Wolves Make Strong Comeback, but U.S. Program Still Angers Ranchers

It’s 8:30 p.m. and the final slivers of sunlight slant down into Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley. By the side of the road, a cherry-red rental car is parked with doors open, dome light on and nobody in sight.

Park ranger Bundy Phillips knows the sight--”wolf groupies,” he calls them. These are the markings of people who have caught a glimpse of a Yellowstone wolf and have rushed off to get a better look from higher ground.

In the last two years, 66 Canadian wolves were released in the park and central Idaho as part of an effort to restore the species in America’s northern Rockies. Wolves roamed the area widely 100 years ago, but were wiped out through poisoning, trapping and hunting in the 1920s and 1930s.

This year the wolves brought to Yellowstone this year and last will start producing pups, a new lineage for this endangered animal that has stirred the emotions and polarized people living just outside the park and thousands of miles away.

For example, supporters of the project say it cost $7 million, about $106,000 per wolf. Opponents such as U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) maintain that the price by the end of the project will actually be closer to $123 million, more than $1.8 million per wolf.

Ranchers and some residents of back-country communities believe the federal government is using the Endangered Species Act to encroach on their land and enact policies that harm their livelihood to protect the wolves.

“There’s two sides to this story,” says Don Weir, a former rancher and now bar manager at All Seasons Mining Co. in Cooke City, Mont., a “gateway” community about four miles northeast of the park’s northeastern entrance.

“On one side, you have the urban people who teach other urban people about [wolves] or the young folk who are interested in biology. The granolas think it’s neat as beans. But we [locals] think it’s a joke,” Weir says.

Federal officials say the program is succeeding with surprising results and at a better rate than expected. They hope the wolf can be taken off the Endangered Species List by 2002 or sooner.

Originally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that wolves would kill about a dozen head of livestock a year; some ranchers said the restored predators would kill hundreds of sheep and cattle.

So far, one wolf has killed two sheep--and that wolf was killed by federal officials.

Of the 31 wolves released in Yellowstone since 1995 and the nine pups born through the spring, six have died. Wildlife biologist Mike Phillips, head of the wolf recovery project in Yellowstone, estimates that 25 pups will be born this season, bringing to 59 the number of wolves in the park.

That is another sign of success, Phillips says, because the high rate of reproduction will put the recovery program ahead of schedule, saving taxpayers money.

Robert Ridgely, a bird biologist from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, visited the park recently for some wolf-watching.

He’s a member of Defenders of Wildlife, one of the driving forces behind the restoration project, which he calls “a return of part of the American heritage.”

The group has created a compensation fund for ranchers who can prove that they have lost livestock to wolves.

“I don’t know what they are howling about,” Ridgely says. “There’s no evidence showing the ranching industry has been hurt. They’ve been suckered into this ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ scenario.”

Ridgely emphasizes that the wolves would help thin out the overabundant elk and bison herds and help the habitat recover from their grazing.

In Daniel, a small town about 120 miles southeast of the park’s southern entrance, rancher Dru Roberts says the issue is one of balance.

His weather-beaten and calloused hands move off his polished pine table, turn palm up and slightly cupped as if forming a scale to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of the predators.

“I’m not against having wolves in Yellowstone, and even having wolves down here wouldn’t bother me if they are controlled,” says Roberts, whose home is 10 miles from the nearest paved road. “I don’t want to see the last coyote get killed . . . but if you get too many, then we lose the balance of nature. I don’t want to see what happens when everything comes unbalanced . . . that’s what spooks me.”

Maintaining a balance is essential to him, since he wants to turn over the 200-head cattle ranch to his son.

A day later and about 200 miles away in Yellowstone, Mike Phillips cups his hands to make the same kind of gesture as Roberts. He, too, speaks of balance and legacy.

“Certainly the world is a less attractive place if we are always dealing with extremes,” Phillips says. “But so often in the past, people have polarized the wolf issue--either it is this way or that way. But it is not an either or.”

Ranchers and wolves can coexist, he believes. And this needs to be done for reasons greater than profits or showing political power.

“It’s about symbolism,” Phillips says. “We need something to guide us. I believe wolf restoration in Yellowstone is an effective touchstone for measuring our reverence for what we inherited and for measuring our concern for the legacy we leave our children.”