Search for The Wolf

By EUGENE LINDEN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

People around Yellowstone National Park have been agitated by some strange sights lately, and not just the usual glimpses of Elvis and UFOs. The new apparition is the wolf, the magnificent predator that disappeared from the American West more than 60 years ago -- killed off by relentless bounty hunters and government agents. Over the past decade, a few wolves have moved from Canada back into northern Montana and Idaho, but most experts thought it would take many years before they spread out and found ways to cross interstate highways and hostile ranchland to reach Yellowstone.

The first credible claim that the wolf had arrived in the park came in August, when a filmmaker recorded a large wolflike animal feasting on a bison carcass in Yellowstone's Hayden Valley. Not all biologists were convinced, since the animal appeared to have some doglike features. But more and more sightings took place. Rangers and visitors reported seeing paw prints and even groups of wolves. Then on Sept. 30, a hunter's smoking gun left the most compelling evidence thus far: the body of a gray-black 42-kg (92-lb.) male that was shot while supposedly traveling with a group of three or four animals just south of the park in the Teton Wilderness Area. The first scientists on the scene said it looked like a wolf, but U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service experts are putting the remains through a long and complicated series of tests to determine if the animal is a wolf-dog hybrid and whether it spent time in captivity.

Conservationists have long bemoaned the absence of the wolf in the otherwise complete Yellowstone ecosystem. Extending from northwestern Wyoming into southern Montana and Idaho, it is the largest expanse of virtually unspoiled wilderness in the Lower 48 states. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 requires the U.S. government to take steps to bring back the wolf, but a succession of plans to reintroduce the animal to Yellowstone and other parts of the West have become mired in controversy. Even though a majority of Westerners favor the return of wolves, formidable opposition comes from local ranchers and hunting outfitters who fear that the predators will kill livestock and deplete game and that tight restrictions will be placed on land use as a way of protecting the animal's habitat. The ranchers see the wolf as their own version of the spotted owl.

Surprisingly, even some wolf supporters were taken aback at the possibility that the animal is engineering its own comeback. They are reacting as if werewolves, not gray wolves, have suddenly appeared. Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, fear that their long-discussed plans to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone could become sidetracked. The Endangered Species Act would require the Federal Government to protect wild wolves from hunters and ranchers, and could prohibit the reintroduction of other wolves. Conservationists are worried that there will be too few immigrant animals to start a thriving population, and that a complacent public will mistakenly assume that the problem of getting wolves back into Yellowstone has been solved.

No rational policy can be set until scientists confirm or refute the evidence of the wolves' return. So the painstaking examination of the animal killed last month is beginning to resemble the autopsy of a slain President. Forensic tests to examine wear of the beast's paws and teeth support the notion that it is a wild wolf. Preliminary analysis of the skull is inconclusive. Now researchers are trying to match the animal's genetic material with that of known populations of wolves.

Unfortunately, no single test can rule out the presence of dog genes. For instance, one scientist studying the remains argues that skull analysis requires the examination of many skulls of the same age and sex; in the case of an endangered species like the wolf, it could take years to accumulate a big enough sample. Concludes John Varley, the chief of research at Yellowstone National Park: "The best we can hope for is 80% certainty, and we are going to have to make a decision based on that."

Even if the biologists decide that the animal is a wolf, a crucial question remains: Was it a lone sojourner and thus of no great importance, or a member of a group that might colonize the park? A pack could have established itself if at least one male and one female migrated from the north and then mated in Yellowstone.

In Montana and Idaho, wolf populations have been kept low by disease, illegal poisonings and lethal encounters with cars. But Yellowstone could be a promised land. The 930,000-hectare (2.3 million-acre) park is surrounded by millions of hectares of wilderness, a panoramic spread of high plateaus, broad river valleys and forests that teem with elk and other wolf food. Abundant grizzly bears keep backpackers to a minimum. Hunters are allowed to move through the wilderness areas adjoining the park only during five weeks each fall, and killing a wolf could bring high fines and imprisonment.

If a wolf pack has settled in Yellowstone, it could produce four to six pups annually, some of which could survive to disperse and colonize other parts of the park. "That's the way it happens," says Michael Hedrick, a wildlife biologist who monitored wolf packs on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. "First you get ambiguous sightings, then someone sees a family, and then the % floodgates open."

That possibility is what makes landowners edgy. Says Clifford Hansen, a former Wyoming Governor and Senator whose family grazes cattle in Grand Teton National Park: "I'm old enough to remember when ranchers paid a $150 bounty on the wolf, and in those times they would not pay that kind of money to counter a trivial threat."

Wolf advocates respond that before the turn of the century, the West had hundreds of thousands of wolves, which began killing livestock only after hunters slaughtered most of the bison, elk and other prey. Yellowstone's superintendent, Robert Barbee, points out that the situation is now dramatically different: the park and surrounding wilderness have more elk and deer than at any time since the white man went west. One conservation group, the Defenders of Wildlife, is so confident that wolves will stick to abundant wild game that it has unveiled a plan to compensate ranchers for losses to wolf attacks.

Renee Askins, executive director of the Wolf Fund advocacy group, sees the issue as a "rare opportunity for people to set right an environmental wrong." At the very least, finding a resolution that protects the wolves while easing fears of the nearby ranchers would be a great step toward showing how Americans can learn to manage their difficult and often ambivalent relationship with wild nature.