Timer's going.
All right. It looks like we're live.
Hey, everyone. How are you doing?
My name is Ranger Jake, I'm here in Yellowstone National Park,
and we are broadcasting from the north part of the park
in the Mammoth Hot Springs area.
Once again, I want to thank everyone for joining us
to describe what's going around.
Got another storm last night, so we've got some fresh snow.
You can see we've got some nice hot springs behind us.
It was looking pretty dismal today, but then the weather cleared up,
and now we got blue skies.
I just want to thank everyone for joining us today.
Another thing I'd like to encourage you,
this is the last week that we're going live,
and we'd really love if you're one of the folks that are watching live
that you could push the share button,
so your friends and family can join with us during the live broadcast.
As a reminder of these, I'll do a quick intro.
I'll introduce today's speaker,
and then I'm going to jump behind the camera and look for your comments and questions.
Then when the speaker's done talking, I'll ask some questions.
As Doug is talking and presenting, be sure to fix comments,
questions, whatever you got.
We dropping them in there, and we'll be reading them.
If you haven't been following along, basically, for the entire month of March,
we've been doing these Facebook lives to commemorate
25 years of wolves in Yellowstone.
It's been 25 years since they've been reintroduced.
We've been broadcasting weekly.
The last live was supposed to be on Tuesday,
but because the park closed down, we delayed an extra day.
Today is that final day with Doug Smith.
It's bittersweet feelings. We excluding today's post.
We've been in people's news feeds,
we've compiled some of the numbers with these posts.
We've been in people's newsfeeds over 10 million times,
which is an astounding number.
It's been really successful, and of that 10 million times
that we've been in people's newsfeeds,
you guys have interacted with those posts over 850,000 times.
For folks that are not familiar with social media
and numbers and statistics, that is humongous.
What that tells us is that you guys really care a lot about wolves.
We've been so thankful for you joining us week to week
and following us along this entire time.
There's been a lot of planning that's gone in to be able to do this
with you for this entire month of March,
and then not to mention the 25 years of hard work
that we've been able to just touch on
and to share with you over this month.
I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce today's speaker.
It's Doug Smith once again.
He's our senior wildlife biologist.
To give you a little background on Doug, he came to the park in 1979.
There's a lot of us that are here that weren't alive in 1979, myself included.
Doug has got tons of experience. He's been studying wolves for 41 years.
He came to Yellowstone in 1994, so I messed that up.
He took over the lead position in 1997, moved to his current position in 2008.
Doug's primary areas of focus are beaver, birds, elk, and you may have guessed, wolves.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce Doug,
we're going to do a nice little swaparoo here.
I'm going to go around the camera, and Doug's going to jump on and take it over.
Go ahead and drop those questions in.
Hello, and welcome to our last Facebook live,
a 25th anniversary celebration of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone.
January 12th, 1995, the wolves came in.
March 21st, 1995, we released them from the pens.
This month, we've celebrated that event.
We're going to finish it off in the year with a publication of our book
Yellowstone Wolves: Science and Discovery in the World's First National Park
as a finishing touch, but that will be much more detailed and in depth.
Here we sit with the frosty grip of winter still on us.
Wolves love the cold, the snow.
This is, for them, not a big deal, but for us, it's April so it's cold.
Bringing wolves back is reminiscent of what's going on now.
Them coming back to Yellowstone in a way has made the park whole,
it's been restorative, and given about the world events going on now,
I think that's a helpful healthy thought that nature
is powerful and can heal itself.
These are things that we can think about now.
Today, what I want to talk about is how the reintroduction of wolves
has fit back into the Yellowstone ecosystem,
but also, how wolves coming back has fit into the human psyche and world.
We do, after all, control the world
and in wolves fitting back into it has been difficult.
I want to talk a little bit too about the role that parks have had in that process.
The early parks really didn't have ecological processes
or ecosystems in mind when they set them up.
One of the first parks set aside, not as a national park,
but Yosemite was characterized as not being worth much for anything else.
Why don't we set it aside?
Yellowstone, world's first national park, 1872,
was set aside because of some of these geological oddities.
Then a spate of parks after that were set up for cynic purposes
lead by Steven Mather, Horace Albright, wonderful visionaries,
but people weren't thinking about ecosystem processes at that time.
What good were predators?
Hunting was big, market hunting had occurred.
The settling of the west had occurred.
Predators were pretty much eliminated, including in Yellowstone.
Wolves, cougars, coyotes, most prominently.
Not so much bears, but they did decline.
These ecological processes were eliminated early
in one of our first champions of the park.
President Theodore Roosevelt loved Yellowstone, big Hunter.
Another champion of the park, George Bird Grinnell,
big conservationists.
Both were big hunters, did not like predators.
In fact, Teddy Roosevelt referred to wolves
as the beast of waste and desolation.
This was what wolves were up against when Yellowstone was first established.
What did that do?
The removal of wolves and other carnivores, most prominently cougars,
from the park changed the dynamics of the park,
and the elk population really soared.
The park manager saw this as an issue.
Without all the major carnivores,
they had to control the elk population.
It started in about 1923 all the way up to 1968.
The parks started controlling elk.
Doug Houston's book, The Northern Yellowstone Elk
is probably the best source for this,
but roughly, 77,000 elk were either killed by park staff,
shot by Montana hunters as they migrated out of the park in the winter,
or move to other areas that had been depopulated from elk
because market hunting had reduced elk across North America.
Elk was shipped to many other States, Canada, Mexico,
in fact, they were sent to Alberta where our wolves came from.
Those wolves had been preyed on Yellowstone elk for quite some time.
This didn't really achieve the purpose that it was set out to do
because elk still had a great amount of impact on the vegetation,
primarily, the woody vegetation.
The grass isn't forb or slightly different.
That's grazing, and that might have increased
their productivity by having all these elk.
It was the woody vegetation where the real controversy was.
This removal of elk, the loss of native
carnivores really suppressed that woody vegetation.
Primarily, what I'm referring to here is willow, cottonwood, and aspen.
Those plants were reduced, and they didn't grow tall,
and their distribution did not increase.
This was the way Yellowstone was for most of the 20th century.
The species that use them for shelter and food
and the things that they did to the environment
were pretty much reduced.
This was the big issue.
Too many elk impacting the vegetation,
changing the park, and this was a big controversy.
When the carnival recovery began, we were behind wolves,
that's why we're here today.
Twenty-five years ago, cougars came back on their own.
The bear population grew in greater number and distribution.
We began to see a signal of this changing woody vegetation.
The willows started to respond, not everywhere but in some places,
and as a shrub, they were the very first things to come back,
then the aspen.
As a tree, we began to see glimmers of their growth.
People began to wonder, "Was this through the wolves?
Is that too simple story?
Was this due to elk browsing and nothing else?
This was the scientific debate of the last 20 years.
It's not fully resolved, but there are some things that have come clear from this.
Elk browsing was a limiting factor.
As elk browsing declined, not occurring everywhere,
some of the places, not all of them.
In other words, it was a heterogeneous response, not a homogeneous one.
Some places willow and aspen came back.
These are the places where elk browsing had been reduced
because the elk herd had declined, there were fewer elk.
Was this due to just fewer elk? Was it due to a change in elk behavior?
There was a lot of science that went into this.
This change of behavior we learned that elk really weren't responding,
and we looked at this in a number of different ways to the return of wolves
like they have been previously, or Cougars
or should I say it this way
is that Cougars and wolves were on the landscape in the distant past,
elk modified their behavior slightly,
and wolves and cougars came back, they adapted to it.
That adaptation allowed them to get to the places
they wanted to be at different times.
In short, and this is much more complex than I'm going to describe,
but the elk just avoided the activity peaks of the cougars and wolves
but still got to the places that they wanted to forage.
The weight of evidence tends to show or indicate
that this was a reduction in elk number.
I'll get to that in a minute what happened there,
rather than a behavioral response.
This really was a big scientific debate, and it's still ongoing.
After elk browsing had gone down,
not every willow or aspen then recovered
and those are the places that were limiting for moisture.
If you reduce browsing but you don't have adequate water,
you don't get a response.
That helps explain this tiered system.
One of them, in fact, or another way, the next one kicks in,
and that created a lot of debate.
It wasn't all just due to wolves, it was due to a restored carnivore suite,
wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, black bears.
Arguably, one of the most diverse and abundant
carnivore suits in North America.
That was the scientific debate, and it's changed Yellowstone.
There's many spinoff factors. We've studied songbirds.
Many songbirds have responded to this increased growth in willow and aspen,
Wilson's warbler, willow flycatchers, catbirds,
to name just some used all of these riparian areas.
Beavers have responded, and in some areas,
not at all, increased 10 fold.
There are many other unstudied things
that this has probably impacted fishes, insects, hydrology, geomorphology.
All still being studied or waiting to be studied,
so the impacts have been huge.
What are the other things wolves have done?
This is a human story.
How have wolves fit back into our human ecosystem?
There's five things I want to touch on briefly.
Of course, throughout the course of history,
the fate of wolves has depended on us.
Worldwide, they were the most controversial species of wildlife you will find,
they have been dealing with humans for thousands of years.
Myths about them go back to medieval times,
so we really control the fate of the wolves.
How you think of them will depend a lot on your worldview.
If you think the world here is for us to use
as we see fit to get from it what we need,
that might be called the utilitarian view of the world.
If you have that view,
you're probably not going to be in favor of wolf
restoration across the west or other areas.
Your ancestors might've been part of the removal of them
to make way for other human events.
If you view yourself as one species among many,
and our role here on the planet is to coexist,
then you're probably going to be in favor of wolf recovery,
in which one of those positions you hold
is ingrained from you from your wee young days.
Your family, your friends.
It's immune to facts and science and evidence.
It's your value system, and where do you get that from?
It just comes to you as you grow up
and that's an incredibly hard thing to take on.
Whether you like wolves or not, we're talking to you about your values.
That's tough sledding, really tough sledding,
and that's why wolfs are so controversial.
One of those two wolves points.
The second is ethics.
Do we have the right as the dominant
species on the planet to completely wipe out
another species from the face of the earth?
That's a question to be; related to the first.
The national park service said, no.
That's the whole idea behind the national parks service.
Our fundamental policy preserve nature, not conserve it.
Because conserve is wise use, preserve is no use.
It's a lot more complicated than that, but I don't have time to get into it.
That is our fundamental underpinning.
That means we don't have the right to completely
wipe another species off the face of the earth.
The third thing links back to my first as well.
This deals with our pursuit of knowing about the world.
We're in a situation now where we need to know about the world,
where science means a lot, and that's a problem wolves have had.
Because before science was very advanced,
it was our values and storytelling and fables that determined what wolves did.
A big objective of the Yellowstone Wolf Project
and The National Parks Service is data and evidence.
We want to go out.
This is one way of knowing about the world.
You come up with ideas and how it works
and you go out and you gather observations about the world
and you test it and you see if your theory works.
If it doesn't, you keep modifying it.
You critically work on it, and other people criticize it.
There's disagreement about how elk impacted the woody vegetation
was brutal at times,
but this disagreement created clarity.
That's what I mean by data and evidence.
Wolves need that because if you don't have that,
people make it up.
They make up stories.
Here are five quick examples.
When we renewed schools 25 years ago, they said the elk herd would get wiped out.
It has declined probably to a more ecologically appropriate level,
but they didn't wipe the elk herd out.
Based on early growth rates, I read in the paper people saying,
"There'll be 3,000 wolves in Yellowstone within 10 years."
Right now, we have 94 in eight packs.
A third one, someone said, "Wolves are already here."
You don't need to do the reintroduction.
We didn't find any, nor did the wolves we turned loose find any.
These are all evidence based facts that we can accept or reject.
A fourth is or a fifth is, wolves or disease factors.
They're going to spread disease, and people are going to get it,
that hasn't happened.
Another one is, someone's going to get injured or killed,
that hasn't happened.
These are all fact based, evidence based checks
on how we think the world works,
and we modify that based on what we find.
The fourth thing I want to talk about is, this is a cross boundary world.
Yellowstone does not exist by itself, isolated.
We are surrounded by other entities,
US Forest Service, States of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, private land.
When wolves crossed the boundary, it's a different world to them.
A lot of the work we're doing has to be cross boundary,
has to be communicated.
In fact, the ecosystem management concept was working here in Yellowstone,
and that's when species move across jurisdictions.
We're going to talk, and we're going to manage them
for their best gain as well as humans.
We're talking to the States, and it's not a hard boundary.
The wolves that mostly live within Yellowstone are used to people.
They cross the park line.
It's a different management regime.
There's hunting and they're naive.
They're not as weary as a wolf that lives with people all the time,
so that boundary's got to be soft.
We're studying the impact of this.
In fact, we have four parks, possibly five that we're doing that in.
Two in Wyoming, Yellowstone grantee time, and two in Alaska.
Denali National Park and Preserve and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve,
where we're studying the impacts of wolves that mostly live
inside the national parks and go outside
and are legally killed. What does that do?
This is part of that cross boundary world that we're working on.
What we found is that wolves are resilient
population only to human harvest, and that's well known.
Wolves are killed frequently by people,
and a sustainable rate is up to roughly 30%,
but we're learning past that there could be important social impacts.
Wolves live in family groups.
They have dominant wolves, subordinate wolves,
and that integral social hierarchy is very, very important to their existence.
Remove the long wolf, that can have big impacts.
We found that packs that suffer human caused mortality,
they have a less chance of persistence
or reproduction capacity in the next year.
There could be important social impacts on wolves
that you don't see, just their ability to bounce back from a harvest.
We've learned too, and this is still early phases,
so it may not be born not to be true based on data and evidence
that pups could be the social glue
that help hold the pack together, postharvest.
If you lose the wrong wolf at the wrong time of year,
season being very important too, they may not have pups,
and not having pups means their pack does not stay together as well.
That's a very important study.
There's another study we might recruit a park for Minnesota
called Voyageurs to get five parks.
All these parks are very different.
All have wolves, and their responses could be different.
The last one I'd like to say is, wolves feed the economy.
We did a study in the late 2000 of $35 million a year.
People come in here just to see wolves from all over the world.
This is an important effect.
In the states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming,
Yellowstone is a big draw.
Wolves and grizzly bears are the two biggest things
people want to see in terms of wildlife.
This is a tourist magnet.
It's an economic driver,
so this is very important to tourism to this Tri-state area.
This is a list of things that wolves have done
that have really affected the ecosystem
but affected the human ecosystem as well.
I do want to finish now with a quote.
If I could get the book by that guy
I referred to earlier in my talk, Teddy Roosevelt.
This is a book written by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
and it was a DVD special,
I don't know, six or seven DVDs,
fabulous special on the national parks.
Of course, Teddy Roosevelt played large,
loom large in The Champion of Yellowstone.
Here he is just down the hill,
1903, dedicating the arch.
Hopefully, I'm not messing that up.
Dedicating the arch,
giving a speech in Gardiner, Montana, 1903.
This is cool.
An excerpt from this speech.
My fellow citizens, the Yellowstone Park is something
absolutely unique in the world so far as I know.
Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be found
such a tract of veritable wonderland made accessible to all visitors.
Where, at the same time, not only the scenery of the wilderness,
but the wild creatures of the park are scrupulously preserved.
This scheme of its preservation is noteworthy;
it is essential democracy.
The park was created and is now administered
for the benefit and the enjoyment of the people.
In his property of uncle Sam and therefore all of us.
What speech making. He wrote that speech by himself, too.
No speech writers back then.
Then he went to Grand Canyon.
This is not Yellowstone, but it's still noteworthy
because he's talking about the value of nature.
Keep in mind, this is a guy
who could prepare a study skin of a bird, of a mammal.
This strip that I'm quoting from,
he came and slept in a tent at Tower Juntion for two weeks in the ground.
Went out every day to observe wildlife, knew all the birds.
In fact, he went to Yosemite after and met John Muir.
He tried John Muir for not knowing the song of a hermit thrush.
Imagine a president like that.
Rode horses extraordinarily well.
When was the last time we had a president like that?
This is Grand Canyon, and I would like to read
what he said about nature there and then I'll finish.
I want to ask you to do one thing in connection
in your own interest and the interest of the country.
Keep this great wonder of nature as it is now.
Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
What you can do is to keep it for your children,
your children's children,
and for all who have come after you as one of the great sites,
which every American, if he can travel at all, should see.
I met with Teddy's great grandson
over the Hill in my office a few years ago.
I had to ask,
"Would Teddy still TR great president,
consider wolves the beast of waste and desolation?"
He paused for a moment and thought and he said,
"I don't think he would.
I think he would change his mind about wolves."
That was his great grandson.
That wasn't a great president himself, but he changed his mind.
I want you to think about that,
and think about what wolves have done to this park
and done to the other areas they settled.
It hasn't been as bad as people said it would be
based on evidence and facts.
I think it has made human life better.
It certainly has made Yellowstone more whole.
Thank you for tuning in these last five sessions.
Please, tune into our book when he comes out
and to the park when it opens back up.
Thank you for your attention.
-Do you want to take any questions, Doug? -Sure.
All right. We've gotten a few that have come in here.
One of the ones people are asking,
you talked a little bit about the impact
that wolves have had on the ecosystem
and that other animals have come into the area.
Why is that important?
Why do we care about other species?
Why don't we care about how many elk we can have in Yellowstone?
I think because ecosystems function best
when they're more diverse that makes them more stable,
that makes them healthier.
When you start fiddling with them by pulling out this species
and that species because you don't think it's important,
you start to get degradation of the ecosystem or the environment.
That, in itself, causes it to function less well.
That in itself may cause the ecosystem services that benefit us.
Clean water, clean air,
hunting opportunities, things of that nature, degrade.
The more we work on this idea of an interconnected food web.
Keep in mind, I forgot to say during my talk,
carnivores functioned together as a top force.
They eat elk and elk eat vegetation,
and then we have this bottom up force.
Sun into plants, plants into elk, elk into carnivores.
That's a yin-yang process. It's very dynamic.
It's essentially structured all ecosystems.
I realize it's an oversimplification,
but all ecosystems on the planet that we see today,
certainly productivity has a lot to do with it but so do predators.
We start meddling with that, it starts to fall apart,
and when it starts to fall apart, it can affect us
because the environment, the ecosystem
is no longer functioning as it should.
We can tease out and pull out as much as we want.
A lot of species you pull out, it doesn't do anything,
but if you do it enough, eventually, your cards collapses.
I got a question from me that seems to be somewhat
appropriate given the whole pandemic that we're in.
There are diseases in wildlife and other national parks like Rocky,
they have chronic waste and disease.
We have brucellosis in our animals here.
What role do having predators on the landscape
like help either prevent the outbreaks of certain things?
Do they have an impact? Has that been a thing that we are studying?
For sure. I try and avoid what people call wives' tales
because it just can't be true.
It's too simple, but the calling effect of predators
has been shown time and time again to be very beneficial to--
Well, it's a selective process that you're taking out the animals
that aren't as fit, young, weak, old, sick, diseased.
There hasn't been a lot of work done with chronic waste and disease
and what the predator effect will be.
There's been some with mountain lions and mule deer
in Rocky Mountain National Park,
but it almost, certainly, it's an ancient.
We're talking millions of years of fact that predators are pulling out animals
that are having problems,
and likely, a wolfer cougar is going to be able to spot.
Say, for example, a mule deer that's carrying chronic waste and disease
before it's really manifesting the impacts that we see.
If you take out that vector and cause it to be a stationary,
rather than mobile factor so it's not spreading disease,
predictions are, and again, this has been verified.
Some models have been done, we're working on a model about this,
but predictions are that's going to impact the spread of chronic waste and disease.
We think, underline think, there's going to be a predator effect.
Awesome.
Not a ton of questions anymore.
Here's the one that just came in.
25 years ago, the idea of bringing wolves back was very controversial,
and it still is controversial.
Would you say that things have gotten better over the last 25 years
since you've been here for the entire time?
Where was it? Where is it now?
Where do you see it going in the future?
That's the tough question to the age old question.
As I mentioned in my discussion,
these are value ladened things, and how often do people change their values?
I love the expression, "Can't teach an old dog new tricks."
That kind of thing.
A lot of people, how you grew up
is how you think about wolves for your entire life.
There's a group of people that have not changed
their mind very much on both sides,
but I do think the talking is getting better.
I think the more time that goes by
that we have wolves outside of national parks
if I can talk about that briefly.
The sky hasn't fallen in, that the world hasn't ended,
the people aren't getting attacked and killed.
Certainly, there's a lot of controversy and discussion about
how to manage wolves on human dominated landscapes,
but it has, for the most part, worked.
It has, for the most part, been a success.
It has had its problems,
but I think more time that goes by like that to show
that this is a problem that can be solved
through compromise in moderation.
Neither extreme sides is going to get their way.
We've been banging on each other forever about that.
The middle road is a path forward.
I think despite your value system,
more people are looking into that middle road
and think that it could be okay.
I think that would be a good end for there.
A lot of the comments around here are just thanking you
and thanking everybody that were a part of this
and to please keep doing more of these.
I think a lot of people are stuck at home,
and they're looking for entertainment,
but we just got a lot of positive comments there.
With that, I'll probably jump on the front and sign out.
Great. Thank you.
I want to thank everyone again for joining us.
It's been such a privilege to be able to be here
in person to listen to these experts for the last five weeks.
It's been a lot of fun to be able to figure out
how to share all this information with people directly.
We get the word, in general, that you really love these broadcasts.
We're going to look to continue to do more of them in the future
on different topics and how we can bring Yellowstone to you,
especially right now, it seems more relevant than ever.
I just want to thank everyone for joining us.
Thank you so much for being a fan of Yellowstone National Park.
We know that you guys care so much about it
and all the different unique things that are here.
Thanks for following us on social media,
and we'll be seeing you soon. Thanks.