165 visitors join me on the pen walk. I had done so many nature walks during my Park Service career that I was confident managing the large crowds that came with me. On the way to the pen, I paused periodically and told the wolf reintroduction story in stages. I always stopped at an old aspen grove and had people look at the hundreds of shoots coming up from the roots. Aspens usually regenerate from roots of existing trees rather than from seeds, and I pointed out how every shoot had been browsed to death by hungry elk in the winter months.
We now know that after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed off in 1926, the elk population skyrocketed, because one of their main controlling factors had been eliminated. (Cougars also prey on elk, and the rangers killed them off during that time as well.) In the early 1960s, the Park Service brought in range management experts to analyze the vegetation in the northern section of the park, an area known as the Northern Range. In their 1963 report, they estimated that the carrying capacity for elk wintering in that region was about five thousand, well below the number living there at the time.
Going all the way back to the 1920s, the Park Service live-trapped and shipped out Yellowstone elk to any state or Canadian province or zoo that wanted them. Rangers also shot elk to reduce the overpopulation. Due to the controversy over shooting elk, that program ended in 1968. The capture program was also shut down. By that time, 26,400 elk had been removed from the park, either dead or alive. The elk population rapidly increased from that point on. Just prior to the arrival of the wolves from Canada in 1995, there were 19,000 elk wintering in the Northern Range, nearly four times the estimated carrying capacity of the area. The overpopulation led to extreme overbrowsing of aspen shoots, extensive damage to willows growing along creeks and rivers, and erosion along waterways due to loss of vegetation.
As we approached the pen area, I finished the story of how the wolves had been placed in the acclimation pens and later released into the wild. Then I said we would go around a nearby rocky knoll to a point where they could see the pen. I added that I would not talk when we got to that viewpoint, because I wanted each person to have a quiet moment to see the pen and think of its significance. We silently walked around that knoll, and the hikers finally saw the pen. After hearing so much about it, seeing the pen was an emotional event for visitors, especially when they noticed the panel where the exit hole had been cut. That was the exact spot where the first pack of wolves had come out of the pen to become permanent Yellowstone residents. It was the wolf equivalent of Plymouth Rock.
Due partly to the return of wolves, and partly to other factors such as rising numbers of mountain lions and bears, increased human hunting north of the nearby park border, competition from larger numbers of bison, and climatic changes, winter elk numbers in the northern section of the park dropped in the coming years. They eventually stabilized in the six thousand to seven thousand range, a level more sustainable for the ecosystem.
As the wolf packs became more settled in the park, I continued to lead hikes up to the pen site and often hiked up there on my own. Within a few years the aspen trees near the pen site were producing tens of thousands of surviving shoots each spring, which soon formed a forest nearly as dense as a bamboo thicket. Willows also began to flourish along Crystal Creek, and beaver, which need aspen trees and willows for food and building materials, moved in and colonized the area. When documentary filmmakers come to Yellowstone to do stories on the wolf reintroduction, Doug Smith takes them to that creek to point out the amazing recovery of the ecosystem.
My Park Service job ended in early September, but I stayed on in the park to look for wolves. That fall I got together a group of volunteers, and we helped Doug carry fence panels to a new acclimation pen site in the Blacktail Plateau area, about ten miles west of Tower. Mike and Doug planned on bringing in four more packs from Canada, and two new pens needed to be constructed. The Rose Creek and Crystal Creek pens would be reused for the other two packs.
6
The Rose Creek Wolves Get a New Alpha Male
I HAD ONE LAST sighting of the Crystal Creek pack before I left the park for the winter. On October 5, 1995, I saw five of the six Crystal wolves traveling through Lamar Valley. It was the forty-fifth time I had seen the pack that year. The missing member was the gray yearling, wolf 8. Recent tracking flights had often spotted him apart from his family, exploring new country. In February, he would be old enough to breed a female and father pups. I wondered if he was looking for a mate.
A few days after that sighting, I started getting ready to do a lecture tour in Japan on wolves. Gray wolves were once native to Japan, but they had all been killed off by the late 1800s. A wildlife professor, Dr. Naoki Maruyama, who had started a campaign to bring back wolves, had asked me to help by giving talks on the success of our wolf reintroduction program.
I stopped in at the Wolf Project office one last time before leaving, and Doug told me an extraordinary story involving wolf 8. Ray Paunovich was making a documentary on the wolf reintroduction. On the morning of October 11, he had been up by the pen and had seen the two pups still outside the fence begging food from 8 and playfully romping around him. He was the first adult male wolf the pups had seen, and they seemed to be fascinated with him. When I interviewed Ray for this book he told me: “8 acted very friendly with the pups. My impression was he had already made friends with them. They were hanging out together and were very comfortable with each other.”
Right after that encounter, Doug, Mike, and a few others went to the pen and opened the gate so the mother and the six pups inside could go free. By late morning, 9 and all eight of her pups were together, and there was a tenth wolf in the group: 8. After that, he was seen traveling full time with the Rose Creek alpha female and her pups. He was now functioning as the pack’s alpha male, a place in life he might never have achieved if not for the benevolent way he had treated those first two pups.
Over the years, I have tried to envision what had happened. I visualized 8, after leaving his family, heading up Rose Creek to investigate the wolf howling he heard from that area. On getting there, he would have seen the two free-roaming pups. He had always been the smallest wolf in his world, but now, for the first time, he saw wolves that were smaller than he was. That sighting probably triggered a paternal instinct and he befriended those pups. Their mother, who was still in the pen, would have watched when he interacted with the first two pups. She would then have been welcoming to him when she and the other six pups were released. Due to his youth and size, 8 was not the most ideal candidate to be her new alpha male, but he had been friendly and playful with her pups, so the mother wolf accepted him into her family. She was looking for someone with a heart of gold, and she found that in him.
That day 8 and 9 started to form a long-term pair bond, something only 3 to 5 percent of the roughly five thousand mammal species in the world do, something humans and wolves have in common. He was still a yearling, about sixteen years old in human terms, when he joined the pack. Over the years I have watched many yearling wolves at dens and recorded endless hours of them playing with pups. It is obvious that yearlings love to interact with them. Given my observations, I am sure 8 behaved the same way with 9’s pups and was much more playful with them than an older male would have been. It was probably that very thing that impressed her.
I later read how the act of nursing, in both humans and animals, releases the hormone oxytocin in mothers and in their offspring. It also is released when a mother cuddles or strokes her baby. Sometimes called the love hormone, it strengthens the bond between them. One study even described how oxytocin caused a mother to have an irresistible desire to interact with her baby. Oxytocin is also released in fathers, and in their sons and daughters, when they play together, especially when a father and son engage in roughhouse play. For both sexes, higher oxytocin levels correlate with increased empathy, attachment, and altruism. Every time 8 played with the Rose Creek pups, the hormone oxytocin enhanced the emotional bond between them, particularly when he engaged in roughhouse play with his four adopted sons.
When 9 invited 8 into her pack as the new alpha male, one of his primary responsibilities was to be her personal champion, like a medieval lady of the court asking a knight to be always ready to defend her. As the Rose