Michael Leach

Video Transcript
The is a transcript of a Wolf Talk given by Park Ranger Michael Leach for a group of people in front of the Albright Visitor Center in August of 2004.

Michael Leach: My name is Michael Leach and today we are going to be talking about one of the most controversial success stories in the history of the Northern Rockies, the return of this animal, canis lupus, the gray wolf.

A lot of exciting things have happened here since the reintroduction of the wolf. This is an animal that we call a keystone species, meaning it greatly affects its entire landscape just by its mere presence. We’ve seen what scientists call a trophic cascade, or what we like to call a trickling effect, since the return of the wolf. Now, the preliminary studies, the early indications from those studies, show that the wolf greatly benefits the diversity of the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. These studies are early; they’ve only been back for about nine years, but they do show what we like to call that trickling effect.

Let’s talk about that a little bit right now because this is pretty exciting stuff. Now the wolf preys heavily on elk, and that shouldn’t be a surprise to people, because Yellowstone has North America’s largest elk herd. Elk make up 90 percent of the wolves’ diet. So that, again, shouldn’t be surprising to people, and I’m sure that the wolves are affecting the elk population because we’ve seen a decline in the elk population since the return of the wolves. But they are one of many factors which I’ll talk more about in a little bit. But one thing we do know is that the wolves are redistributing these elk.

Before the wolves returned to Yellowstone, the coyote was not a predator that a large elk had to worry about, and the grizzly bear is not a very effective predator. So they would hang out in these large congregations. They would sit and just overgraze and over browse an area. And they would, in particular, hang out along the streams where they would cause erosion by eating all of that woody vegetation. But now they have to use those eyes that are planted near the back of their head. And they have to be wary. They have to look around for those wolves. They can’t just hang out down in a little indention, or down in a river, because they may get ambushed. So we’re seeing them being redistributed.

And this is adding to the diversity of some woody vegetation here. So let’s talk about this more in depth. This animal, right here, the wolf, competes directly with this animal, the coyote. And since the reintroduction of the wolf, we've seen a decline of about 50 percent in the coyote population. In some areas, it’s been up to 80 percent. Who does this help? Well, this helps the red fox because the red fox competes with the coyote. The coyote eats a lot of ground squirrels, which is an important food source for the red fox. So we’re starting to see the red fox population rebound. And we think we may start to see that get larger as the coyote population stabilizes.

What about pronghorn? Pronghorn are one of the fastest animals we have on Earth. (It's) an animal that a lot of people love to see here in the park, although we only have approximately 250 to 270 of them here in Yellowstone National Park. Their top predator is the coyote, and their fawns are preyed on heavily by coyotes. So we see that, we’re thinking that, the pronghorn population is going to benefit from the return of the wolf.

Who else does this help? Well remember that we’ve seen a redistribution of the elk; well, this has helped woody vegetation. So, we’re seeing a return of some aspen, some cottonwoods, and most importantly, because this is the largest return we’re seeing, are in willows. Woody vegetation. And who needs this woody vegetation? Beavers. We had no beavers here in the Northern Range before the reintroduction of the wolves. And I do want to point out that we did reintroduce beavers to the Gallatin National Forests. So that’s certainly part of the reason that they came back. But they couldn’t have came back if there wasn’t that woody vegetation that they need, and a lot of people are attributing that to the redistribution of the elk. And what do the beavers do? Well, they alter their environment. They’re one of the few animals that alter their environment. They create wetlands. They create swamps and marshes, riparian areas that are considered some of the most productive biotic regions on our planet.

And who does this help? This helps fish, it helps birds, and it helps moose, an animal that people always want to see here in the park, and an animal that was hurt from the ’88 forest fires. These beavers may be helping us because scientists are now starting to think that the wetlands that these beavers create may help us in the future with global warming, because those swamps, those marsh areas, act as a sponge, slowly releasing water over time, verses spring run off that can happen in one to two months or, in our case this year, seemed to happen in about two or three days because we had such a warming spell. So you see there are a lot of animals that are benefiting from the return of the wolf.

But there is more--scavengers. We saw those magpies here. Magpies, ravens, golden eagles, bald eagles. These animals can always be found on an animal, a carcass, that was killed by a wolf. The average number of ravens on a wolf-killed carcass is 29 and the greatest number of ravens ever discovered, ever seen, on a wolf-killed carcass occurred here in Yellowstone and that was 135 ravens. (laughter, gosh) So these ravens can be seen flying among the wolves as they're hunting, waiting for them to take down an elk or take down a bison. So when ever these wolves take down an animal, they’re creating food for other wildlife here in the park.

But I don’t want you folks to think these wolves have it easy, because they don’t. These wolves have a very tough time at it. Only one in every four hunts is successful. And at some points in the season, up to 80 percent of their hunts may be unsuccessful. And every time they take down an animal, or every time they’re in a chase, they’re getting kicked in the ribs, kicked in the head, kicked in the leg. We had a Druid wolf this year that you can tell must have be kicked either by a bison or an elk. It wasn’t a conflict between another wolf because it’s a clean break. So it got kicked, it’s on three legs right now. The Mollie pack, down by the Pelican Valley, is one of two packs here in the park that hunts bison in the winter time because, remember, these packs are territorial. So they have to stay in what is their little area, in what we would consider their county. Well, most of the elk migrate out of their area, so (the wolves) are forced to hunt bison. And because of the return of the wolf we’ve seen an ancient dance of North America’s top predator, and North America’s top prey, with the wolves and the bison here. We see that down in the Pelican Valley. And last year, when the Mollie pack took down a winter-weakened bison, it took them over an hour to do so. That bison broke the alpha female’s leg. It killed the alpha female’s sister, and it injured another animal. That can greatly affect the ability of that pack to hunt throughout the rest of the winter. So they don’t have it easy.

And these wolves are certainly one of the great balancers of nature. The average age female elk killed in the northern range by a wolf is 14 years old. Animals that often wouldn’t have made it through that season; wouldn’t have made it through that winter. The average age female elk killed by hunters in the northern range outside the park is six years old. And the six-year-old female elk is considered the prime reproduction age for that animal, an animal that is going to go on and breed for many more years to come. So that just shows what an effective job this wolf does here in Yellowstone and all throughout North America and the world, because they go after the weak, the young, the sick, and the old.

There’s another animal that’s benefiting from the return of the wolf. And this is the one that I find the most exciting, because this is an animal that’s dear to my heart, because I think this is one of the animals that speaks to the wild spirit of Yellowstone. This is an animal that’s threatened, and it’s an animal that we only have approximately a thousand of left in the lower 48 states--the grizzly bear. The grizzly bear is not a very effective hunter. Eighty to ninety percent of their diet is green vegetation. But if they can get their hands on some meat, they love it. They have the wolves to thank for some of their new meat source here, especially in years like this (we’re having a bust in our whitebark pine crop right now). Whitebark pine seeds are very important to the grizzly bears. During times of small food source years like we have this year with whitebark pine, the wolves could prove very beneficial to the grizzly. These grizzlies have been seen following wolves, and we will almost always find a grizzly on a carcass killed by wolves.

What these wolves do is take down an animal, and then they sit down and consume as much as they can eat. One wolf can consume up to 20 pounds in a sitting. They are made to eat. Then, at that point, they become what some of our biologists like to call "meat drunk." So they feel a lot like what we feel after Thanksgiving dinner. Although, remember we’re not made to eat the way we eat on Thanksgiving (laughter), these wolves are made to eat that way. But then they go away, they lay down, and then a grizzly may come in, a coyote may come in, these other animal get to feed. We’ve seen one grizzly fend off up to 22 wolves on a carcass that those wolves risked their life taking down.

So that’s an animal that is affected (and has) benefited from the return of the wolf.
There are many people who will tell you that the wolf is single handedly decimating the elk herds here at Yellowstone--that there will be no wolves or there will be no elk in the northern range of Yellowstone by 2004, 2005. There are also people who will tell you that all we need here in Yellowstone are wolves. That the wolves are the single most important thing we have here in the park and if we just have a huge population of wolves, Yellowstone will be healthy. I’m here to tell you to be wary of those people. Be wary of anybody who’s speaking in those extreme terms, in that black and white language. Especially if they’re speaking about a large carnivore that’s as steeped in mythology as the wolf. There lies a middle in there somewhere, there’s a gray (area), there’s a balance there somewhere.

I also believe that the return of the wolf has greatly benefited this entire ecosystem, and by returning the wolf, we’ve restored the balance and integrity to this entire landscape. I like to think of Yellowstone as a puzzle, one large puzzle. And each animal, each aspect of Yellowstone, even us, the visitor’s here in the park, we all are a piece to that puzzle. And certainly our large carnivores, like wolves, are a large piece of that puzzle. By returning the wolf to Yellowstone we’ve completed this puzzle here in the park.

I hope you folks may go on to hear the call of the wild, the cry of the wolf. Thank you.

(Applause from audience.)