As the embers of your campfire fade, the full moon provides almost-enough illumination. You've eaten your fill of s'mores. You've marveled at the joy of the day's spectacles and planned tomorrow's adventure. You're trading ghost stories. Suddenly one long blood-drenched howl rings out across the night, triumphant with its kill. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up as you huddle a little close to the fire. For a moment, your Gore-tex and GPS fade away and you're back in a Jack London novel, or even draped in an animal pelt thousands of years ago, when it was just you and the fire and the wolf.
Then you start humming a song by Warren Zevon or Duran Duran, and it all passes.
Wolves matter: for that moment of connection to ancestors, and more. However, they're under attack in the states closest to Yellowstone.
Wolves, once at the top of the predator pyramid in Yellowstone, were hunted to extirpation (local extinction) by 1926. For most of the 20th century, wolves were no more than a backcountry rumor. In 1995, they were reintroduced to Yellowstone, where they've been venerated, feared, and studied within an inch of their lives.
Some surprising findings have emerged. Mongabay summarizes three studies of top predators' role in ecosystems. Without top predators, populations of the predators immediately below them on the pyramid (e.g., hyenas in Africa, coyotes in North America), called mesopredators, explode; mesopredators tend to reproduce better than top predators, and they hunt prey species to extinction, so prey species actually flourish with top predators ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend"). Likewise, trees do better when top predators keep foliage-grazing animals down. And prey corpses are biological hotspots. One Zion National Park study of mountain lions found that water plants, wildflowers, amphibians, lizards, and butterflies were all lower in areas where mountain lions were scarce and more abundant in areas where mountain lions still roamed frequently. In Yellowstone, the reintroduction of wolves to the ecosystem where they belong has been an enormous success. The biologist in charge of Yellowstone's wolf program believes it's gone very well. The wolf numbers have declined, from a high of about 200 to about 96, as wolf and elk populations have moved into equilibrium, he states.
The wolf reintroduction program may have gone too well. The Obama administration moved the wolves' status from "endangered" to the less "threatened" in May 2009 and permitted states to develop their own hunting management plans, one of the reasons why the Center for Biological Diversity gives Obama's first year a C grade on endangered species. Defenders of Wildlife has led the court challenge to the delisting.
Following the delisting, states near Yellowstone have created hunting management plans running the gamut from bad to worse to OMG-how-do-these-people-sleep-at-night.
Although the Wyoming Game & Fish Department website doesn't appear to have been updated since July 2008, the state's long term plan is to eliminate most of the wolves from most of the state, so the wolf is still listed as "endangered" in Wyoming. For that reason alone, Wyoming wins the temporary "least offensive" award, but not for lack of trying.
By contrast, Utah's state senate has passed a bill to prevent wolves from establishing a viable pack in the state at all; wolves who poke their noses across the border can be moved or killed.
Montana's Fish, Wildlife, and Parks permits hunting. During the months that Montana allowed hunting in fall 2009, Yellowstone's entire Cottonwood pack was killed for the crime of crossing the Montana state line.
Wolves are also rumored to be in Colorado, while the state of Washington is developing a management plan.
Idaho's wolf hunting program is embroiled in three separate controversies against a general backdrop of wolf population in Idaho decreasing for the first time since 1995; among other items, nine packs were killed in a USDA-approved cull in 2009. Gee, do you think populations might decline when they're being hunted?
The Idaho Department of Fish & Game has helicopters chase wolves through the Frank Church Wilderness to put radio collars on them; lawsuits have been filed by environmental organizations who don't see the need for helicopters in wilderness under any circumstances, let alone chasing and harassing wild animals. A hearing will be held this Thursday.
A pro-wolf website, Ralph Maughan's Wildlife News, has just obtained a leaked Idaho Fish & Game memo that will turn Idaho's wolf plan into the one Wyoming wants, i.e., keep wolves out of most of the state and permit occasional clean sweeps (or massacres, depending on one's point of view).
Meanwhile, yesterday the Idaho state legislature introduced a concurrent resolution calling for an emergency reduction of wolves in the state, the Idaho Spokesman-Review reports. Only Democrats opposed it.
Yellowstone is becoming the wolves' only sanctuary in the Rocky Mountains just as biologists are finding how much they're needed. The Wildlands Network, founded by conservation biologist Michael Soule, aims to work with private landowners to establish wildways -- wide corridors where wildlife can travel safely -- along four pathways in north America, including the "spine of the continent," the Rocky Mountains. By design, the wildway networks must include top predators such as wolves. Resilient, biodiverse networks can help ecosystems adapt to climate change. So, in a very roundabout way, the wolves of Yellowstone also matter in the brave new world that humans are busily creating.
The howl of a wolf may provoke irrational fear in some, but for others it's a song of beauty. For some people, the wolf is the face of the wilderness. The wolves of Yellowstone matter to the ecoystem and to us.