Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
OK, well, great.
Thanks for having me today.
This is a really exciting topic for me to talk about.
Twenty years ago,
I was rollerblading - going to work, then rollerblading, hanging out,
playing volleyball at the beach.
And I stopped one day, and I read this book.
It's by a biologist called R. D. Lawrence, "In Praise of Wolves".
And by the time I got done with it, I was... I was set,
I was going to focus on wolves for the rest of my life,
in some capacity or another.
I wanted to do something bigger than myself
and get involved in an issue that, I think, is very important
for not just the North American continent, but the entire world,
or at least the Northern Hemisphere where wolves exist.
And at that time, in the mid-90s, the federal government thought so, too,
and so did a whole host of conservation groups.
And so they released, they embarked on
the largest recovery project of an endangered species,
the recovery of gray wolves into the Rocky Mountains states.
They released 66 wolves into central Idaho and into Yellowstone National Park,
and they set in motion
a change of the landscape that would happen forever.
I'm being told to get closer to the wolves.
So, currently, wolves were wiped out
and before that time,
wolves were wiped out from the lower 48 states,
there were only a couple hundred existing up in the upper Great Lakes region.
And then, by the time we got to wolf reintroduction in the mid-90s,
we had about 200 left in the lower 48 states, that was about it.
Now, today - let's just fast forward till today -
we've got about 3,500 in the Upper Great Lakes,
- I don't know if I have a -
we've got 3,500 in the Upper Great Lakes,
we've got about 1,500 or so in Yellowstone, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming,
and then we've got about 110 in Oregon and Washington,
85 or so in the Southwest.
For me, when I started, I focused about the wolf itself;
I was very excited.
The book I showed you was a focus on a wolf pack,
it was a captive wolf pack,
and the biologist spent a good part of a year studying that pack.
I wanted to do the same thing, I thought it was just the most exciting thing.
So, at that time, I got involved in a place called the California Wolf Center.
I don't know if you can tell by the fashion of the day,
that's mid-90s wolf fur.
I wanted to study wolves, that's what I wanted to do,
but as I got more into it, I realized
it was more about just the wolf itself, that there was a pack.
And that pack had a lot of meaning, and it interacted with the environment
and was critical for what was going to happen in the wild,
and that our goal as an organization wasn't to be just to focus
on bringing in and teaching people about wolves themselves,
but to talk about how wolves interact in the environment,
and how they make change out there.
And so, wolves are a lot like people; I mean, sometimes
you just have to get in the other wolf's face to figure life out.
Communications happen, wolves live
in a very family-oriented environment,
in fact, it's very similar:
they go through marriage, they go through divorce,
they raise kids, they have teenagers,
the teenagers get in fights, the parents yell at them,
they run away from home, they start their own family.
So it's really exciting to watch those changes happen,
I had so many opportunities to do so.
Also, as I started to study wolves in the wild,
I started to understand how wolves like to travel, too, just like we do.
Their ranges, their home ranges, though, are a little bit bigger:
50 to 1,000 square miles.
Some wolves will disperse and leave the pack, and travel up to 600 miles,
and that's how get wolves moving around.
And they can run up to 40 miles per hour,
and I'll show you some of that in a short bit.
What do wolves eat?
This is where we start getting into the important stuff,
wolves prey on large ungulates: moose, elk, deer, caribou, and bison.
They're not going to be successful all the time,
but what they do is they create what's called a landscape of fear.
By hunting, by testing their prey,
they're causing change in the environment, and that's critical.
Wolves may be successful 10, 20% of the time,
but it's those continual hunts that make a difference.
I don't know if you can read the caption, but it says:
"I know you miss the Wainwrights, Bobby, but they were weak, stupid people -
and that's why we have wolves and other large predators."
(Laughter)
Wolves cull out the weak, sick, diseased, old, and young,
and by doing that, they leave the healthy behind
to continue to breed and move on.
So, before wolves, when wolves were wiped out,
before we returned wolves to Yellowstone,
[in] the picture on the left,
the environment was pretty much a mess,
- and again, this is probably an early 90s photo -
the grasses were overgrown in certain places,
but the river banks were eroded.
Elk, by way of one example, could just graze wherever they wanted,
there was no predator that could chase down elk or bison,
so they could just eat forever.
After wolves, we see a dramatic change in the environment.
We see the river banks come back,
and that creates habitat for different species.
Wolves also, when they make a kill, they put food on the ground for other species.
It's been well-documented that ravens follow wolves
because wolves are going to put food on the ground.
Bears follow wolves.
Coyotes follow wolves.
And sometimes even wolves follow the ravens because the ravens will say:
"Hey, you know what, let's get out in front of this,
let's figure out where those ungulates are, where the food is,
we're going to hang out there."
And the wolves will follow the ravens as well.
So what we have happen is the before-picture on the left,
the elk are just hanging out,
it's really easy, it's kind of like a vacation.
We bring wolves back, everything starts to change.
The elk stay on the move,
the grasses grow back; it shades the river, brings back certain fish,
creates habitat for migrating songbirds.
Coyotes and foxes have to deal with wolves,
but they get some more food.
The bears come back around,
and the elk, as you can see, are off in the distance there,
so it's a much more lively environment.
So let's take a look at some of this in action.
This is a pack of wolves in Yellowstone Park in 2005.
One of the biologists on the Yellowstone Wolf Project,
Dan Staler, took these photos from above.
And the wolves were actually hanging out with this bison herd for quite some time,
and then they got up and started to move the bison around.
And what they want to do is they want to test them,
so they kind of want to move around, keep testing,
they want to find out what the weaker elements are in the herd.
If you look at the bison, you can see their tails are kind of curled up.
If you're in Yellowstone Park or somewhere where there's bison
and their tails do that, you just need to leave.
Those bison are fairly strong,
and in this instance, they drew a line in the snow,
although that line is going the wrong way.
But this is a very dramatic, punctuated photo
showing how the wolves are basically stopping the hunt:
100% of the time, when bison and moose turn and face wolves,
they prevail.
So if wolves are chasing you, you turn and face them, you'll prevail.
We can also look at comparison with elk as well,
and in this instance, we have some elk in the Southwest.
Let's see if we can get this video to work... OK, here we go.
So, we've got elk in Yellowstone Park.
And the wolves are starting to approach the elk,
and this is going to create, this keeps the elk on the move,
but what I want you to watch is the elks' posture.
It changes from just kind of mingling to two very distinct things:
besides the fact that they're running and that they're bunched together,
they do something called "stotting",
which is where all four legs go off the ground and they raise their heads up.
- let this wolf catch up here for a second -
The wolf is probably going somewhere between 35 to 40 miles an hour.
And the wolves will kind of stay at a certain range, at a certain speed,
and then they'll speed up really quickly
when they find what they think is the weaker element.
And certain elk will cut away, but they don't go after those.
Their heads are raised up, the heads are pointing towards they sky,
and they're going to do that stotting motion,
they're going to run with kind of a very confident move.
And that's going to signal to the wolves
- this has evolved over thousands of years -
that's going to signal: "Don't come after us, you're going to get hurt."
And wolves can get killed in this process, it's not easy,
you can see the size difference right there.
The pack could be... I think this pack might've been about 10 or 11 at the time.
Maybe 3 or 4 of the wolves will do the primary hunting,
some of the other more juvenile wolves will just kind of hang out
and run around, and wait for the kill to be made.
So, they may have zeroed in on that one.
We'll keep going.
But what happens when they make the kill, what we've seen
is we see all these other species come in, and feed off it, and benefit.
We've got some ravens here in the foreground,
and then we've got the wolves,
and we've got a bear, pretty much sitting on the carcass, saying,
"I'm taking this over."
And it's really been... the documentation of bears and wolves -
they were... the biologists were very concerned at first.
They thought that when wolves were reintroduced,
they would disrupt the ecosystem in a positive way,
but also that the bears have been so used to not having wolves around,
that it would be painful for them,
it'd be difficult for the bears to adjust because they're very sensitive.
The bears have done great, and in fact, we see again,
we see wolves following bears and bears following wolves around.
In this particular instance, I think,
we documented this wolf following this bear for quite some time.
This stuff doesn't take place in a few minutes,
it takes place over the course of a day.
We've sat there in Yellowstone watching a coyote follow a pack of wolves,
one single coyote following a pack of wolves from about a half-mile distance.
And they just stick with them,
because they know that's where food is going to be.
They're the only species, the wolves, that hunt in packs
and hunt those same, those large ungulates,
and so the other species can benefit from it.
And wolves will chase off the coyotes quite a bit.
We have a relationship between the wolves and their prey that's very important.
We have a relationship between wolves and other predators
that's very important as well.
And all this is called the trophic cascade.
And it's this cascading effect;
as the wolves chase their prey, as the wolves make kills,
changes happen in the ecosystem that wouldn't otherwise be there.
I've heard some folks say in the political arena,
"Well, it's just a wolf."
Well, it's just a species that makes quite a bit of difference.
And so for me, over time, it was really fantastic to get involved in this project.
When I started, I had no idea I'd be involved for 20 years,
but I can say I'm going to be involved for the rest of my life,
it's the greatest thing in the world.
When I first told my parents in 1996:
"I think I'm going to quit being a lawyer, I'm going to focus just on wolves,"
I don't think they've responded to that since.
I think their jaws dropped,
and they've stayed dropped for that whole time.
But I kept my day job, but this has been a great way to do work.
And so, in California, on December 28, 2011,
the first wolf returned to California after an 80-year absence, wolf OR-7.
I think what this is going to do
is set in motion that trophic cascade here, in California.
We're part of a stakeholder working group, that's a diverse group of interests,
of not just biologists and wildlife conservationists,
and agency folks,
but ranchers and hunters,
and folks that live up in areas where wolves were recovered,
trying to figure this all out, how to make it work in California.
And I think we've got quite an opportunity here,
because we've seen wolves recovered in other states,
we've seen the mistakes made,
but we have a very interesting and diverse state in many aspects.
And I think we can do some pretty good things
with recovering wolves in this state.
And so, as I enjoy the life of being involved
in this project in the presence of wolves,
all I can think about is how important the species is.
And going back 20 years ago,
I really am glad I gave up the rollerblading.
I haven't done much since,
but I've done a lot of work on this, so I'm really happy.
I want to just share a credit
to both our education team at the California Wolf Center
who helped to put the presentation together and do a lot of good work,
and then Landis Wildlife Films
who shot that raw footage with Bob Landis.
So, thanks a lot, and I don't know
if you have questions or you want to go.
Thanks.
(Applause)