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                                                                                NATURE, Page 66

Search for the Wolf


Ranchers and animal lovers have fought for years over plans
to bring the predator back to Yellowstone. Now the beast may
be taking the matter into its own paws.

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.