Book Library – Yellowstone

In 2020, it will have been twenty-five years since one of the greatest wildlife conservation and restoration achievements of the twentieth century took place: the reintroduction of wolves to the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. Eradicated after the park was established, then absent for seventy years, these iconic carnivores returned to Yellowstone in 1995 when the US government reversed its century-old policy of extermination and—despite some political and cultural opposition—began the reintroduction of forty-one wild wolves from Canada and northwest Montana. In the intervening decades, scientists have studied their myriad behaviors, from predation to mating to wolf pup play, building a one-of-a-kind field study that has both allowed us to witness how the arrival of top predators can change an entire ecosystem and provided a critical window into impacts on prey, pack composition, and much else.
 
Here, for the first time in a single book, is the incredible story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone National Park as told by the very people responsible for their reintroduction, study, and management. Anchored in what we have learned from Yellowstone, highlighting the unique blend of research techniques that have given us this knowledge, and addressing the major issues that wolves still face today, this book is as wide-ranging and awe-inspiring as the Yellowstone restoration effort itself. We learn about individual wolves, population dynamics, wolf-prey relationships, genetics, disease, management and policy, newly studied behaviors and interactions with other species, and the rippling ecosystem effects wolves have had on Yellowstone’s wild and rare landscape. Perhaps most importantly of all, the book also offers solutions to ongoing controversies and debates.
 
Featuring a foreword by Jane Goodall, beautiful images, a companion online documentary by celebrated filmmaker Bob Landis, and contributions from more than seventy wolf and wildlife conservation luminaries from Yellowstone and around the world, Yellowstone Wolves is a gripping, accessible celebration of the extraordinary Yellowstone Wolf Project—and of the park through which these majestic and important creatures once again roam.

The breathtaking firsthand account of two Yellowstone wolves and their remarkable bond.

Wolf 21 and Wolf 42 were attracted to each other the moment they met in Yellowstone Park—but Wolf 42’s jealous sister hindered their relationship. After an explosive insurrection within the pack, the two wolves came together at last as alpha male and alpha female of the Druids, the most successful wolf pack in Yellowstone history. Rick McIntyre recounts their fascinating love story with compassion and a keen eye for detail, drawing on his many years of experience observing Yellowstone wolves in the wild. This remarkable work of science writing offers unparalleled insight into wolf behavior and Yellowstone’s famed wolf reintroduction project.

Rick McIntyre has spent more than fifty years watching wolves in America’s national parks, twenty-five of those years in Yellowstone, where he has accumulated over 100,000 wolf sightings and educated the public about the park’s most famous wolves. He has spoken about the Yellowstone wolves with 60 Minutes, NPR, and CBC, and he is profiled extensively in Nate Blakeslee’s American Wolf and in international publications. He lives in Silver Gate, Montana.

Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The astonishing true story of one of the first wolves to roam Yellowstone in more than 60 years.

“[Rick McIntyre] is first and foremost a storyteller whose encyclopedic knowledge of Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction project is unparalleled.”
—Nate Blakeslee, author of American Wolf

Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves—but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995.

This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves.

Wolf 8 struggles at first—he is smaller than the other pups, and often bullied—but soon he bonds with an alpha female whose mate was shot. An unusually young alpha male, barely a teenager in human years, Wolf 8 rises to the occasion, hunting skillfully, and even defending his family from the wolf who killed his father. But soon he faces a new opponent: his adopted son, who mates with a violent alpha female. Can Wolf 8 protect his valley without harming his protege?

Authored by a renowned wolf researcher and gifted storyteller, The Rise of Wolf 8 marks the beginning of The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series, which will transform our view of wolves forever.

Rick McIntyre has worked with the National Park Service for more than fifty years and has recorded more sightings of wild wolves than any other person. During one fifteen year period, he rose before dawn every day to observe the Yellowstone wolves. Now retired, he has spoken about the Yellowstone Wolves with news outlets such as 60 Minutes and NPR’s Snap Judgement, and is profiled extensively in American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee.

Robert Redford—actor, director, and producer—has been a passionate art and environmental activist since the early 1970s. He has been an advocate for climate change awareness, clean energy, and habitat protection for over forty years.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The enthralling true story of the rise and reign of O-Six, the celebrated Yellowstone wolf, and the people who loved or feared her.
 
Before men ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West.

With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth. Uncommonly powerful, with gray fur and faint black ovals around each eye, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother. She is beloved by wolf watchers, particularly renowned naturalist Rick McIntyre, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world.

But as she raises her pups and protects her pack, O-Six is challenged on all fronts: by hunters, who compete with wolves for the elk they both prize; by cattle ranchers who are losing livestock and have the ear of politicians; and by other Yellowstone wolves who are vying for control of the park’s stunningly beautiful Lamar Valley.

These forces collide in American Wolf, a riveting multigenerational saga of hardship and triumph that tells a larger story about the ongoing cultural clash in the West—between those fighting for a vanishing way of life and those committed to restoring one of the country’s most iconic landscapes.

Yellowstone holds a special place in America’s heart. As the world’s first national park, it is globally recognized as the crown jewel of modern environmental preservation. But the park and its surrounding regions have recently become a lightning rod for environmental conflict, plagued by intense and intractable political struggles among the federal government, National Park Service, environmentalists, industry, local residents, and elected officials. The Battle for Yellowstone asks why it is that, with the flood of expert scientific, economic, and legal efforts to resolve disagreements over Yellowstone, there is no improvement? Why do even seemingly minor issues erupt into impassioned disputes? What can Yellowstone teach us about the worsening environmental conflicts worldwide?

Justin Farrell argues that the battle for Yellowstone has deep moral, cultural, and spiritual roots that until now have been obscured by the supposedly rational and technical nature of the conflict. Tracing in unprecedented detail the moral causes and consequences of large-scale social change in the American West, he describes how a “new-west” social order has emerged that has devalued traditional American beliefs about manifest destiny and rugged individualism, and how morality and spirituality have influenced the most polarizing and techno-centric conflicts in Yellowstone’s history.

This groundbreaking book shows how the unprecedented conflict over Yellowstone is not all about science, law, or economic interests, but more surprisingly, is about cultural upheaval and the construction of new moral and spiritual boundaries in the American West.

Greater Yellowstone was the last great truly intact ecosystem in the temperate zones of the earth – until, in the 1920s, U.S. government agents exterminated its top predator, the gray wolf. With traps and rifles, even torching pups in their dens, the killing campaign was entirely successful. The howl of the “evil” wolf was heard no more. The “good” animals – elk, deer, bison – proliferated, until they too had to be “managed”.

Two decades later, recognizing that ecosystems lacking their keystone predators tend to unravel, the visionary naturalist Aldo Leopold called for the return of the wolf to Yellowstone. It would take another fifty years for his vision to come true.

In the early 1990s, as the movement for Yellowstone wolf restoration gained momentum, rage against it grew apace. When at last, in February 1995, fifteen wolves were trapped in Alberta and brought to acclimation pens in Yellowstone, even then legal and political challenges continued. There was also a lot of talk in the bars about “shoot, shovel, and shut up”.

While the wolves’ enemies worked to return them to Canada, the biologists in charge of the project feared that the wolves might well return on their own. Once they were released, two packs remained in the national park, but one bore only one pup and the other none. The other, comprising Wolves Nine and Ten and Nine’s yearling daughter, disappeared.

They were in fact heading home. As they emerged from protected federal land, an unemployed ne’er-do-well from Red Lodge, Montana, trained a high-powered rifle on Wolf Number Ten and shot him through the chest.

Number Nine dug a den next to the body of her mate, and gave birth to eight pups. The story of their rescue and the manhunt for the killer is the heart of The Killing of Wolf Number Ten.

Read The Killing of Wolf Number Ten, and if you are ever fortunate enough to hear the howling of Yellowstone wolves, you will always think of Wolves Nine and Ten. If you ever see a Yellowstone wolf, chance are it will be carrying their DNA.

The restoration of the wolf to Yellowstone is now recognized as one of conservation’s greatest achievements, and Wolves Nine and Ten will always be known as its emblematic heroes.

Yellowstone National Park is a visionary gift that was bestowed upon the world on March 1, 1872. On that day, Pres. Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill that created the world’s first national park. Filled with natural wonders and inspiring scenery, it is home to some of America’s rarest and wildest species. Its natural appeal is enhanced by the thrilling display of wildlife living within the park boundaries. More than three million visitors a year pass through the park’s portals and enter “Wonderland.”

The relationship between wolves and humans is long and storied, and one contentious chapter in this lengthy history has been playing out over the past two decades in and near the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States–especially in the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The present controversy has focused on a proposal by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to transplant populations of wolves from Canada into parts of Idaho and Wyoming–wolves already had spread from Canada into northwestern Montana–and the consequences of those transplants. The animals to be reintroduced into the area were from Canada; they were larger than the wolves native to the northern Rockies of the United States, and they possibly had a different social structure and filled a different niche.

The action proposed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service would reintroduce a species of large predator into a region from which it presumably had been exterminated during more than a century of human persecution. Such a proposal awakened historic, scientific, social, economic, legal, political, and bureaucratic perspectives which often differed and inevitably converged and competed for influence and, eventually, expression. The purported benefits of this experimental reintroduction included:

(a) expanding the numbers and range of an officially recognized threatened species;
(b) restoring the regional ecosystems to something nearer their natural states;
(c) providing predators that could reduce the unnaturally large herds of elk and bison that occurred in some parts of the region; and
(d) stimulating ecotourism in the region.

Opposition to the transplant rested on the premises that:

(a) populations of native wolves were already present in at least some parts of the region;
(b) these native populations likely represented a different subspecies than the Canadian wolves that would be transplanted;
(c) the US Endangered Species Act forbids the introduction of an exotic subspecies into the range of threatened populations of the same species; and
(d) predation on sheep and cattle were likely outcomes of this action.

The opposing sides expressed their views widely and diversely, litigation took place, and eventually the US Fish and Wildlife Service was given clearance to proceed with the reintroduction program. The transfer of Canadian wolves actually took place in 1995; the transplants were successful and, since that time, the wolf populations of the region increased rapidly and steadily expanded their ranges.

Yellowstone Wolves provides a unique perspective on this controversy, including many of its historic, scientific, social, economic, legal, political, bureaucratic, and emotional dimensions. It is the most comprehensive account ever assembled of the history of the wolves native to the Yellowstone region; it is a detailed chronicle of the debate over the legality and propriety of introducing wolves from Canada into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho during the mid-1990s; and it is an account of the spread of the Canadian wolves, following their release, and the tensions created by the movement of these large predators into what are primarily lands where sheep and cattle are raised.

Author Cat Urbigkit–an advocate for the conservation of what were presumed to be remaining populations of wolves native to the Yellowstone area, a newspaper reporter who covered the debate over wolf “reintroduction” to Yellowstone during and after the mid-1990s, and one of the litigants who sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent the reintroduction of wolves–is uniquely qualified to provide this intensely personal perspective on, and detailed record about, the debate over wolf reintroduction to the northern Rockies.

Consequently, Yellowstone Wolves provides an unequalled background that frames well the recently implemented circumstances of wolf management in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming–where the status and future of wolves are still being manipulated by opposing interests. Will they be protected by legal action, or variously and simultaneously managed as protected resources, game, and unwanted predators? An epilogue discusses these issues as well.

The Foreword by internationally recognized mammalogist and canid expert Ronald M. Nowak provides authoritative context for understanding (a) the broader (global) significance of endangered species management and (b) the record, and trends, of the United States in managing the biological diversity and heritage of the country and adhering to the mandates of the Endangered Species Act, as well as (c) appreciating the unique perspective that author Cat Urbigkit provides in Yellowstone Wolves.

Yellowstone Wolves demonstrates well the diverse, complex, and passionate views that can be represented in what might appear to be even relatively simple perspectives on, or decisions influencing, environmental management.

Wagner, one of our most distinguished wildlife biologists, is a strong critic of ecological practices in the national parks. This book provides an assessment of the ecological history of Yellowstone’s northern range, since before the park existed, showing the impact of US Park Service policies on the health of the areas they oversee. He demonstrates that elk had been historically rare throughout the region and that overgrazing by elk has seriously degraded the landscape and altered the structure of the area. This is a major contribution to reconstructing the ecology of this region over the course of the past 500 years. It is also a critique of US Park Service management policies and their stewardship of the nation’s most cherished natural areas. Wagner’s book will generate substantial attention and debate both in the scientific and policy/management communities.

“In Decade of the Wolf, project leader Douglas W. Smith and acclaimed nature writer Gary Ferguson describe the journey of thirty-one Canadian gray wolves that were released in 1995 and 1996 into Yellowstone National Park and the people who faithfully followed them. With recently updated poignant details about the lives of these animals, including moving stories about survival and family dynamics, Decade of the Wolf serves to mark the end of the opening act of this inspired, often tumultuous tale of preservation. The wolves have not only survived but completely changed the ecosystem, spilling a fresh measure of wildness across the world’s first national park.”

A dazzling photographic and scientific portrait of how wolves are changing the very nature of Yellowstone. Highly acclaimed for its accuracy and photography of wild wolves.

“The book is breathtaking! For anyone who has traveled to Yellowstone in recent years and seen the wolves, this book is must reading.”
—National Wildlife Federation

“Outstanding and very accurate. (Halfpenny) puts all the scientific research into common language. He fills in with personal observations. The stories really personalize what happened.”
—Ed Bangs, Wolf Recovery Coordinator, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renée Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. In this intimate account, Askinsrecounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone’s ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountain is the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.

Millions of years ago, the North American continent was dragged over the world’s largest continental hotspot, a huge column of hot and molten rock rising from the Earth’s interior that traced a 50-mile wide, 500-mile-long path northeastward across Idaho. Generating cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and large earthquakes, the hotspot helped lift the Yellowstone Plateau to more than 7,000 feet and pushed the northern Rockies to new heights Smith and Siegel bring to life the grandeur of these geologic phenomena as they reveal the forces that have shaped–and continue to shape–the greater Yellowstone-Teton region.

Re-introducing wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem was perhaps the most controversial issue in American conservation history. The wolves’ release in January 1995 was the culmination of more than two decades of intense effort on the part of environmentalists and wildlife scientists. McNamee (The Grizzly Bear), a former president of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, was active in the project from the start. Here, in dated entries (February 1994-Autumn 1996), he tells, sometimes in diary form, the gripping story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone. The narrative covers politics, infighting among environmental groups and the excitement and uncertainty within the scientific community. McNamee relates the fates of wolf Number Ten, wantonly shot from the highway, and his pregnant mate, Number Nine, who gave birth to eight pups. As of spring 1996, 40 free wild wolves roamed the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, with five packs fully established, two others nearly so and two new pairings. McNamee’s fine account of the re-introduction of an essential part of the wild into the wild should appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.

“There is not a predictable moment in this poignant and beautifully told story of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park.” Jean Craighead George, author of the Newbery Award-winning Julie of the Wolves.