As we celebrate Wolf Awareness Week — a commemorative week established by Defenders of Wildlife in 1996 — I find myself reflecting on a Defenders’ trip to Yellowstone National Park this summer that allowed me to take a deep dive into our organization’s history with the park’s wolves. I had previously been to the park a handful of times as a tourist but had never experienced an intensive wildlife-focused tour led by experts and, before now, never visited the park as the president and CEO of a leading wildlife conservation organization.
Defenders played numerous important roles when the wolves were reintroduced to the park 30 years ago, including using our legal expertise to make the reintroduction a reality and helping to carry the crates holding the first pack of wolves into their new home. From there, our involvement grew to educating the public about sharing the landscape with wolves and running a compensation program for ranchers who lost livestock to wolves, an effort later taken on by government partners. All this work has paid off as measured by the fact that Yellowstone wolves are thriving and they are hitting the numbers science predicted: with roughly 100 wolves now spread across 10 packs.
Yellowstone demonstrates that when there are adequate protections in place, wolves can recover and occupy a critical ecological niche. When those protections do not exist, however, wolves are at great risk. For instance, wolves living just outside of the park’s boundaries have no protections under the Endangered Species Act, making them vulnerable to trapping, baiting and hunting.
Yellowstone gives us hope for what can be achieved to restore wolf populations, but there is still much work to do in other parts of the country. Defenders is actively working alongside landowners, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other partners in California, Colorado, New Mexico, the Northern Rockies, South Carolina and the Pacific Northwest to provide the tools and resources needed for people to coexist with wolves. Like the wolf, another shining example of an animal that plays an outsized role in maintaining ecological health is the American bison. As these magnificent animals roam in herds around Yellowstone, they help shape the very ground they walk on by disturbing the soil with their hooves and dispersing native seeds. While bison thrive within Yellowstone’s protective borders, there is still much work to do to restore them to landscapes outside of the park’s boundaries. To help in this effort, the Yellowstone Bison Conservation Transfer Program each year moves a portion of Yellowstone’s bison population to Tribal lands across much of the country to help Native American communities restore buffalo on their lands. The program is a top priority of Defenders, and to date it has successfully transferred over 400 bison to Tribes across the western U.S., Alaska and even Canada.
I hope you will be inspired to learn more about our work to restore bison to Tribal lands and that you take a moment to celebrate Wolf Awareness Week. Most importantly, I hope you will help spread Defenders’ message that by working together we can successfully coexist with wolves and other wildlife and, in doing so, protect our shared natural heritage for generations to come.
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