naturally in the US would be endangered species with full protection under the ESA. The same livestock industry that had moved heaven and earth to have wolves wiped out in the first place, and used to having his way in the West for more than a century, was now in an uproar. Few Western ranchers were willing to try coexistence with wolves. Some acted as if recovering wolves repudiated their entire history, so the nineteen ninety three compromise for Northern Rockies wolf recovery designated human released wolves as experimental non essential animals, which meant that ranchers or Federal Wildlife Services hunters could kill wolves that attacked life side. Regional and national hearings over Western wolf recovery produced the most public comment ever logged on any American environmental proposal, and they showed a changed America. Eighty percent of those comments were in favor of wolf recovery. During the second week of a cold nineteen ninety five Montana January, the first e e gray wolves captured in the Alberta Rockies came through Missoula bound for acclimization pins in Yellowstones Lamar Valley. Three days later, four of the first wolves headed for Idaho were blessed by the Nez Perce on the tarmac of the Missoula Airport, then trucked to Salmon, Idaho for hard release in the frank Church River of No Return wilderness. Meanwhile, in Yellowstone, two packs bred in their pins that February, so pups were on the way on the spring equinox March twenty first of nineteen ninety five, Yellowstones New wolves sniffed at the open doors on their enclosure, then bounded one after the other into the nearby trees. In nineteen ninety five and nineteen ninety six, Yellowstone released forty one wolves into the park, and another thirty five wolves were released in Idaho. Word was that the twenty five thousand elk on Yellowstones Northern Range animals that had survived a recent eruption and then a die off, were suddenly nervous as hell, and with good reason. Four years after that first pack, appropriately named the Leopold Pack formed in Yellowstone, a dinning pair of wolves bore pups in the Bitterroot Valley where I lived. Not long after that, a three mile pack emerged in the Sapphire Mountains just above my place. As the twenty first century dawned for the first time in my life, I was hearing wolf howls in the evening dusks, spotting wolf tracks in the mud of the local creek, and in silvery winter moonlight, occasionally seeing shadowy caned forms loping across the hills as I drove home at night. It was an exciting time to be alive. We Europeans had been killing wolves for eight thousand years in the Old World. For the past four hundred years, our ancestors had erased wolves in America from coast to coast. Now, the science of ecology and the national will had brought us to a new place of respect for the deep time history of America, for our continence, uniqueness, and a recognition of the wrong headedness of trying to make America into a carbon copy of the Old World. Of course, all this is far from over. The wolf story that’s loomed over America’s relationship to nature for the past four centuries continues, if anything, even more politicized now and even more complex. Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies are especially noteworthy as pawns and victims of America’s cultural and political battles. Under federal direction, the gray wolves in the vast wildlands of the Northern Rockies became a worldwide example of charismatic wildlife recovery. By twenty twenty one, there were more than two thousand gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. From the perspective of ecologists and most of the international public, a wildlife story on a par with saving bald eagles under the Endangered Species Act. Even with private, then state compensation programs to pay for stock losses, plus the ability to remove problem wolves. Ranchers in several states nonetheless persuaded rural communities around them to proclaim local emergencies over wolves. Many in the hunting community, that bulwark of saving wildlife a century before, grew resentful that they were having to share elk and deer with the West’s original predators. In twenty twenty five, the president of Montana Trappers claimed that the presence of wolves had created what he called the greatest loss of hunting opportunity in the world history, as in the market slaughter of wild animals in the same nineteenth century West, obviously was in his strong suit. The intent of endangered species recovery has always been to return management of recovered species to the states of their residents, and by act of the Republican Congress in twenty ten, management of wolves in the Northern Rockies returned to the states there. Conservative legislatures in the Mountain States moved quickly to establish wolf hunts with seasons and bag limits, increasingly becoming so laughingly liberal that they barely qualified as man management. Across most of the state of Wyoming, not even a hunting season applies. Wyoming has made most of its wolves varmints subject to being shot on site at any time of the year, except in its northwest corner. Just as decisively, the Mountain States took wolf management out of the hands of its university scientists and even its wildlife agencies. In fact, state wolf management in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming increasingly looks like a reprise of the philosophy of the eighteen eighties, with professional hunters bounties luring wolves with bait, hunting them after dark with night vision equipment, shooting them from planes and helicopters, running them down with ATVs and snowmobiles, even to the use of wire strangle snares that tighten at every move a panic wolf makes to escape, even as a recent outbreak of canine distemper is devastating the survival rate of regional wolf pups. Montana’s goal for twenty twenty six is to kill and astonishing five hundred and fifty eight wolves in the state. Idaho hopes to reduce its wolf population by ninety percent by twenty twenty eight. Rather than working to recover ancient American ecologies, the intent in the northern West seems to be reducing wolf populations to just above the obligatory minimum number of animals that would trigger federal judges to return wolf management to fish and wildlife under the Endangered Species Act. Not surprisingly, the Northern Rockies example is becoming exhibit A in arguments against current Republican bills to delist all of America’s wolves and turn their fates everywhere over to the States. Because Yellowstone is owned by the public and managed by a federal agency, wolf recovery in the park has been shielded from some of the viciousness outside the park. Indeed, Yellowstone has become the premiere wolf viewing locale on Earth, drawing visitors from all over the world to come see wolves in the wild, producing eighty two million dollars annually for the park’s surrounding communities. With multiple prey animals and several competing predators, Yellowstone has also generated wolf research that’s tremendously magnified what we know about wolves and indeed about ancient American ecologies. The way wolves produce ecosystem wide effects that flow in all directions has been one of the park’s more compelling lessons when they were released wolves pushed coyotes out of a primary cada niche. The coyote numbers drop by half before stabilizing, but magpies, ravens, eagles, grizzly bears, and even cougars have all seen their numbers grow in the park. At one wolf kill, a biologist counted three hundred and forty seven ravens and forty nine bald eagles partaking of the large s, with numbers once as high as twenty five thousand. An elk decline that started prior to wolves reached a low of five thousand and twenty twelve, but since then elk numbers have risen towards ten thousand, a level biologists believe may be a natural wolf elk equilibrium with el At that level, the population of Lamar Valley bison numbers has increased now four times over Bison, in fact, today make up twenty five percent of the wolf diet in the Lamar Valley. Meanwhile, wolf recovery elsewhere in the West is happening before our eyes, sometimes because of human assisted releases, more often because wolves are seeking to reinhabit the landscapes they evolve to. While states like Utah and Texas remained loud and vociferous opponents of wolf recovery. In twenty twenty of voter led initiative in Colorado empowered its wildlife officials to begin releasing an experimental, non essential population of gray wolves into Colorado starting in twenty twenty three. An initial ten wolves were hard released into Colorado west of the Continental Divide that year. The official count as of May of twenty twenty six indicates thirty two gray wolves are now present in the wilds of modern Colorado. The western state whose wolf recovery story stands probably in starkas distinction to that of Utah’s and Texas’s unyielding opposition are Montana or Idaho’s rural hostility. Naturally enough, is California. Yet wolf recovery in California has not been human assisted. Instead, in a state where wolves were wiped out by the nineteen twenties, just as they were elsewhere in the West, wolves have been colonizing into northern California and founding packs in the state since twenty eleven. In that year, a male wolf California school children named Journey arrived in Siskiyu County from packs that had started naturally colonizing Oregon in the late nineteen nineties. Journeys trek southward was followed in twenty seve sixteen by a female wolf arriving in California who apparently was a dispersure from a gray wolf pack as far away as Wyoming. And here is where wolf recovery in California stands separate from that of the rest of the West, at least so far. In twenty fourteen, California moved to declare gray wolves protected as in dangered species under the state’s own in Endangered Species Act. In twenty twenty six there are now roughly ninety fully protected gray wolves in California, with at least twelve packs. Most are in the northern counties, in the same country where the last wolves were exterminated in the period before the nineteen forties. Today, wolves still meet with a good deal of resentment and hostility from locals there, some of whom have argued that their wolves must have been planted by environmentalists and are not the same wolf species once found in California anyway. As if to dispute those claims, coastal gray wolves continue to disperse across California. As you hear these words. Most recently, a collared female travel some three hundred and seventy miles southward from her natal pack in Plumus County, reaching Los Angeles County in late winter of twenty twenty six and ultimately Inyo County, where this past April she became the first gray wolf in the state’s Sequoia National Park in more than a century. And that kind of long distance journey, this California wolf is not alone. Where I live near Santa Fe, New Mexico, a female Mexican wolf and admiring public has named Asha, has repeatedly crossed the no go line of Interstate forty and has twice now been captured near Taos and the Colorado border before being returned hundreds of miles to the south. There’s a conclusion to draw here. I think, having evolved in America and lived here for most of five million years, the West wolves are determined to make these last four hundred years of wolf persecution and anomaly no more than a tiny blip on the screen in their bigger biography as ancient natives, as animals from America who made the West their home back when we primates on the other side of Earth were only just starting to blink into consciousness.

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Speaker 2: So, Dan, this is the Wolf episode, and I wanted to start off by use a framework in this episode that’s very familiar to me. And it occurred to me that I don’t know that we’ve really dug into it in the context of this podcast, but anyone who took a class from you was well exposed to the idea of a new West and an old West.

00:43:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s a.

00:43:27
Speaker 2: Useful for framework for thinking about historical change in this part of the country. But I wonder if you can unpack that for listeners. What do you mean when you talk about the old West versus the New West? And how have scholars sort of used that to help understand the story of this place.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it’s something that historians have been talking about now for you know, twenty or twenty five years, I guess. And what it refers to as two different kind of value systems about what the West means, and one the old West. One is kind of the west of settlement of farms and ranches and a kind of lingering conservative where a colony of the East where way out here in a part of the country where we don’t really have to follow the lead of what’s going on in New York or in Los Angeles. We’re in a world of our own, and it’s a timeless world. It’s a world that in I think the sensibility of the Old West that really begins for a lot of people sometime in the eighteen seventies, when a lot of their ancestors come out and settle and create farms and ranches and that sort of thing, particularly in the northern West. In the Southwest, it’s obviously an older kind of stretching back into time experience, but it begins to conflict with a new version of the West that really I think takes its route probably certainly after World War Two, but more than likely, you would say you first start getting a glimmering of the New West in the late sixties and early seventies, when the West becomes a destination for a lot of people moving from other parts of the country. And what they’re interested in is not necessarily setting up farms and ranches. They’re interested in the adventure possibilities of the West. They’re interested in things like fly fishing and in hunting, and in mountain climbing and backpacking and running rivers and all of the recreational opportunityities that kind of define a sort of a contemporary possibility of life in the West. Very much like the last episode when we talked about going down the Grand Canyon. I mean, that’s very much a new Western experience that hardly any Old Westerners ever did. And so it becomes a kind of a way of looking at the West that develops two different value systems. The value system of the New West is one where we appreciate preserving diverse cultures, having native people do well and be on the landscape, and being available in terms of their culture and their insights about the world. We appreciate public lands and wilderness and wild and scenic rivers and things like returning wild animals that had been obliterated in this earlier phase back to the Western story, and that obviously is in conflict with a group of people who believe that what they did by eliminating all those things sort of established the baseline civilization that they all wanted to hang on to. So the kind of confrontation between the Old West and the New West and the modern era is one of the great stories about this part of the world. Yeah, I think.

00:47:23
Speaker 2: It’s obviously playing playing out right in front of us here in Bozeman where it’s extremely visible, but it’s it’s it’s really those who come to this part of the world orho came to this part of the world for resource h versus those who came to this part of the world for amenities. Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. There’s I guess the natural transition there might be to when you talk about wolves and Yellowstone, you highlight the economic impact of wolf based tourism, and I think it’s an interesting point, but there’s some tension there in the idea that if the world lost interest in those wolves. I imagine that you would still want them there if they didn’t generate a dollar for the gas station and gardener. Right, It’s kind of an interesting argument, I guess, like it’s the wolf ree introduction is inspired by sort of a deep principle that’s rooted in science, and yet it you often see the economic argument that is, you know, usually sort of ranchers are the ones pointing to economic costs. So I wonder if you can sort of speak to that the tension that goes on and sort of how this debate is framed.

00:48:58
Speaker 1: Well, I think the economic argument is clearly a way to admit that we live in a capitalist country and almost any act you take has to be justified in terms of the sort of money that it’s likely to provide. And it is a funny thing because I mean, I’ve had the experience of staying in places like Gardener and having a hotel manager welcome all these people who are coming to the mar Valley basically to watch wolves, and then in his private time, I once saw the same guy wearing a T shirt that said smoke a pack of Day, and he wasn’t talking about smoking a pack of cigarettes. So it’s this kind of tension that the whole wolf story has given us between the Old West and the New West, and what I’ve tried to make clear. And so in this podcast, I’ve done three wolf episodes. I did Western Wolves in the nineteenth century, the Wolf West, I call it, and then I did a second episode that was essentially I called it Golden Eyed Lightning Rod, and it was about the story of wolves in the West when we were wiping them out from nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty or so. And what I said in that particular episode, and I tried to bring it up again in this one, is that what has given us this sense that wolves need to be back on the Western landscape is the discoveries through the science of ecology and of paleontology that wolves have been here for millions of years. They have been part of the landscape here, part of the ecological processes here for some five million years in North America, and the Old World idea having successfully because they were herders and successfully got rid of their wolves coming here five hundred years ago and immediately, I mean the very first act that Europeans enacted in terms of the environment was to place a bounty on wolves. I mean that kind of hubris where we’re going to go to a whole new continent and we’re going to replicate what we just did in the place where we’ve been living without making any effort to understand the role that wolves actually played in the history of the place or in the ecology of the place. I mean, it’s one of those kind of classic, you know, old European We’re going around the world and we know what the hell is going on everywhere, and we’re going to tell everybody what to do. And it turned out to be a mistake. And so what I’ve tried to convey in these Wolf episodes is this history of how it all played out, and this one, of course, is about how wolves have been recovered and the political battles over it. I think were in no way unexpected. Everybody knew what was going to happen when we brought wolves back, and in fact, when wolves were first released in yellow Sale, and there were people who were involved in opening the doors and releasing wolves who who I’ve talked to, I said, they couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that it was actually a possible thing to do. But we managed to make it happen, and it’s changing the West once again. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder.

00:52:37
Speaker 2: When we talk about the political fallout from reintroduction. You traced this out in the episode that there are sort of two parallel stories. One is active reintroduction and the other is recolonization. And you point out, you know, right around the time they’re discussed the Yellowstone reintroduction, there’s wolves coming into Glacier from Canada, and we sort of see this. It happened again recently in Colorado with the wolf reintroduction. I feel like I saw a lot of subject matter experts say, well, truthfully, they were going to get there at some point, and so they’re really only getting ahead of what would naturally happen as wolves move south.

00:53:25
Speaker 1: And so I wonder if you can speak to.

00:53:29
Speaker 2: Sort of the stakes of active reintroduction versus recolonization, because I think the recolonization story also is one that’s like it’s something that should be celebrated that they can occupy these habitats and move across the landscape.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And you know, you could say you could argue that had we not done any hard releases, had Colorado not done their hard release in twenty twenty three, wolves would have gotten there eventually. I mean it might be twenty or thirty years down the timeline. Maybe a straggler or two would have arrived earlier than that, but having actual breeding packs and a substantial population of wolves would have probably taken considerably longer. And so that’s the reason for the hard releases is to go ahead and let’s make this happen, because if we simply allow natural reinhabitation from places like Alberta to take place, it’s going to be a fifty year period probably to reacquire wolves, but it is one of the features of what’s happening now. And because we’ve got significant wolf populations in the northern Rockies and in the Southwest both, it’s happening now on a scale that has not been a parent before. I mean the California story that I told in this particular script, I mean it is it has all been reinhabitation by wolves moving down primarily from Washington and Oregon. And so there has not been a hard release of wolves in California. But there are more than fifty wolves in California right now. Twelve packs, I think was the latest figure I heard. I think the figure is actually ninety wolves and twelve packs, and that’s all been from natural recolonization.

00:55:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it just strikes me that that is sort of less politically fractious, I think it is. That’s the right word, yeah, than reintroduction. You know, it’s sort of an interesting counterfactual to think about. Had had there not been a hard release, what would the what would the discourse look like today?

00:55:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it would have. It would have been less of you know, a fight it out in the streets kind of issue. I will note and I tried to tell this story because I sort of was anticipating that you and I might talk about that very thing I didn’t want to talk about. When wolves were beginning to colonize in Montana in the nineteen eighties, in particular in the early nineties, most of those early wolves ended up getting killed. Yeah, I mean, you know, so the bear Paul wolf shows up on the Rocky Mountain Front, he doesn’t last a year before somebody shoots him. And then those wolves that colonized in the Nine Mile Valley outside Missoula, you know, within two or three months, the female with a radio collar on her neck was shot and killed, and the male managed to get the pups that she had had up to about six months old, and then he got run over on in a state ninety got hit by a car. And so when the numbers are so small in that early colonization stage, the attrition rate is pretty high. And that became one of the argus for hard release is that, Okay, we’ve got some colonizing, but man, they seem to be disappearing almost as fast as they as they show up. But I do agree, and I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s a little easier in California, plus the more liberal politics there is that wolves in California have naturally colonized. It doesn’t mean that the people in the northern counties are happy about it. You know, they’re still screaming bloody murder about the wolves there. But nonetheless, I think that natural colonization does have this effect of making people think, well, this is not something that we’re doing. This is happening in spite of some sort of positive or negative human action.

00:57:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, and one sort of final thought here, I guess it always strikes me as if you if you arrived in the West with no context, I think it would be very striking to realize that one of the big cultural points of division is an animal. Right, And I wonder about other places on Earth where there’s an analog to this, where it’s there’s an animal that’s the focus of so much political strife, and it’s there’s fingers pointing at the end. You know, you’re you’re responsible for this animal. You want to kill all these and it’s like it’s just a very unique story to the West. I’m sure there’s I’m sure there’s other examples around the world, but you know, it’s it’s a very strange part of our politics. Well it is, there’s no question about it. And what I will say is that, you know, I’ve stressed several times in this podcast and these scripts that one of the things things we did as a country, the United States did is we attempted to emulate the countries of Western Europe instead of I mean, we had an opportunity to create something wholly new, and in the West, I think with the public Lands we did do that, we created something holly new. But America I had the chance to create something wholly new. And what we kept wanting to do was we’re going to make ourselves like England or France. We’re just going to clone these countries of Western Europe. What’s interesting to me in a question like this is that today, because the West has begun to rewild in this form and reintroduce animals like gray wolves, the Europeans suddenly have decided that we’re setting the model. And so one of the things that’s happening in Western Europe right now is that country after country is releasing reintroducing wolves into western stern Europe.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: That’s a mind blowing thing to think. But there are more wolves in Western Europe today than there are in the United States, and that’s kind of a shocking thing to consider. But who they learned this from is us, So we have admirers elsewhere in the world for what we’re doing, despite all the battles that we’re having about it here on our home turf.

01:00:24
Speaker 2: Very interesting, well, Dan, as always, it’s been good

01:00:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, radll great man.