Page 49 - EarthHeroes

Through his spotting scope, Doug watched the wolf pups at play. One was pouncing on a feather on the ground. A second joined in and soon the two were rolling in the grass. Nearby, an adult wolf, lean and grey with a white muzzle, was trotting around with a long stick in its mouth, followed by four more pups. It was one of last year’s pups that had stayed behind to ‘babysit’ while the rest of the pack was hunting. Then a large, handsome black wolf suddenly came into view. With its broad shoulders, grey-flecked fur and golden eyes, Doug recognised it immediately as Wolf 21 – the alpha male of the Druid Peak pack and one of the strongest yet gentlest wolves he’d ever known. At once, the pups stopped their games and crowded around their father, prodding his muzzle with their noses to ask for food.
It was summer 2003 and Doug Smith, Yellowstone Park Wolf Project leader, was watching some of the wolves that make the park world famous. But it hadn’t always been this way. Until 200 years ago, wolves roamed freely in North America, but when European settlers arrived in the 1800s, ranchers and hunters killed wolves to stop them eating livestock and wildlife such as elk, which they wanted to hunt themselves. The park was created in 1872 to preserve the area’s natural beauty; it is renowned for its volcanic springs, geysers and coloured pools. But by 1926 wolves had been wiped out from Yellowstone. The poisoning and trapping of wolves continued elsewhere until the early 1970s and wolves only survived in remote areas of North America: Minnesota, Western Canada and Alaska.
Without wolves to hunt them, Yellowstone’s elk population rose rapidly. The
elk overgrazed the grass and their browsing – or nibbling of young leaf buds
– killed young trees. Park rangers now had to kill elk to control their numbers, and people began to ask if losing the wolves had been a good idea. In the 1960s and 70s, public attitudes to the environment and wildlife changed and in 1973 a new law was passed – the Endangered Species Act – to try to correct
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