“It’s unprecedented,” Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told me.
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Idaho, aiming to eliminate 90 percent of its wolf population, passed a series of similar measures. Snares, indiscriminate tools that routinely kill other wild animals and pets, were now permitted. Aerial hunting was authorized, as was hunting after dark with night vision and bright lights to disorient wolves. The state legalized the use of bait to lure wolves off protected lands.
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To hit that mark, Montana extended its hunting season and gave individual hunters and trappers license to kill 20 wolves each, enough to eliminate entire packs. The goal was to reduce the state’s wolf population to a “sustainable” level by killing at least 450 animals. Gianforte’s measures sought to turbocharge those efforts. The elimination of the Yellowstone wolf-hunting quotas was one measure among many that Greg Gianforte, Montana’s first Republican governor in more than a decade and a half, instituted in 2021.įollowing an on-again-off-again process that began in 2009, wolves have been absent from the Endangered Species Act list and fair game for hunters and trappers in Montana for the better part of a decade. The man who pulled the trigger, ending the deadliest year for Yellowstone’s wolves in living memory, was one of the park’s own backcountry law enforcement rangers. But as the investigation soon uncovered, the outfitter was the mere recipient of 1233’s collar. Like others in the area, the guide linked wolf hunting to a broader political project aimed at resurrecting the glory days of the American West. Still emitting signals after his death, 1233’s collar pointed to the property of a local hunting guide. Given the timing and proximity to Yellowstone’s border, the Park Service opened an investigation into the incident. “And I’m worried about next winter, because the thing is, compromise and reasonability seems to be gone.”ġ233 was the last of the park’s wolves to die during the winter hunt, and his killing stood out from the others. “The level of mortality is historic and catastrophic,” he said. It was a death toll unlike anything Smith and his colleagues had seen since wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies in the 1990s. Roughly a fifth of Yellowstone’s wolf population was gone, with one pack seemingly eliminated entirely. The National Park Service counted 25 Yellowstone wolves among the dead, with 19 killed in Montana, all in the hunting districts where the quotas had been lifted, as well as four in Wyoming and two in Idaho. When Montana’s hunting season ended in March, the state’s game agency reported 273 wolves killed. Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly assured a worried public that the park was working with Montana officials to reinstate the quotas. “Their first movements and they’re dead,” Smith told me. What’s more, the pups had never left the pack before. Being late summer, the wolves’ fur was still light and ratty - without the luxuriant winter coat, it had no economic value. Smith has been with the Yellowstone Wolf Project since the beginning, serving as senior biologist and head of the program for 24 of its 27 years. Living embodiments of one of the most celebrated conservation comeback stories of all time, their very existence helped make 2021 Yellowstone’s busiest year on record.ĭoug Smith was in his office in Mammoth, Wyoming, home base for Yellowstone staff, when the news came. They were members of the Junction Butte pack, the most famous wolves on Earth. The first killings were reported less than a week after the season opened: two 8-month-old pups and a yearling. Hunters gathered along the park’s border in anticipation. Last year, those restrictions were lifted. The wolf’s body was gone.įor years, Montana had imposed strict quotas limiting the number of wolves hunters could kill in the two districts north of Yellowstone. When park officials visited the scene, they found a pool of blood, crimson on the fallen snow, just outside the Yellowstone boundary line. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, the wolf known as 1233 crossed the invisible line separating Yellowstone’s protected lands from the national forest territory of Southwest Montana. It had been a long and bloody winter for wolves living on the park’s northern border, and it wasn’t over yet.