Howling in Yellowstone

When I began researching our trip to Yellowstone, I realized that one big difference between this trip and some of the other wildlife-watching adventures Trish and I have shared was how close we could get to the animals. In British Columbia, we had experienced orcas swimming past our inflatable dinghy so close it seemed we could lean out and touch their six-foot-high dorsal fins, and had them dive right under our boat. On that same trip we had (accidentally) gotten within fifty feet of a grizzly sow teaching her second-year cubs to fish for salmon. In Laguna San Ignacio in Baja, Mexico, our 14-foot wooden boat had been bumped by numerous gray whale mothers and calves, and we had leaned over the gunwales to pet several of them.

But wolves are different, their curiosity tempered by wariness. They do not seek out human company, and if they discern with their superhero-like senses that humans are in an area, they simply avoid it. They undoubtedly come close from time to time, but they are so stealthy and so incredibly well-camouflaged that we mere humans with our blunted senses don’t have a hope of realizing they are near.

My research told me that the closest we were likely to get to our quarry on our Yellowstone wolf-watching expedition was a half-mile, and that a distance of a mile or two was a far more reasonable expectation. So we braced ourselves for the seemingly inevitable disappointment of seeing wolves a mile or more away, assuming that such a distant encounter could not have the magical quality we had experienced at close quarters.

We were wrong.

As Peg explained to us on our first day, the easiest way to spot wolves was to spot people who were already watching wolves. And even in the dead of winter, when the light lasts for less than ten hours, the temperature averages less that 30 degrees F, and more than a foot of snow accumulates each month, there are people watching wolves. Many of them are research biologists, some involved with wolf studies that have been ongoing since the first wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone at the beginning of 1995. Other wolf watchers are film makers working on nature documentaries, local citizens who can’t get enough of the magnificent carnivores in their midst, park staffers who spend all their free time following the wolves the way Brits follow royalty, and tourists like us from all over the world.

Our first glimpse of wolves was indeed from over a mile away, parked in a turnout that overlooked the Lamar River valley. Across the river and beyond the open valley lay a thin forest of winter-nude trees, and with a lot of coaching from Ellie and Peg, I finally discerned movement at the foot of the trees: a small pack of wolves skirting the woods, on the move in single file, dressed in shaggy coats of white, gray, brown, and black that made them look like moving boulders, patrolling their territory.

Yellowstone National Park covers more than 3400 square miles and, according to http://www.yellowstone-natl-park.com/facts.htm, is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. In 1995, 14 wolves were brought in from Canada at the start of the reintroduction process. In 1996, another 17 Canadian wolves were brought in, and then ten orphaned wolf pups from a naturally recolonizing pack in Montana were added to the mix. These wolves were kept in large pens in various parts of the park for about 70 days for acclimatization. When the pens were opened, the wolves took off into the wilderness and each pack staked out its own territory.

The Lamar Valley, through which runs the plowed State Road 212 that we drove back and forth along every day we were in the park, is divided into the territories of several packs, including the Slough Pack, the Druid Pack, the Leopold Pack, and the Rose Creek II Pack. (You can see the known pack territories as of 2003 at http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/yellwolfmap-latest.htm) These territories butt right up against each other and any wolf crossing the boundary into another pack’s territory is likely to be driven out and perhaps mortally wounded in the process. A large and stable elk population seems to attract and keep so many wolves in the Lamar Valley; during the winter in particular, the snowfall in that area is lighter than in some parts of the park, and the elk flock to the Lamar Valley as a result.

The Mollie’s Pack, on the other hand, has a slightly larger range in the central part of the park that overlaps the park’s eastern boundary. This area is isolated from other packs, but it’s also subject to heavier snowfall, meaning that the elk tend to leave during the winter. And so the Mollie’s Pack is one of the few that has adapted to hunting bison, which remain in the deep snow areas.

The packs change in size, composition, and territory over time; some packs die out altogether, and a new one forms when a few youngsters splinter off from the pack of their birth and head out on their own. Lone wolves, both male and female, will occasionally move between packs in the search for a mate.

We caught sight of one such lone wolf out in the Lamar River valley. Rangy and wary, with a shaggy gray coat and eyes that made a shiver run down my spine even when viewed through the safety of a spotting scope, he was working his way west down the valley. He paused now and then and threw back his head; in the snow-shrouded stillness, his howl reached us a couple of heartbeats later. Each howl was answered by a howl from another wolf on the hill behind us, which stayed on the far side of the ridge, making it impossible for us to see.

We got into the van and moved west with the gray wolf to continue observing it. At one spot where we got out of the van and turned all of our cameras and binoculars and telescopes on the loner, he stood and stared straight at us, not breaking eye contact for at least five minutes. Peg said she thought the wolf was probably looking for an unpeopled spot where he could get across the road – they avoid vehicles and hate to approach the road closely during daylight hours, making most of their kills at night.

When the loner abruptly turned back east, Peg suggested we stay put to give him an opportunity to make it across the road unmolested, and we all agreed. We went to use one of the “comfort stations” at a parking area a little further west, which gave the wolf plenty of time to escape from human attention – it’s amazing how long it takes a line of about a dozen heavily-clothed people to use a one-hole outhouse!

We finally moved the van east and joined a group watching five wolves from the Slough Pack – one gray like the lone wolf we had been watching, and four black – stationed up on the hillside where the answering howls had seemed to originate.

As we speculated about whether this group of five had been the ones answering the loner’s howls, the loner came into sight again, this time on the north side of the road which he had obviously succeeded in crossing, heading cautiously, almost hesitantly up the hill towards the Slough Pack wolves we were watching. Ellie and Peg thought that we might see a confrontation during which the loner would be run off, or possibly even run down, by the Slough wolves. As the loner got within a hundred yards or so, the gray Slough wolf walked down the hill to meet him. Their fluffy flag-like tails were held straight out, and after they went through a sniffing ritual, the gray Slough wagged its tail and turned and romped back to its black-coated friends, with the gray loner close behind.

The black Sloughs did not race down the hill to greet the newcomer, but they did close in around him when he arrived with their pack-mate, sniffing and bowing and wagging tails. After a minute or two of this, they bunched close together and threw back their heads and gave a magnificent group howl. Another shiver ran down my back, and as we wolf-watchers cheered sotto-voce (sound carried so well in the snow-covered hills and valleys that Peg and Ellie were constantly reminding us to whisper so as not to spook the wildlife!) and gave each other mittened high-fives, we were astounded to hear an answering howl from across the river valley.

Louder than the wolves’ howls, this howling was the product of what sounded like at least a dozen separate voices. It went on and on, and open-mouthed, we turned to scan across the road and valley, but couldn’t see the source of the howling. As the howl trailed off it ended with a spree of yips and yaps, like a spectacular Fourth-of-July firework that explodes in a beautiful colorful fountain and then finishes with a succession of small, loud pops. “Coyotes,” Ellie and Peg stage-whispered in unison, and then the wolves on the hill above us sent up their voices in another howl. The coyotes answered, and for another ten minutes or so we stood there mesmerized by the howling volleying back and forth across the valley, wolves challenging, coyotes – growing ever distant – responding.

When the howling was over, Peg and Ellie rounded us up and loaded us back into the vans to warm up, explaining how they’ve had week-long tours where they didn’t hear a single wolf howling. We had been incredibly fortunate to witness such a howl-a-thon.