Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Yellowstone National Park.
I'm Ranger Jake.
I'm part of the social media team here in the park.
To give you a little bit of a sense where we're at,
we're at the north entrance of the park.
We have the Roosevelt Arch directly behind me.
We have Electric Peak.
You might notice there's a little bit of brown patchy snow in the ground,
which is pretty typical for this time of year.
Not a lot of snow
as we're moving out of the winter and into the spring.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the wolf reintroduction.
To commemorate that,
we're doing a series of Facebook Lives.
Each week, we're going to talk about a different topic
and we'll have a subject matter expert
who will come and be able to talk with you.
The plan is that I will introduce the person,
I will jump behind the camera
and while they're talking,
drop your comments and your questions in the comment section below.
We'll be monitoring that.
When they're over and done with their presentation,
we'll go ahead and ask and answer as many questions as we can.
With that, I'll bring on our first speaker.
Doug, come on over and join me over here.
For those that don't know, this is Doug Smith.
He is our senior wildlife biologist in Yellowstone National Park.
To give a little background, let me see if I can remember this.
Doug got his first job studying wolves in 1979
so 41 years ago.
Doug came to Yellowstone National Park
in 1994
as a wolf project biologist
and on the wolf reintroduction as a project biologist.
In 1997, he took the lead position
and 2008, Doug moved into his current position,
where in addition to setting wolves,
he's also studying beavers, birds, and elk.
-Did I get all that right? -You got it right.
All right. I did my homework.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and jump behind the camera.
I'm going to turn it over to Doug.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
-We really appreciate it. -Thanks for the intro, Jake.
Following his lead, I guess I'm Ranger Doug.
I was here 25 years ago for this moment.
Here it is January 12th, 1995
and standing in the same spot now.
I was just up the hill waiting for the wolves.
My job was to receive them and take them to the pen.
We really haven't done anything in the last 25 years.
We thought now is a moment in time to reflect back on what this meant,
because this was a really big deal.
As everybody knows,
Yellowstone's the world's first national park.
At the time it was turned into a park,
we were killing predators.
We got wolves. We got cougars. We got coyotes.
The bears are preserved but their population's declined.
For all of its history, almost 150 years,
Yellowstone was very different than it was now.
The last wolf was killed 1926.
The middle part of the 20th century, we had no wolves.
We had to control the elk population as a result.
Then people's minds began to change but not all of them.
When we proposed bringing them back, a lot of people weren't happy,
and they said
a whole bunch of unintended consequences
were going to occur.
It was a really bad deal. It was crazy.
It's going to change life as we know it.
It was National Park Service policy worked out for over 100 years,
that one of our founding principles was to preserve nature,
to set it aside, to minimize the human fingerprint.
Yellowstone's a big park, 2.2 million acres,
and we killed off the wolves.
We killed off the cougars, the other predators.
We felt it was important to restore the ecosystem what it was,
and it became policy.
1973, we passed Endangered Species Act.
Wolves were listed in 1974,
but as importantly, ethically,
do we have the right to take over the planet?
The National Park Service said no.
Do we have the right to wipe out a species?
The National Park Service said no, but wolves were hard.
This was political.
This was cultural, value-laden arguments.
Wcience is off to the side,
because the science would say, "We can do this."
We've decided to take the whole month here,
the release month.
This was January 12th, when they came through this arch,
but we released them in March to not just do a quick recognition
but an in-depth as to what's happened.
What did happen is first, we had all the wolves marked.
We had to. We handled them. We caught them Canada.
A lot of people say, "Wrong wolf.
It's Canadian, not the wolf that was here.
We're going to talk about that in future weeks."
Wolf taxonomy is specific.
Wolves move around across North America.
You don't get isolated populations that turn into different subspecies.
Plus,
a lot of ungulates were killed called market hunting,
and we shipped elk to Canada.
These wolves are already eating Yellowstone elk,
but we marked them.
We had to keep track of them.
We had to know how it went and we've kept them marked much less.
They're all marked at the beginning. Now, only 25% to 30%.
We, for the most part, kept each pack collared
and it's been one of the best places in the world
to study this controversial carnivore.
And so we can dispel the myths
because that's the other thing about wolves.
It's really hard,
the myths, the legends, the stories, the fables.
We put collars on them and got hard data.
We still do that even though it's a national park.
We want to have a light touch.
Wolves have to have that
because if they don't, people will make stories up.
The elk did decline and as everyone said they would do,
but they didn't go away.
Cougars contributed to that, bears contributed to that,
people contributed to that.
We have fewer elk now, and it's probably a better number.
It's more, can I say, in balance with what numbers of elk should be.
Elk hunting is good across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.
Everyone says the wolves are going to ruin our hunting elk
and deer as we know it.
Wolves have been successfully managed on human landscapes.
No one's been hurt.
No one's been attacked in Yellowstone.
No one's been killed.
These are all things people said were going to happen if we did this.
Can't do it.
Well, here we are 25 years later
and a lot of these stories did not come true.
There are some stories that are important and worth telling.
I love these things about wolves and national parks and nature
because they are things I connect with,
that I want you to connect with too.
There's an elk.
She just died a few weeks ago over that hill over there.
She was born in June 1994.
I came to Yellowstone in November 1994.
We collared this elk and aged her, so we know when she was born in 2011.
We put a collar on, and we followed her,
and she just died at 25 a few weeks ago.
When I learned about this elk and followed her,
I thought,
"Honey, you've lived your entire life
through the time period wolves came back.
You did it."
Most of them don't live past 20, at least female elk.
"How did you do it?"
She survived.
She did it.
What a message.
What a story.
Wolves didn't kill the elk. They didn't kill this old gal.
I skied out to her, I looked at her skull,
and I sat there in a national park, preserved,
not perfectly but still there.
There it is.
Our connection with nature,
an elk that survived all of these years.
We do have fewer elk but they're not gone.
They're probably one of the healthiest elk herd
in North America
because they're called by predators.
We can do things like this. We can make parks better.
Yellowstone is predator rich now as it's ever been in all of its history.
That's not a bad thing. It's made the park a better place.
All the mammals that were here at the time of Christopher Columbus
are here now.
We can do this. It's a great thing to celebrate.
Each Tuesday in March,
we're going to talk about something a little bit different.
Next week, it's about the science.
The week after that, it's about what this has meant to people.
I didn't think that was as important at the beginning
but people have really benefited.
This is restoring nature in the midst of humanity.
It's real. It's not artificially contrived.
It's really important,
and wolves really hold allure for people.
They really are fascinated by them.
This is something to embrace and not say we can't do it.
Some of the questions that we're getting here, Doug--
Thanks for that story. That was really awesome to hear.
What are some of the controversy?
Why are people upset with the fact with wolves come in here?
What are some of the topics or the issues that we're trying to solve
with collaborating with people outside of the park?
Thanks for asking that
because I did forget to say, this was all about compromise.
They did not come in as a fully protected endangered species.
They came in under Section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act.
Which means experimental not essential,
which means it relaxed some stringency
of the Endangered Species Act,
which means ranchers could shoot them if they had a problem with that wolf,
which means some of the planning
that had to occur for fully protected endangered species
did not occur.
The big three reasons people don't like wolves
is they occasionally kill livestock.
That's true but we think that's manageable.
Two, they compete with us for the same wild prey.
Here in this region, primarily, elk and deer.
Three, some would call them a human safety threat.
That one is the least effective argument
because wolves are probably the least dangerous
of all the big carnivores in North America,
but you still need to respect all wildlife.
I walk around my office area and there's elk and bison all over,
and I respect them, I keep a distance from them.
That one's easily managed.
Elk and deer, that's been easily managed as well.
Wolves are a hunted species now across the tri-state area
so that's a manageable situation.
Livestock depredation is extremely low, very low.
Livestock killing, wolves are always killed,
that's not tolerated.
These things that people said that we can't have wolves for
have been overcome.
There are solutions to these problems.
I got another question in here. Someone asked,
you mentioned an elk
that was here for a long time that you studied and watched,
what's a wolf that you've studied and watched for a long period of time?
Wow, that's a good question.
For one, wolves lived much less.
Their average lifespan is about five to six.
They can live 12, 13, 14.
I think the oldest age recorded is 14.
This old gal elk, we had a lot of time together.
Some of the early wolves, I knew better.
I spend more time in the office now than I would like.
Wolf number nine was certainly special to me.
13 was special when he came, and we called him Old Blue.
I resonate with that because I used to be old brown
and now I'm old blue like Old Blue was.
He was a cool one, died right away.
14 went on to found the Delta Pack,
and we oftentimes think
that a charismatic female that lasts a long time
is really the glue that holds the pack together
for quite some time culturally and socially.
I think those three were big for me.
I really bonded with nine in the pen a lot.
I was in the pen, feeding wolves,
and one time,
I was outside the pen, doing something,
I was by myself. She stopped.
she came up to the edge of the pen and our eyes met.
I got to tell you,
if you ever meet the eyes with a wolf,
or maybe I could say this, any wild animal, go do it.
I think we're losing this today in the world that we have,
but if you look for a few seconds right to a wolf's eyes,
it will change you as a person forever.
You won't be the same.
Nine did that to me.
I was outside the pen working on something,
look up, there she was.
Thank you, nine. You're long gone.
You gave me a lot. Thank you.
Some other basic questions.
You mentioned that the wolves were brought in from Alberta.
Can you talk a little bit about
the different groups that were brought in
and when they were brought in and where they were captured from?
I forgot to say that in my hurry to get through my speech.
First-year wolves came from Alberta, 14, three different groups.
Second-year, British Columbia, 17, four different groups, I think.
Third-year, Choteau, Montana,
homegrown wolves, 10, they're all packs.
Their parents didn't come with them so we had a little bit of work to do
to assimilate them into a natural pack.
They went on to help form the Nez Perce pack.
A total of 41 wolves over three years.
The original plan was three to five years to Canada.
We only went two and then one year to Montana
and those 41 grew all the wolves we have now,
integrate with Yellowstone ecosystem.
Those wolves are loosely connected to the Idaho population,
which is well connected to the northwest Montana population.
The entire region, we're pushing about 2,000 wolves
and that was partly due to wolves
coming to northwest Montana on their own.
Then central Idaho,
there was a sister project that was also reintroduction.
Now that tri-state area,
wolves are delisted of the endangered species list,
about 2,000 and life has gone on as we know it.
Another question was about wolf management.
When there is conflict that takes place outside the park,
who's responsible for making sure that situations are handled?
Is that us that does that or is that states?
No, the National Park Service is not involved with that.
Fish and Wildlife Service, by the way, was the lead agency.
Fish and Wildlife Service friends would want me to say that.
Park Service Health, Yellowstone's reintroduction site,
but US Fish and Wildlife Service
deals with refuges and endangered species.
They are the picture.
The wolves are managed by the states now
and they've invited in the Department of Agriculture,
which is Wildlife Services, to deal with livestock depredations.
There's twin management under the purview of the states.
They have management authority over wolves
outside of parks and Indian reservations
and Fish and Wildlife Service refuges.
You mentioned 41 wolves as part of the reintroduction.
-What are we at right now? -We are at 94 now, eight packs.
We've been very stable.
Sorry, I did mention that.
The population shot up to a peak of 174 in 14 packs.
Actually the next year, we had 16 packs
but the population was erratic.
The first 12 or so years, we had three disease outbreaks.
They recovered quickly after the first two, '99 and 2005.
We had another disease outbreak. This disease is distemper.
They declined after 2008 and did not bounce back
and so we feel now we have a new limiting factor
and that's food.
We feel right now, the elk have been very stable.
We had 20 to 25,000 elk when wolves were reintroduced.
Cougars came back on their own.
We reintroduced wolves, their numbers increased.
We have now we estimate 8,000-ish elk so it is smaller,
but we feel that's more ecologically appropriate.
They've been fairly stable for the last six or eight years.
Wolves have been stable at around 10 packs,
100 wolves for the last 10.
We're in a new era.
Actually, one of the bigger ecological questions we have is,
how long is that going to last?
All right.
A lot of the other questions are coming in.
I do see a lot of the questions,
people are asking stuffthat we're going to be covering in future weeks
so I don't want to jump the shark so I'll let those go on.
With that, I'll jump around on the other side.
Doug, you can come over here. I just want to thank Doug
for taking the time to talk with us and to go live.
I want to thank everyone
who joined us and asked a bunch of questions.
If you're joining us after the live
and you weren't able to answer while we were here with Doug,
please continue to drop your comments and questions in the comment section
and we'll do our best to answer those.
Before we sign off, I'm going to a pitch for next week.
We're going to be going live with Dan Stahler and Kira Cassidy.
Dan is a wildlife biologist,
Kira is a wildlife research associate.
The two of them are going to be talking
about the scientific discoveries
that we've learned in the last 25 years
with the wolf series, is that correct?
Yes, I'm not going to miss that. That's going to be even better.
Doug's not going to be on camera but he's going to be in attendance
and he'll be watching with us.
Thanks again everyone for joining.
We really appreciate you following us along on social media
and have a great day.
Thank you.