Yellowstone Wolves: Science and Discovery in the World's First National Park

In 2020, it will have been twenty-five years since one of the greatest wildlife conservation and restoration achievements of the twentieth century took place: the reintroduction of wolves to the world’s first national park, Yellowstone. Eradicated after the park was established, then absent for seventy years, these iconic carnivores returned to Yellowstone in 1995 when the US government reversed its century-old policy of extermination and—despite some political and cultural opposition—began the reintroduction of forty-one wild wolves from Canada and northwest Montana. In the intervening decades, scientists have studied their myriad behaviors, from predation to mating to wolf pup play, building a one-of-a-kind field study that has both allowed us to witness how the arrival of top predators can change an entire ecosystem and provided a critical window into impacts on prey, pack composition, and much else.
 
Here, for the first time in a single book, is the incredible story of the wolves’ return to Yellowstone National Park as told by the very people responsible for their reintroduction, study, and management. Anchored in what we have learned from Yellowstone, highlighting the unique blend of research techniques that have given us this knowledge, and addressing the major issues that wolves still face today, this book is as wide-ranging and awe-inspiring as the Yellowstone restoration effort itself. We learn about individual wolves, population dynamics, wolf-prey relationships, genetics, disease, management and policy, newly studied behaviors and interactions with other species, and the rippling ecosystem effects wolves have had on Yellowstone’s wild and rare landscape. Perhaps most importantly of all, the book also offers solutions to ongoing controversies and debates.
 
Featuring a foreword by Jane Goodall, beautiful images, a companion online documentary by celebrated filmmaker Bob Landis, and contributions from more than seventy wolf and wildlife conservation luminaries from Yellowstone and around the world, Yellowstone Wolves is a gripping, accessible celebration of the extraordinary Yellowstone Wolf Project—and of the park through which these majestic and important creatures once again roam.

Douglas W. Smith has studied wolves for more than forty years. In 1994 he was hired by the National Park Service in Yellowstone National Park as the project biologist to reintroduce wolves, and in 1997 he became the project leader, a position he still holds today. Besides wolves in Yellowstone, he is also responsible for supervising the park’s bird, elk, and beaver programs. He is coauthor most recently of Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone.

Daniel R. Stahler is the Yellowstone Wolf Project’s lead biologist and the project leader of the Yellowstone Cougar Project. In addition, he helps manage the elk program and is Yellowstone National Park’s threatened and endangered species coordinator, working with species like lynx, wolverine, and grizzly bears.

Daniel R. MacNulty is associate professor of wildlife ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University and was one of the first volunteers hired by the Yellowstone Wolf Project.