It has probably been 60 years since the mournful howl of the timber wolf has been heard here in Yellowstone National Park, a sanctuary where managers of the National Park Service long have worked to preserve every one of God`s creatures native to the Rockies-except the wolf.
Managers long ago ordered all the wolves shot.
Now as an autumn Moon like the ones that once set Yellowstone`s wolves wailing hangs over the park`s primordial forests, backers of a plan to reintroduce the wily and voracious predators say they are closer to their controversial goal than they have been in years.
Hard-eyed hunters hired by the selfsame National Park Service that now has proposed importing wolves to Yellowstone are believed to have shot the last wolf living here in 1927, explained John Varley, Yellowstone`s chief wildlife scientist.
Those shootings were part of a nationwide federal wolf slaughter undertaken in the 1920s to halt the killing by wolves of livestock on the nation`s farms, Varley explained. The national parks were included in the eradication to prevent wolves from using them as a sanctuary, foraging beyond the boundaries for livestock on neighboring farms and then returning to the national preserve, where they could not be hunted. The program was carried out by the U.S. Agriculture and Interior Departments.
Today there are fewer than a couple of thousand timber wolves left in the contiguous states, including about 1,200 in Minnesota, a few dozen in Wisconsin and Michigan and a handful in Montana`s Glacier National Park and in central Idaho, Varley said. There are about 5,000 wolves in Alaska and perhaps 50,000 in Canada.
So successful was the program that today the Northern Rocky Mountain timber wolf, the original inhabitant of Yellowstone, is considered extinct.
In the early 1970s, however, a growing environmental movement, coupled with a new philosophy in Yellowstone that the park should be returned to its natural state before the first cowboy intruded, led the federal government to place the Rocky Mountain wolf`s Midwestern cousin, the gray timber wolf, on the list of endangered species and begin the quest to increase the wolf population in the contiguous states.
To date, however, not a single wolf has been reintroduced under the federal plan. Only last year did the mountains of studies and data generated by the 1973 order result in a plan-and subsequently a controversy, once it was made public-about how that reintroduction should be accomplished. Yellowstone was selected as the first site to import the gray wolf, a large canine weighing 120 pounds or more as an adult and capable of eating 20 pounds of meat at a sitting.
”There definitely is an ecological niche that throughout time was filled by wolves that has been vacant here in Yellowstone for about 60 years,”
Varley noted. The elimination of the wolf, which preyed on large ungulates-moose, elk and bison-has led to overpopulation of those animals, whose grazing in turn has spoiled habitats for smaller animals such as the beaver, which is rarely found in the park anymore.
But as far as many Westerners, including the three powerful Republican lawmakers representing Wyoming in Congress, are concerned, 60 years without wolves hasn`t been long enough.
Because of the political strength of wolf opponents, advocates of the wolf`s reintroduction have suffered repeated reversals since their drive started in 1980.
The issue has divided top officials in the Reagan administration, angered ranchers in Wyoming, Montana and Utah and created concern among professional hunting guides, called outfitters, who worry that wolves will cause a drastic drop in the supplies of elk, deer, antelope and other game.
A University of Wyoming study published in August about the views of ranchers who oppose wolves said that to many people the wolf ”is the Devil, red-tongued, sulfer-breathed and yellow-eyed; he was the werewolf, human cannibal; he was the lust, greed and violence that men saw in themselves.”
And the fomentation has been equally intense in the pro-wolf camp. Earlier this month members of the violence-prone environmental group Earth First! issued a statement that they planned to clandestinely truck in shipments of wolves to the park this winter.
Meanwhile, mainstream environmental groups, including the Fund for Animals and Defenders of Wildlife, have spent tens of thousands of dollars lobbying for the recovery plan.
Defenders of Wildlife officials have gone as far in their public relations push as to pay ranchers in Montana more than $3,000 after the ranchers claimed to have lost livestock to the handful of wolves living in Glacier National Park. The group promised that it would also pay for any animals killed by wolves once they are reintroduced into Yellowstone.
The Defenders also spent $10,000 to take a group of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho ranchers to Minnesota, where they were shown evidence that wolves there had killed only about two dozen cows and sheep last year on the more than 12,000 farms within the Minnesota wolves` hunting grounds.
Largely unmoved, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association voiced strong objections to the plan, and Wyoming Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop and Wyoming`s only congressman, Rep. Richard Cheney, joined forces over the summer on behalf of ranchers and outfitters and persuaded the Interior Department`s Fish and Wildlife Service director, Frank Dunkel, to order the recovery project scrapped.
Dunkel`s order, issued after a meeting with the three lawmakers, led to a confrontation between him and the popular director of the National Park Service, William Penn Mott, who strongly endorses the recovery plan, said George Berklacy, spokesman for the National Park Service in Washington.
The federal bureaucracy requires that Dunkel`s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduce the animals into Mott`s park, so the conflict ”means that the hopes for a recovery program are on hold,” Berklacy said.
Mott, a friend of President Reagan`s who ran California`s state parks when Reagan was governor, rejected Dunkel`s order to stop calling for the plan but can`t override his colleague and implement it on his own, Berklacy said.
”There is just no way that you can claim to be director of the National Park Service and not be in favor of restoring one of the key species that lived in a park before it was designated a park,” Berklacy said.
He noted that behind the new-found optimism of wolf advocates is a congressional decision to finally take the emotional issue before a committee. Rep. Wayne Owens (D., Utah) introduced a bill in early October that would order Dunkel or his successor to attempt a three-year experiment in which 10 packs of wolves, consisting of 18 to 30 wolves each, would be introduced into the 3,000-square-mile Yellowstone park.
Wildlife biologists at Yellowstone, including Varley, estimated that these wolves each year would kill about 3,000 of the park`s enormous herd of 30,000 elk, thereby helping to restore the herd`s natural population and prevent the overgrazing that has driven out smaller animals.
But opponents such as Sen. Simpson counter that the wolves would simply remove animals that now are killed by hunters each winter when the elk migrate into forests of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.
After Owens offered his pro-wolf bill, Simpson, Wallop and Cheney told reporters that they would continue to oppose the measure. Said Cheney, ”I intend to work strongly against it.”
But public hearings required by the bill`s introduction mean that the issue will get a hearing beyond the three well-connected Wyoming Republicans, who have succeeded in stalling the plan until now, said a key wolf advocate, Hank Fischer of the Montana chapter of the environmentalist group Defenders of Wildlife.
”We believe that Americans as a whole, including even a majority of the residents of the state of Wyoming, support the idea of reintroducing wolves and that majority is being thwarted by three congressmen responding to the special interests of a few of their constituents,” Fischer said.
In 1985, he recalled, the University of Minnesota staged an exhibit in Yellowstone featuring Minnesota`s wolf population and explaining how farmers and ranchers there coped with having predators near their livestock.
A poll conducted by University of Montana researchers of visitors to the Minnesota exhibit found that 85 percent of tourists favored reintroducing wolves.
By contrast, a poll taken last summer by the University of Wyoming and paid for by the National Park Service found that sentiment against the wolves ran at 17 to 1 in the Wyoming counties that border the park.
Statewide, however, the poll found that people living in counties far away from the park support wolves. The poll of Wyoming residents overall found 48.5 percent in favor of wolves, 34.5 percent against and 17 percent with no opinion.
But the poll results, compiled by Alistair J. Bath, a professor in the College of Commerce and Industry at the Univerity of Wyoming, established that those in Wyoming who don`t want wolves largely take the view that the only good wolf is a dead wolf.
Wyoming wolf opponents largely refused to drop their opposition even if all wolves were kept inside the park or if the federal government were to pay for any livestock killed by the predators outside the park.
Said park biologist Varley, ”The people opposed to wolves are very, very strongly opposed. There is something about the animal that simply brings out hatred, anger and fear in many people.”
Despite the poll results, Defenders of Wildlife leaders think they can change at least some minds by promising to pay for any livestock killed by wolves once the 10 packs are restored to Yellowstone.
”We`re putting our money where our mouths are, but the fact is that we are right, and therefore we aren`t taking that much of a risk,” said the Defenders` Fischer.
A study by William J. Paul of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Minnesota found that the 1,200 wolves in that state had hunted over ground covered by 12,230 farms and yet had been linked to the deaths of only 7 cows, 10 calves, 13 sheep, 285 turkeys, 1 goat and 1 dog.
”There is only a fraction of the numbers of livestock around Yellowstone as there is in the Minnesota wolf ranges, and we`re only talking about a couple of hundred wolves here instead of 1,200 like in Minnesota,” Fischer said.
”We definitely can afford to pay for the small numbers of animals likely to be taken by a reintroduced Yellowstone (wolf) population.
”It would be a tiny price for the privilege of living around a magnificent animal.”
