The Wolves of Yellowstone

I thought that with all the doom and gloom filling up this forum I'd add some good news for a change, this link tells the story of efforts to re-introduce the Wolf one of the most misunderstood facets of ecosystems back into the Yellowstone system. The results? Increased plant diversity because the Elk do not stay in one place as much anymore, thusly decreasing overgrazing which promotes plant growth which attracts more species of insects and avians.

www.oriononline.org...

We can halt the damage we are doing to these localized systems, sometimes all it takes is to re-introduce a species that WE removed in the first place.

Maybe they would have eventually recolonized Yellowstone without human intervention. They were already beginning to ease back down across the border, filtering into Montana through places like the Yaak, the Ninemile, and the Flathead valleys, but the American public wanted them sooner. So we went out and got them, and brought them here in trucks and helicopters, wrenched from their old homelands, and with significant mortality. Not that a more natural recolonization would have been entirely seamless.

Already, not one of the original recolonizers survives; in the wild, a seven- or eight-year-old wolf is getting old, and a ten-year-old wolf is ancient, and ten years have gone by. Already, the last of those first returning—or returned—wolves have gone under, down into a soil that did not birth them, but which sustained them, and from which they summoned a seemingly miraculous flowering of wildness.

There is color in the land again. How can the crimson blood of elk in the snow release a bluebird? How can black and silver wolves combine, like pigment, to unleash a new surge of yellow warblers and brilliant tanagers back into a landscape long absent such threads, such an abundance of colors?

[edit on 4-8-2005 by sardion2000]

There was a total of 31 wolves broght to Yellowstone from Canada, I was quite hopeful that it would work out when they were sent there. Most recent update I found said just under 200 wolves now, most recent exact number was 164 in 2003. It is now at a peak size, and is expected to remain a stable number. One of the things that surprised me was how long it took to actually reintroduce the wolves, it was first proposed in 1944.

There's no shortage of links on them, but this one looked pretty good.
www.angelfire.com...

I watched a National Geographic Special on the reintroduction of wolves back into Yellowstone. They were hunted to near extiction in the late 1800s to the early 1900s by farmers and people that thoght they were a threat to them. Good topic sardion2000.