The history of wolves in Yellowstone includes the extirpation, absence and reintroduction of wild populations of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. When the park was created in 1872, wolf populations were already in decline in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The creation of the national park did not provide protection for wolves or other predators, and government predator control programs in the first decades of the 1900s essentially helped eliminate the gray wolf from Yellowstone. The last wolves were killed in Yellowstone in 1926. After that, sporadic reports of wolves still occurred, but scientists confirmed in the mid-1900s that sustainable gray wolf populations had been extirpated and were absent from Yellowstone as well as 48 states. Beginning in the 1950s, park managers, biologists, conservationists, and environmentalists began what would ultimately turn into a campaign to reintroduce the gray wolf into Yellowstone National Park. When the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed, the road to legal reintroduction was made clear. In 1995, gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in the Lamar Valley. The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone has long been contentious, as have wolf reintroductions worldwide.
Extirpation (1872–1926)
In 1872, when Yellowstone National Park was created, there was not yet any legal protection for wildlife in the park. In the early years of the park, administrators, hunters, and tourists were essentially free to kill any game or predator they came across. The gray wolf was especially vulnerable to this wanton killing because it was generally considered an undesirable predator and was already being deliberately exterminated throughout its North American range, usually in the interest of protecting livestock. In January 1883, United States Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller issued regulations prohibiting the hunting of most park animals, but the regulations did not apply to wolves, coyotes, bears, mountain lions, and other small predators. Shortly after the U.S. Army took over administration of the park on August 1, 1890, Captain Moose Harris, the first military superintendent, allowed public hunting of any wildlife and left all predator control to the park's administration. Official records show, however, that the U.S. Army did not begin to implement a policy of killing wolves until 1914. In 1885, Congress created the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy with the express purpose of conducting scientific research for the protection of wildlife. The agency soon became the U.S. Biological Survey, which was in turn the forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1907, under political pressure from western cattle and livestock industries, this agency began a concerted predator control program which was eventually called Animal Damage Control. This program resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,800 wolves and 23,000 coyotes in 39 U.S. National Forests in 1907 alone. In 1916, when the National Park Service was created, its enabling legislation included words that authorized the Secretary of the Interior to "provide in his discretion for the destruction of such animals and of such plant life as may be detrimental to the use of said parks, monuments and reservations". It is generally accepted that sustainable gray wolf packs had been extirpated from Yellowstone National Park by 1926, although the National Park Service maintained its policies of predator control in the park until 1933. However, a 1975–1977 National Park Service-sponsored study revealed that during the period from 1927 to 1977, there were several hundred probable sightings of wolves in the park. Between 1977 and the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, there were additional reliable sightings of wolves in the park, most believed to be singles or pairs transiting the region rather than permanently inhabiting the park.
Official records of wolves killed Prior to the National Park Service assuming control of the park in 1916, the U.S. Army killed 14 wolves during their tenure (1886–1916), most in the years 1914–15. In 1940, Adolph Murie, a noted wildlife biologist published his Fauna Series No. 4— Fauna of the National Parks of the United States-Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone National Park. In this report, Murie tallied the number of wolves killed as reported annually by park administrators between 1915 and 1935:
Updated research in the 1980s verified that the last official killing of wolves in the park took place in 1926 when two pups found near Soda Butte Creek were killed by park rangers. The last reported wolf killed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (prior to today's legal hunting or control measures) occurred in May 1943 when Leo Cottenoir, a Native American sheepherder on the Wind River Reservation shot a wolf near the southern border of the park.
Absence (1926–1995)
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