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One of the wolves popular with visitors to Yellowstone National Park is the female alpha of the Wapiti Lake herd (photographed in June 2020). A small swelling in one eye may be caused by a scratch of this year’s puppies.
Julie Argyle / Wild Love Images
Wildlife environmentalist Jim Halfpenny was near the Stone Arch on the northern front of Yellowstone National Park on January 12, 1995, when horse trailers facilitated the transport of the first wild gray wolves that entered the park for about 60 years. From Canada, these wolves were the beginning of a historic attempt to complete and repair the park ecosystem by reintroducing a species that had disappeared decades earlier (SN: 17/03/19).
Remember that schoolchildren who had accumulated were disappointed to see the trailers, without even glimpsing the fur. However, Halfpenny and the other extremely happy adults “were up there screaming,” he says.
However, not everyone in the pro-wolf domain. Seven of the 41 genetic founders of the Population of Yellowstone Canis lupus were brought in that year and the next illegally slaughtered.
The deep cultural reminiscence entangls wolves and nature in all their terror and majesty. In the bubonic plague episodes in Europe, “there would be other people on the castle walls watching the wolves devour their parents because they were dead and throw them out,” Halfpenny says. However, the wolves also draw the center as cousins of humanity’s beloved dogs. In surveys of Yellowstone winter visitors, “the number 1 thing they need to see is the wolf,” he says. “In summer, it’s the bear, then the wolf.”
At the time of the reintroduction, Halfpenny trained on wolves and other wild animals for his own company, A Naturalist’s World, while still working at the Arctic and Alpine Research Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From the beginning, when he recorded the pairs of wolves brought, the cubs and the rise and fall of the herds, he sought visitors from Yellowstone and other passionate wolf enthusiasts so that he could also stick to the stories. Then he hit him: “People have ancestors.” The genealogy site Ancestry.com, he thought, could provide wolves as the first non-human section.
So that’s what he and 4 colleagues committed despite everything created in 4 intense months of knowledge conflict. A portrait of single genealogy with biographical sketches can take weeks. It is still being updated, and anyone can locate a wolf’s tale in wolfgenes.info and (scrolling down) can request an invitation to get a loose account to see the circle of wolves of relative trees on the website Ancestry.com. The media gallery at the Yellowstone Wolf Genealogy Site includes photographs of many wolves, as well as life stories and a circle of relative trees. Halfpenny and two co-authors also provide this knowledge, and those stories, in a 2020 e-book celebrating the 25th anniversary of the howl of the arrival of advances.
A Canadian-born woman known as 5Fg, for example, was the first wolf to come out of trailers in Yellowstone and be released into the wild in March. The following year, he lost his partner and four newborn cubs in an attack by a rival herd. The looters also damage her, but some other survivor helped feed her and she recovered to discover a new herd with him. The Canadian woman 9Fb also lost her first partner (illegally slaughtered) but was accepted, along with her 8 cubs, through another transplanted Canadian, a fairly young male. He played with the puppies, letting them sneak in and jump on their feet only at the last minute.
One of those puppies is one of Halfpenny’s favorite wolves, 21Mb, National Geographic’s 3-star specials. “The most important day for me,” says the half-penny, came when 21Mb was a young adult to manipulate a herd that had just lost its alpha male (another illegal shooting). A furious stalemate dragged on for hours.
Eventually, a woman tried it and “finally put a paw on his back,” Halfpenny says. After this turning point, it is about to be accepted and has become the alpha wolf. His biography describes him as a wolf that humans can admire: “As far as we know, he never lost a fight, and he never killed a defeated wolf from an enemy herd.”
For new visitors who need to take a look at the lives of the wolves themselves, Halfpenny has conflicting tips: pay no attention to the wolves. Keep an eye on people. Longtime observers of Yellowstone’s enthusiastic wolves gather just at the end of the night, when they believe they most likely are. If all long views are dragged in one direction, “it’s a smart signal”.
An edition of this article appears in the August 15, 2020 factor of Science News.
J. Halfpenny, L. Leckie and S. Baron. Mapping of Yellowstone Wolves; Anniversary. A naturalistic world, Gardiner, MT, 2020.
Susan Milius is a life sciences student, covering biology and the evolution of organisms, and has a specific hobby for plants, fungi and invertebrates. He studied english biology and literature.
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