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Controversial wolf restoration project subject of NatGeo Explorer talk in Des Moines | RADIO IOWA
National Geographic photo by Doug Smith
The wildlife biologist who spearheaded the project to reintroduce wolves at Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s will be in central Iowa this week to tell that remarkable story — and to discuss the controversy that still surrounds those animals and the effort.
Doug Smith tours the country as a National Geographic Explorer and says before they launched the restoration program decades ago, wolves had been long gone from Yellowstone.
“We use the date 1926 when the last wolf was killed. It was official park policy to kill all predators, particularly wolves, so there was about a 70-year absence when we restored wolves starting in ’95, finishing in 1997,” Smith says. “Right now, there’s roughly 80 wolves in eight packs. The long-term average has been about 110 packs. So the numbers are slightly down right now.”
Smith served as a wildlife biologist at Yellowstone for nearly three decades and studied everything from beavers to birds, but also focused his research on wolves there and during special projects in Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana.
“I have a 45-year-long career with wolves, and so getting hired to do the Yellowstone reintroduction really was a dream of a lifetime,” Smith says. “It also felt right because it’s restoring an ecosystem, and ethically it felt good too because we tried to wipe wolves off the face of the earth, and bringing them back I think was the right thing to do.”
Some critics believe it was a mistake to restore the wolves at Yellowstone, while others applaud the program. Smith says the park’s landscape has changed since the wolves arrived, and during his talk, he’ll be showing a series of photos and videos of the quest to bring back the apex predator.
“People’s view of wolves is determined by their culture and their values, and our country right now is pretty polarized, so it’s kind of like you love them or you hate them,” he says. “I was hoping in my 45-year career that we’d get kind of a coming to the middle, and I think that’s where we need to be — in the middle — but it’s super hard to get people there, especially in these times.”
Smith is the first of this season’s NatGeo Explorers to appear at the Des Moines Civic Center. He’s scheduled to speak Wednesday night at 6:30.