Wolf Nation Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Brenda Peterson

  All illustrations © William Harrison

  Peggy Shumaker, poem “Caribou,” from Wings Moist from the Other World (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), used with the permission of the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 53 State Street, 9th Floor, Boston, MA 02109.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2017

  ISBN 978-0306-82493-7 (print)

  ISBN 978-0306-82494-4 (ebook)

  Published as a Merloyd Lawrence Book by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  www.dacapopress.com

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  Editorial production by Christine Marra, Marrathon Production Services. www.marrathoneditorial.com

  Book design by Jane Raese

  Set in 10-point LinoLetter

  E3-20170317-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Big, Good Wolf

  PART ONE: WHAT WE ALMOST LOST 1. An Historic Rage

  2. “Who Speaks for Wolf?”

  PART TWO: WOLF WARS 3. Wolf Teeth on an Airplane Wing

  4. A Taxidermist’s Dream

  PART THREE: RECOVERY AND BACKLASH 5. Yellowstone: “A Wolf’s Paradise”

  6. Trophic Cascades: A Not-So-Simple Story

  7. 06: The World’s Most Famous Wolf

  8. Old Growth and Young Howls

  PART FOUR: WOLF NATION 9. Wolves and the National Commons

  10. Wolves at Play

  11. Raised by Wolves

  12. Wolf Music

  PART FIVE: WOLVES RETURN 13. OR7: A Wolf Called Journey

  14. Sheep Highway: Coexisting with Wolves

  15. El Lobo Returns Home

  Epilogue: Speaking for Wolves

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Organizations Working to Preserve Wild Wolves

  Notes

  Index

  FOR THE WOLF AND THE WILD—

  ALWAYS IN OUR WORLD

  Wolves enliven the northern mountains, forests, and tundra like no other creature, helping to enrich our stay on the planet simply by their presence as other highly advanced societies in our midst.

  —Gordon Haber, “Wolf Family Values”

  PROLOGUE: THE BIG, GOOD WOLF

  When I was growing up in the Sierra Nevada in a small US Forest Service cabin, wild animals lived alongside us. Even though there hadn’t been wild wolves hunting in our California forest for almost a hundred years, their spirits still haunted their native woods. I listened to every yip-yip of a coyote to see if that sharp, staccato song would be answered by the soaring, plaintive howl of a returning wolf.

  In the vast Plumas National Forest, I grew up on the sweet, lean meat of the game my father often brought home to feed his family. Predator-prey relationships shaped our wildlife management and hunting culture. I learned to love what was wild and would never belong to me, what was not a pet or daily companion but wary, hidden away, untouchable. I loved most what was not tamed or domesticated. I learned about the wolves’ power, their generosity, their fiercely tender protection of those in their care. I wanted to grow up to be a wild wolf.

  I hoped that one day a wolf might return to my birth forest, perhaps even in my lifetime. That hope was finally fulfilled in 2012 when a lone wolf, OR7—called Journey—returned to the Plumas Forest to become the first wolf in California since 1924. Journey reclaimed his rightful habitat after leaving his original family and traveling over twelve hundred miles alone. His story has helped to grow public acceptance and even celebration of the wild wolf in America. Such stories need to be told to balance our unnatural history of prejudice against wolves, for our American character is reflected in the history of how we treat wolves.

  Wolves are both the most misunderstood and maligned of animals and at the same time among the most majestic and mysterious of all our fellow creatures. We still hunt them, and they hunt us by haunting our imaginations. Science alone will not restore them to their rightful habitat. We need new stories of the wolf-human bond, a new history that embraces wolves not as enemies but as mirrors, allies, and good neighbors.

  Wolf Nation is a narrative of restoration science often trumped by political shenanigans, of generational prejudice yielding to new ways of living with wild wolves. Here are stories of wolves followed as passionately as rock stars, wolves as tragic heroes and picaresque, even playful characters, trying to endure against great odds. Although they are fascinating research subjects, they are also individuals with names, histories, family trees, and emerging generations. Wolf Nation is their story, as well as my own, and that of the people who devote their lives to wolf recovery.

  The story of wild wolves in America is a chronicle of war and love, a history of hatred and redemption. Why do we need wild wolves? Because they help us heal our natural world, because humans and wolves have always belonged together. We are top predators, partners, fellow survivors.

  Brenda Peterson

  Seattle, Washington

  2017

  part one

  WHAT WE ALMOST LOST

  1. AN HISTORIC RAGE

  A bumper sticker on a battered Montana pick-up shows a sketch of a wolf and exhorts, “Smoke a Pack a Day.” A mustached man with a wide-brimmed cowboy hat holds up a protest sign: “Wolves are Illegal Immigrants.” A huge brightly colored billboard in Eastern Washington with paintings of elk, deer, cattle, dogs, and a smiling little girl on a swing asks, “The Wolf—Who’s Next on the Menu?” An Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition leader clad in camouflage gear warns that “wolves are terrorists on the order of Osama bin Laden.”

  Search the Internet for “war against the wolf,” and there are photo galleries of grinning bounty hunters, “wolfers,” proudly posing on a porch in front of a rack of twenty wolf skins hanging down from metal hooks. Surrounding one live wolf roped around the neck, there are five men on horseback, ready to ride off in all directions—and tear the wolf to pieces. In another photo an entire family of black wolves lie in a snowy meadow, a bloody circle. Most revealing of all is an image of a gang of hunters with rifles and white KKK-style masks over their faces as they triumphantly drape a dead wolf in a huge American flag.

  Why is there still such fury against an animal that has been hunted almost to extinction in this country? The historic rage against sharing control of prey and territory has its roots in both European and American history—and in the hunting culture that still dominates every wildlife policy.

  To the early European settlers the wild wolf—like the mysterious and vast wilderness itself—was not a precious partner of the New World to be preserved. Along with native peoples, wolves were another impediment to western expansion—enemies to be subdued and excluded. Chickasaw author Linda Hogan writes eloquently about her people’s traditionally balanced relationship with predators: “From the men’s cave comes the howling of wolves. I think that these are the songs of lives stru
ggling against extinction, even translated through human voices, they are here inside the earth, inside the human body, the captive, contained animals.”

  Early American colonies continued the Old World persecution of wolves. To Europeans the wolf was the enemy, like the Big Bad Wolf tales told in the seventeenth-century French court, a metaphor for predatory men who might prey upon aristocratic daughters. Wolves are the villains in “The Three Little Pigs,” Russia’s “Peter and the Wolf,” and in many Grimm and Aesop’s fairy tales. Sadly these associations and myths were not left behind in Old Europe.

  European settlers rarely fenced in their sheep or cows; livestock wandered about, easy prey for wolves and other predators. In the 1630s Massachusetts Bay and Virginia instituted wolf bounties, and many other colonies followed suit. In a gesture of dominion over both nature and Native Americans, Virginia demanded that local tribes kill a yearly wolf quota and turn in the hides as tribute.

  In his groundbreaking anthology War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf, Yellowstone wolf researcher Rick McIntyre chronicles this history of hatred and decimation. “What the colonists tried to do in their local area—the extermination of all wolves—became the policy of our emerging nation. Destruction of predators became a heritage passed on for generation after generation.”

  McIntyre points out that humans haven’t always felt so threatened and hostile to wolves. Early hunter-gatherer cultures coexisted with wolves in what one wolf biologist, Ed Bangs, now calls “brothers in the hunt.” An NPR story, “Who Let the Dogs In? We Did, About 30,000 Years Ago,” notes that “there may have been a faithful Fido walking with a human before the end of the last Ice Age (and before agriculture).”

  Researchers have for centuries assumed that today’s gray wolf was the genetic ancestor of the modern dog. But genetic studies reported in the 2015 Scientific American article “From Wolf to Dog” reveal the surprising news that “an extinct type of wolf gave rise to the dog before the agricultural revolution began around 12,000 years ago.” That means the current-day gray wolf is a “sister taxa, descended from an unknown ancestor that has since gone extinct.” The article documents studies of dogs and wolves, where both species are bottle fed, hand raised, and trained to obey simple commands. The conclusion: “Despite having lived and worked with the scientists for seven years, the wolves retained an independence of mind and behavior that is most un-doglike.” Even raised by people, wolves “lack such respect for human authority.”

  So Canis lupus, the wild wolf, evolved independently from our domesticated dogs, and this independence is perhaps what triggers our intolerance, even outrage. One definition of the word “wild” is “self-willed.” Wolves are certainly self-willed and do not obey our commands, even if we raise them by hand. A dog respects our authority, our “No!,” and, even on the hunt, must stop short of a canine instinct to kill: a well-trained hunting dog will wait for the hunter to retrieve a fox or pheasant for himself. Canis lupus’ willfulness has worked against their survival.

  As our nomadic ancestors settled into agriculture, hunter-gatherers no longer had to wander in far-ranging packs to feed their families. We could, as the Bible seemed to ordain, “be fruitful and multiply” into growing and settled populations. After depleting the Old World of wild animals like wolves and destroying old-growth forests, the European settlers migrated to a New World and simply repeated their profligate and unsustainable use of the natural world. Bountiful game, like the vast Great Plains bison, was hunted almost to extinction as settlers expanded their range. When the bison disappeared, the wolf “brothers in the hunt” had much less prey. They were forced out of the wilderness and closer to our farms and ranches. Wolves had little regard for our fences. They were out of our control and therefore rivals to be destroyed, just like any animal or peoples who got in the way of Manifest Destiny.

  McIntyre tells the story of visiting an Alaskan Inupiat village called Shaktoolik along the Bering Strait in 1993 to talk about predators with tribal high school students. When he showed them historic slides of thousands of wolves killed by strychnine poisoning, the Native students were shocked and troubled. This was a tribe in which hunting was a way of life. But Inupiat hunters were accustomed to killing wolves only if they attacked local reindeer herds.

  One of the teenage boys asked McIntyre, “Why did they want to kill off all the wolves?”

  McIntyre realized that the Native boy was unaware of the massive government wolf extermination programs in the lower forty-eight states. “The concept of attempting to destroy all the members of a wildlife species was completely alien to them,” he writes. The boy walked away shaking his head in dissatisfaction. “None of it related to the reality of his world, a Native American world of traditions, ethics, and morals that set limits on what humanity can do to fellow forms of life.”

  In the nineteenth century European settlers claimed huge swaths of government-given free land—if they agreed to farm it. Farmers and wealthy ranchers, “stockmen,” were given priority in government policies on private and public lands. In The Great American Wolf Bruce Hampton writes that in 1906, “the U.S. Forest Service acquiesced to the stockowners and enlisted the help of the Bureau of Biological Survey to clear cattle ranges of gray wolves. In other words, the Bureau became a wolf-extermination unit.”

  A 1907 Department of Agriculture bulletin echoes this wolf-control zeal as it addresses “the best methods for destroying these pests,” citing wolf predation on cattle ranges and loss of game on forest lands. The goal of the bulletin was “to put in the hands of every hunter, trapper, forest ranger, and ranchman directions for trapping, poisoning, and hunting wolves and finding the dens of the young.… Prime wolf skins are worth from $4 to $6 each, enough to induce trappers and enterprising ranch boys to make an effort to secure them.”

  One of the most efficient ways to destroy wolves was “denning,” or killing the pups while still in the den. One pup would be saved and chained to a tree to call the parents and wolf pack for help. Then the government trappers would gun down the entire family. When the trappers used poisoned carcasses to bait wolves, the collateral damage included bears, ravens, foxes, and eagles who fed on what the wolves left behind. The bounty hunts and government wolf-eradication programs that began in the nineteenth century continued until as late as 1965, offering $20 to $50 per wolf. Today the historic reluctance to share our habitat with other top predators is still very much alive.

  Even in a twenty-first century of enlightened science, with recognition of the balancing roles that predators play in our ecosystems, this prejudice thrives. When I grew up in a national forest there was no concept of the forest as wild and complex, an interconnected biosphere, complete in itself, without serving our human needs. The mandate for forest and wildlife managers was “multiple use,” with an emphasis on human utility. And many in the hunting culture I was raised in viewed wolves as “pests” or competition or sometimes just trophies.

  I GREW UP WITH HUNTERS. They fed me. Like wolves, they also kept the deer and elk populations from overgrazing the high meadows so the forests and streams were healthier. And hunters told hilarious stories around the campfire while we devoured their barbequed bounty. I still have deep respect for skilled hunters who have a keen knowledge of nature, who can track, patiently wait, and sustainably hunt for their family, like my father. He taught us that wild animals like deer and elk died so that we might live. And of this sacrifice we must be mindful.

  “Think about how hard it was to hunt this supper and who you’re eating,” my father would say. Or, as we munched on sausage cookies made from moose meat or venison, “Nothing wasted.”

  We used all parts of the animal, so that a big elk might also be ground into stew meat or sliced into thin salami. The elk head and horns went on the wall to watch us more earnestly than any babysitter. Every Christmas Eve we made our own moccasins for the New Year out of whatever Father had tanned. In my childhood forest we recognized ourselves as intri
cately linked to the food chain and the fate of the forest. We knew, for example, that a forest fire meant that at the end of the line we’d suffer too. We’d have buck stew instead of venison steak, and the meat would be stringy, withered tasting. Because in the animal kingdom, as it seemed with humans, only the lean and shrewd survived losing their forests.

  Unlike my family, wolf packs have not survived losing their forests. When I was born, wild wolves were nearly all eradicated in America’s lower forty-eight states. After the relentless, systematic, and successful official extermination of wolves in the United States, only a few hundred of the original 2 million wolves still survived, mostly in the upper Midwest and Alaska.

  The hunter bias is still reflected in today’s many states’ agencies outdated names—Fish and Game Boards instead of Fish and Wildlife Service. The US Forest Service falls under the authority of the Department of Agriculture—as if our public lands and wilderness areas are only for livestock, and wildlife exists as our private game preserve. Or as if our forests are simply tree farms for timber.

  In America’s wildlife agencies predator control often falls within the same governmental department as wildlife protection, creating a clear conflict of interest. For example, Wildlife Services, an often under-the-radar agency, still kills millions of wild animals every year, though it was once part of the Fish and Wildlife Service charged with the exact opposite mandate: enforcing the Endangered Species Act. On its website Wildlife Services’ official mission is “to resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” But the reality is devastating: a 2013 New York Times editorial called for a congressional investigation of Wildlife Services, pointing out, “since 2000, some two million dead animals. Coyotes, beavers, mountain lions, black bears and innumerable birds.” The article concludes, “The agency’s real mission? To make life safer for livestock and game species.… Wildlife Services’ lethal damage is broad and secretive.”