SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
recovery efforts in the United
States. It has informed wildlife
management around the world,
showing how apex predators
shape their environment; how,
for example, overgrazed willows,
aspens and cottonwoods re-
bounded when wolves began
thinning the elk and bison herds.
After a particularly costly wolf
hunt in 2012, some of Smith’s
donors said he could no longer
characterize the park’s wolves as
being in a natural, unexploited
state.
“We got through that, with just
12 killed. Now we ’re at 24,” he said
in an interview in February, be-
fore another wolf was killed. “We
were doing some of the best sci-
ence on one of the few unexploit-
ed wolf populations in North
America. We can’t make that
claim anymore.”
“The two primary objectives of
the National Park Service are na-
ture preservation and visitor en-
joyment,” he added. “And both of
these things are impacted by this
unprecedented killing.”
Cara McGary, who runs In Our
Nature Guiding Services, and
Reed, the owner of Reedfly Farm
on the Yellowstone River, recently
formed the Wild Livelihoods co-
alition to represent businesses
whose interests are threatened by
such an aggressive wolf hunt.
The wildlife viewing trips led
by McGary, a b iologist who has
worked in Antarctica and Aus-
tralia before moving to Gardiner,
can cost $700 per day. And view-
ing a Yellowstone wolf is a pri-
mary draw for her clients. The
impact on her business this win-
ter is already noticeable, she said.
“More days are happening
when people are not seeing
wolves at all,” she said.‘This is how they get killed’
On the same day Bean found
the carcass, McGary received a
text from a friend.
“Wolves howling audible from
our place rt now. This is how they
get killed.. .” she read. “Trucks
racing up the rd.. .”
McGary drove up the hill and
met Bean as she was heading
down. They conferred about the
carcass and both suspected wolf.
Bean later realized she didn’t
have enough fur for DNA testing,
and she wanted a quicker answer.
She returned and picked up the
animal’s leg and put it in her car.
“It was a wolf,” she said.
Bean said the confirmation
came from a government wildlife
official who performs necropsies,
but she declined to name her
contact.
As it happened, the last six
wolves killed in southwestern
Montana this year came from
places other than Yellowstone.
The state closed the region for
wolf-hunting on Feb. 17, after har-
vesting 82. Bean doesn’t know
whether the one she found had
already been reported to the state.
Or whether it had been poached.
Both hunters and wolf-lovers be-
lieve that more wolves get killed
than make the official tally.
When she had first seen the
carcass, her mind raced. Who is
this?
“Is this one of my Junction
Buttes? Is this one of my 8 M iles?”
she recalled. “It’s immediately
just that feeling of — a family lost.”
As she stood over the bones, the
mountainside resounded with a
ghostly keening: the howling of
wolves.color and hierarchical position.
The decades-long research
project Smith oversees charts one
of the most successful ecosystemflights and remote cameras. They
know how many wolves are in
each of the park’s remaining eight
packs, along with their age, sex,triple-parked on a snow-covered
pullout overlooking the drainage
area of Hellroaring Creek. They
had clustered their tripods to-
gether like cameramen at a n ews
conference, their eyes pressed to
their Swarovski spotting scopes.
“There’s a h uge bunch. Holy
cow!” said Reve Carberry, who
lives in a motor home outside the
park to devote himself to the daily
pursuit of observing wolves.
“There’s about seven or eight over
in a line.”
“Rick just said 10,” added Jeff
Reed, a lodge owner who stood
next to him.
“That’s probably the correct
number, then,” Carberry conced-
ed.
Rick McIntyre is rarely wrong
about wolves. The former Park
Service employee is a legendary
figure in Yellowstone who has
observed and chronicled the
predators on a daily basis for
nearly three decades. With his
courtly demeanor and soothing
voice, he’s chief historian for the
most famous wolf population in
the world.
He has written three books on
wolves — with a fourth forthcom-
ing — and has compiled more
than 12,000 pages of single-
spaced notes from his daily obser-
vations. He can tell stories from
memory about individual wolves
and their family histories, their
acts of heroism and betrayal, their
hunting prowess and empathy for
the wounded or outmatched.
The wolves lounging on a rocky
hillside about two miles across
the valley from McIntyre and the
others were members of the Junc-
tion Butte pack. Starting last
spri ng, McIntyre observed that
pack for 184 days in a row. Their
den was visible from the road, and
hundreds of tourists gathered
alon gside him each morning to
watch the pups as they tumbled
and scampered in the grass.
“It certainly was, at that time,
the best wildlife viewing situation
in the world,” he said. “For any-
one, regardless of their age or
physical abilities, could drive to
that spot in Yellowstone, with
binoculars or a spotting scope,
and see a mother wolf nursing
and caring for her pups.”
When the September hunting
season started, two of the Junc-
tion Butte pups and a yearling
were shot dead. In subsequent
weeks, five more of their relatives
were killed.
“Virtually every time they go
out of the park, they lose wolves,”
said Doug Smith, the park’s senior
wildlife biologist who has led Yel-
lowstone’s wolf restoration proj-
ect since its inception in 1995.
“They’re going out for a day or
two, and then they come in for
weeks. I sit here with my fingers
crossed: Please don’t leave the
park.”
Hunters have killed off one
entire pack — the Phantom Lake
pack — as well as Brindle, the
alpha female of the 8 Mile pack,
known for her distinctive salt-
and-pepper coat, shortly before
bree ding season, putting that
pack’s reproduction at risk. Smith
estimated that there were 125 to
130 wolves in Yellowstone when
the hunting season started and 89
now.
That is not a rough guess. His
staff monitors their movements
using radio telemetry and GPS
tracking collars — applied by
darting them with tranquilizers
— along with regular airplanesure what we’re doing,” Sholly
said in an interview.
The commission held an online
meeting in late January to ad-
dress the rising wolf death toll in
southwestern Montana. Six of the
seven commissioners had been
appointed by Gianforte; three of
the commissioners had animals
mounted on the walls behind
them.
When the public got to speak,
people from across the country
made impassioned pleas on be-
half of wolves and Yellowstone.
“Yellowstone was created to
protect wildlife,” Stephen Capra
of the organization Footloose
Montana told the commission.
“What we’re doing is criminal
around the park. It’s a d isgrace to
the nation.”
The commission voted to stop
hunting in the broader southwest
Montana region that included the
Yellowstone-adjacent districts
once 82 wolves had been hunted.
At that time, the body count stood
at 76. For the moment, hunting
around Yellowstone would con-
tinue.
Sholly had gone to high school
in the small town of Gardiner, just
north of the park, and his dad had
been chief ranger at Yellowstone.
He knew the charged politics of
the issue and was familiar with
the local hunters. He could only
wait and hope that the remaining
six wolves wouldn’t come from
the park.
“This is a very small number of
people that are killing these
wolves,” he said.
‘Hard to see all the change’
Every morning, Bill Hoppe
leaves his house to hunt wolves.
But at 69 years old, he is engaging
in more of a daily ritual than
determined stalking.
“I don’t try very hard. I guard
the road,” he said. “Mornings at
daylight, you’ll see the eagles
comi ng down the creek out of
their roosts, you’ll see elk scat-
tered around, a few deer. I just like
to look at everything.”
Hoppe was the nearest neigh-
bor to the carcass Kim Bean dis-
covered. In local wolf circles, his
name is often spoken with bitter-
ness. In 2013, he shot and killed a
Yellowstone wolf wearing a re-
search tracking collar after
wolves had killed more than a
dozen of his sheep.
“I never spent such a summer,”
he recalled. “Oh, boy. Death
threats? Oh, hell, yeah.”
To Hoppe, the debate over wolf-
hunting has lost its mind. Wolves
need to be managed just as any
predator does, he said, and
they’re a resilient species that
repopulates quickly. The fact that
tourists and many locals observe
them so intently and know their
names — “Old Fluffy or whatever,”
as Hoppe says — makes them too
emotional.
“I don’t know of anybody
around here who’s ever promoted
killing all the wolves,” he said.
“But, on the other hand, you’ve
got all these people who say,
‘Don’t kill any. Let ’em overrun.’
When they get so many, they get
diseased.”
A fourth-generation hunting
guide whose living room walls are
decorated with moose and elk
and mountain goat trophies, he
made his career taking clients to
hunt elk migrating out of Yellow-
stone and past his house. That
herd numbered about 20,000 be-
fore wolves were reintroduced
and has declined substantially,
partly because of wolves but also
because of human causes such as
climate change and habitat loss.
“One family I knew had outfit-
ted here for generations, and as
the elk herd collapsed, they just
kind of moved off and separated
and went their own way,” he said.
“I saw it break up families that
lived here for 100 years.”
The sepia-toned photographs
on Hoppe’s living room walls de-
pict a Yellowstone long gone.
Back when only a suspension
bridge crossed the Yellowstone
River, not a paved road jammed
with tourists. Back when his
grandfather was hired to help
eradicate wolves in the 1920s as
official park policy.
Wolf hunting connects him to a
vanishing past, before tech mon-
ey moved in and the government
micromanaged his backyard.
“It’s hard to see all the change,
is all.”
Hoppe said he wants people to
be “reasonable.” If the federal gov-
ernment tries to put wolves back
on the endangered species list, he
said, the consequences for the
wolves could be worse.
“This perception that they’re
all going to disappear and we’re
going to murder ’em all? There’s
no way to get rid of them, short of
poison,” he said. “And if these
people keep pushing and pushing
and keep taking away and keep
taking away, tha t’s what will hap-
pen.”
“Don’t try to take it all from us,”
Hoppe warned. “Because this is
Montana. This is not Yellowstone
Park.”
‘Best wildlife viewing
situation in the world’
Inside Yellowstone, the wolf-
watchers’ cars were double- and
PHOTOS BY LOUISE JOHNS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Elk graze in Gardiner, Mont., a g ateway town into Yellowstone National Park, on Feb. 5. Gardiner is the town closest to wildlife management unit 313, where many wolves
have been harvested on the park’s northern border this year.ABOVE: Wolf watchers in
Yellowstone National Park use
spotting scopes on Feb. 5 t o gaze
at wolves about two miles away.
The wolves are from the
Junction Butte pack, which has
been heavily harvested this
hunting season. RIGHT: A
home near Emigrant, Mont., is
decorated with gray wolf pelts.
BOTTOM: Doug Smith, a
Yellowstone wolf biologist,
holds a wolf pelt and skull used
for research. Smith was part of
the team that reintroduced
wolves to Yellowstone in 1995.We were doing some of
the best science on one
of the few unexploited
wolf populations in
North America.
We can’t make that
claim anymore.”
Doug Smith, Yellowstone Park’s
senior wildlife biologist