How Have Gray Wolves Fared 30 Years After Reintroduction?

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday, I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, we’ll revisit a novel approach to fighting pancreatic cancer. But first, it’s time to check in on the state of science.

– This is WWNO, ST Louis Public Radio, Iowa Public Radio news.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Local science stories of national significance. Gray wolves are native to the Rocky Mountains, but decades of hunting nearly eradicated them from the Western US by the 1940s. In 1995, 30 years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and have done remarkably well. They were removed from the Endangered Species list in 2020.

It’s a conservation success story, but it’s not been a straight path out of the woods, which my next guest reported on. Heath Druzin is the host of the podcast Howl from Boise State Public Radio and the Idaho Capital Sun. Heath, welcome to Science Friday.

HEATH DRUZIN: Great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Heath, why did you take this story on?

HEATH DRUZIN: A big part of why I took this story on is that I’ve had a long standing fascination with wildlife. I spent a lot of time in the outdoors in places where wolves live. I live in Idaho and I’m a bit of a National Park junkie, so I travel around to the west a lot.

And both recreating out there and being a reporter in that area, I heard a lot of really strong feelings about wolves, like over the top feelings. That just even animals like grizzly bears just don’t really inspire the same feelings.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like what? Give me an example.

HEATH DRUZIN: There are people who love wolves so much that they even say they want to be a wolf. And people who just assign these sort of mythical qualities, and they’re wild animals. And then on the other side, you’ve got people who have tortured them.

Wolves have been found with horrific injuries from torture. Not just poaching, but really wanting to inflict pain. And so I really want to know why. I wanted to why. I still want to know. I think I learned a little bit about that, but I just want to why these animals in particular inspire such over-the-top feelings in people. Why wolves?

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, let’s go back in time. How did we get into this situation where wolves were basically wiped out in the lower 48 states?

HEATH DRUZIN: I guess that gets to a little bit of what I was talking about with over the top feelings. There’s a lot of wolf mythology out there. In Europe where a lot of early American settlers came from. You got the fairy tails that everybody knows about, and you’ve got a lot of negative feelings. Because wolves were seen as dangerous, and obviously wolves do eat livestock from time to time.

So when settlers came to America, and especially when they came west, they had animals. They had cattle and sheep especially. And wolves don’t always mix with livestock very well. So basically what happened was as Americans moved west, they systematically exterminated wolves to protect cattle and sheep. And they basically wiped wolves out in the west by, it depends who you talk to. But about the 1940s, there were virtually no wolves left in the west.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so what happened 30 years ago when wolves were reintroduced? How did that happen?

HEATH DRUZIN: You have to back up 20 years before that when the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by Richard Nixon, actually. One of the first animals that was protected under the Endangered Species Act was wolves. And so that started this 20 year program to figure out how to get them back.

And a lot of Western states were not very excited about it. It’s cattle country. It’s sheep country. But the federal government essentially overruled rancher objections and said, we’re going to release them in Yellowstone and central Idaho and hopefully restore some balance to the ecosystem with an apex predator.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is this right? I read that this proposal had more than 160,000 public comments?

HEATH DRUZIN: We talked to people who were there. They talked about screaming matches with federal officials at these town halls and small towns in Idaho and Montana and Wyoming. And, I mean, there were death threats. So, yeah, it was extremely controversial. People had very strong feelings, both pro and anti wolf. And there wasn’t a lot of common ground back then.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So what happened since? How have their populations fared?

HEATH DRUZIN: It is one of the great comeback stories in nature. Depending on what numbers you look at, there’s roughly 3,000 wolves. That’s a huge comeback, and it really exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

HEATH DRUZIN: Oh yeah. The federal government was talking about, hopefully having a population of a few hundred and now we’re at a few thousand. So people who like wolves are excited. People who don’t like wolves feel like they were sold a bill of goods.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, let’s talk about that. How people are feeling now. You spoke with Rusty Kramer, who runs a farm and also leads the Idaho Trappers Association.

RUSTY KRAMER They are a large apex predator, and they need a lot of room and a lot of ungulates, a lot of food to eat. And in my opinion, you just don’t have that in Idaho anymore. The people that think that they can coexist are just in la la land, in my opinion, because they can’t exist with this much ag on the landscape.

HEATH DRUZIN: Rusty Kramer, in addition to being a trapper, is an alfalfa farmer. And he says, wolves push elk down into his alfalfa fields for safety, basically, and they trample the fields and hurt his business. And that really does illustrate a pretty wide view of wolves in places like Idaho. People think they hurt ranchers and they hurt farmers.

Now, I do have to say he’s talking about elk and fish and game officials in anti-wolf states will tell you elk herds are really healthy and at their healthiest in a long time. So there’s definitely some debate over some of those points.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How has the comeback of wolves changed the ecosystem out west?

HEATH DRUZIN: That was one of the most fascinating parts of my reporting. Scientists think that wolves have really dramatically changed the landscape. Well beyond predator – prey relationships. There’s a term called the trophic cascade. So to put it simply, wolves eat elk and deer, and that makes elk and deer nervous. That means that they’re not staying in one place very long. And when they do stay in one place too long, they tend to overgraze, and then they chew young trees like aspens to the nub, and they never grow tall.

And so there was a recent study, actually, after we released the podcast, and it showed that aspen trees are doing better than they have in 80 years in Yellowstone. They attribute that a lot to the reintroduction of wolves and other predator populations coming up. That goes all the way down to river ecosystems, where aspens and willows do better, and they grow next to rivers, they provide shade that helps trout, it helps beavers build dams. There’s these crazy connections with animals that you would think really have nothing to do with wolves.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You also spoke with members of Indigenous communities. What did you hear?

HEATH DRUZIN: We spent some time on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho. The Nez Perce tribe played this largely unsung role in wolf recovery. Basically, Idaho in 1995 boycotted the reintroduction process. They didn’t like wolves, and they refused to participate with the federal government. So the Nez Perce tribe stepped up and basically said, well, we’ll be the state agency. We’ll help you out. And for more than a decade, they did a lot on the ground monitoring of wolves and studying of wolves, and seeing how they were doing as their population grew.

We talked to a lot of members of the tribe, including an elder who actually was born right as wolves were dying out. He told us a lot about the belief system that the Nez Perce have, and how wolves occupy a really important space that traditional hunters even study them to learn how to hunt. And that their loss was this really big hole, both in nature, around them and culturally.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What is the current protection status for wolves?

HEATH DRUZIN: It’s complicated. So wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act in most places in America. But they are not protected in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. And those are the strongholds for wolves in the West. Most western wolves live in those three states. So there those states are able to do what they want.

It’s kind of open season. You can hunt wolves through almost any means possible. Wolves have gone from the highest protections of the federal government to less protected than just about any animal out there in the three states that are most important to their survival. That does have a lot of people nervous.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you think they’re at risk for being wiped out in those states?

HEATH DRUZIN: Among the many surprises that we ran into in our reporting for this project. I think one of the biggest ones was that a lot of scientists are concerned that wolves might be in trouble again. Not that they’re on the brink of extinction, but that they’re going in the wrong direction.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to wrap up with another personal experience you had, and I’m just going to intro it with some sound that you recorded. [WOLVES HOWLING]

HEATH DRUZIN: It still gives me chills. I was hiking by myself in Yellowstone, and all of a sudden, about 200 feet in front of me, I saw something moving in the sagebrush. It was a large, black female wolf with three pups. She actually stopped and sat on her haunches and stared at me with her tongue out for 30 seconds. And then she wandered off, and they all started howling. I was right there. I was surrounded by howls, and I was by myself in the wilderness. It was the most thrilling wildlife experience I’ve ever had.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I think that’s the perfect place to leave it. Thank you Heath.

HEATH DRUZIN: Thank you so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Heath Druzin is host of the podcast Howl from Boise State Public Radio and the Idaho Capital Sun. This series was co-reported with Clark Corbin.
Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/