The Sporting Life. Grey Wolves in the Lamar Valley

What does a wolf understand that we humans cannot see? Image: Ranger, Jim Peaco, Thanks to Yellowstone National Park.

Mark Seth Lender, team member, Living on Earth, Explorer in Residence, and discoverer of avian naturalist, Smeagull the Seagull. — Mark Seth Lender, team member, *Living on Earth*, Explorer in Residence, and discoverer of avian naturalist, Smeagull the Seagull.

✓ Travel Tips
Where: Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park. Wyoming
When: Winter is best
How: With a professional guide, wolves are elusive.
Note: Prepare for extreme cold and long waits - but it’s worth it!
Contact us.

✍︎Editor's note: In 1995, if you happened to be in Yellowstone National Park at the exact right spot at the exact right moment, you might have seen a grey wolf streak across a broad, grassy plain for the first time in 70 years. The wolves were back! And they immediately began to shake things up!

Today, the park's ecosystem is more balanced and robust, apex predators make for healthier prey, (see Mark’s field notes at the end.) And the resident grey wolves have made Yellowstone's Lamar Valley famous among wildlife lovers throughout the world.

A few years ago, Living on Earth’s Explorer in Residence, Mark Seth Lender went to see the wolves at work for himself.

To listen to Mark telling the story, check out Public Radio’s Living on Earth where it was first run in 2019

The Sporting Life.
Grey Wolves, The Lamar Valley, Yellowstone

Leaping and loping and tongues lolling the snow falling their great paws snow plowing, down the slope they come. Toward level ground. Down. And down. They are early. The sun hidden below the mountains. The snow blue. The sky blue black. The stillness pure white.

Down.

And down.

Trotting now in their dog-like way along the bank they go. Above where the river flows. Past where elk have nibbled the alder to stubble, and the land in a blanket of winter ten feet deep. The river is iced over. It is a bridge across the valley they do not cross but turn, to the west’ard and the low hills.

And are hidden.

And appear again.

Then into the rolling contours of the land -

And gone.

Gray wolves! Hunting!

The next day beside the ice where I’d last seen the pack, an elk now stands by himself. Antlers five feet across. His lines. His stature. He could be cast in bronze.

Except that he moves.

He turns his head and looks at the hind part of him, at what the wolves, have done to him.

The pack lolls nearby. They are in a hollow just above the river. Sleeping and waking and stretching and going back to sleep. But in their winter-thick coats in an hour the sun becomes uncomfortable and they mill about and on some indiscernible signal begin to howl, all together, confirming to each other their order and unity. A young wolf in need of an additional teaching is nipped and knocked over and he yelps and cries but is unharmed.

The wolves leave.

They have no intention of finishing what they started.

But they cannot help it, the consequence of too many elk there for the taking.

Which does not enhance their reputation.

They are too much like us for their own good.

The Elk, the Wolves, and the Ecosystem

“Did you know that Yellowstone collects data on what wolves eat? The data is then added to the 26 years of research since wolves were reintroduced in 1995.” “Yellowstone continues to be one of the best places to observe predator-prey relationships, and the data we collect helps guide wolf research and conservation all over the world.” –Doug Smith, Senior Wildlife Biologist. Thanks to Yellowstone National Park

Mark’s Field Notes

The elk lived for two days. Then it was over. American bald eagles and ravens arrived, a single golden eagle who swooped in and chased the other birds away. At one point a coyote appeared. They are no match for wolves, a fact of which coyotes in Yellowstone are acutely aware. He pulled at the frozen remains with great urgency. Finally the tension was too much for him and he ran off.

David Mech (the first biologist to develop a significant scientific understanding of wolves) necropsied the carcass. The postmortem damage scavengers had done did not matter to Mech. What he was after would be found not in flesh but on the skin and in the bones. The pelt was infested with winter tick especially around the neck. The marrow inside the femur was like gelatin, pink and translucent, instead of stolid and red. The wolves had made the right choice and the right kill. The elk, statuesque on the outside, was starving to death on the inside. Starvation brought on by overpopulation because in our wisdom, we had exterminated the wolves leaving elk to multiply out of control, for decades. And suffer in the tens and tens of thousands a far worse death than the one I had witnessed.

Now the wolves have done their part. Elk are no longer starving, the population is correct and stable, the aspen grazed to the nub, are at last returning to the slopes. But now throughout the west the ranchers and the farmers are out killing off the wolves despite that weather, both freezing and hot, artificial feedlot crowding and resultant disease, even accidents, each individually kill huge numbers of livestock doing far more damage to a farmer’s bottom line than wolves who take fewer animals by an order of magnitude than high-country lightning.

Image: Public Domain, Flicker, Via Public Radio. Living on Earth

Image: Patrick Carlson via Public Radio Living on Earth

Update on the Status of Grey Wolves

✍︎Editors Note: In October 2020, the Trump administration removed protection for gray wolves resulting in the doubling of “wolf kill allotments” by states like Wisconsin. Idaho enacted a law that allows the killing of 90% (1300 individuals) of the state’s wolf population. However, thanks to The Center of Biological Diversity, The Humane Society, and the Western Watersheds projects, Earthjustice, Defenders of Wildlife, The Sierra Club, National Parks Conservation Association, Oregon Wild, plus you and me and all the folks who signed petitions and raised our pens and voices, on September 15, (2021), The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a new initiative to decide if protection for wolves needs to be reinstated. No species’ survival is ever certain, but for this minute there is a glimmer of renewed hope for wolves.