Once this was a land alive with lions and wolves, jaguars and bears. There were great sharks swimming the seas and eagles aloft in the air. This was a world patrolled by great predators.
Hi-ya! We've underestimated the force of predation in nature. I mean, we almost eliminated it.
We almost eliminated it from the globe. And this was one of the strongest forces we have in nature. Restoring this... Function in nature, I think, is very important. It's one of our biggest challenges to humanity because the simplest answer, the easiest answer, is to just get rid of them.
They are very, very hard animals to live with. It is one of the great paradoxes of our existence. Out of death comes life.
Ever since Darwin, predation has been proposed as one of the evolutionary drivers of the diversity of life. And now, at the dawn of the 21st century, Darwin's successors are adding hard evidence to the theory. of entire chains of life flowering in the presence of great predators.
Yet these are bittersweet discoveries, for the great predators have all but vanished from sight, just as the value of these lords of nature comes into focus. Leading scientists working around the globe are now learning that these much-feared predators may in fact hold a key to life itself. They find it is the presence or absence of top predators that affects the health of an entire ecosystem. One of these places, a place called Yellowstone. Scientists have found a heartening glimpse of rebirth with the return of its top predator.
Bill Ripple, an ecologist from Oregon State University, first came to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, with big predators far from his mind. Ripple was concerned about plants, in particular Yellowstone's aspen trees, and what had become their disturbing and mysterious demise. Ripple knew the aspen as one of the premier magnets of wildlife in the mountains of the American West.
And it struck me, why in this world-famous bastion of nature should the aspen be dying? I thought, somebody ought to be solving that mystery. Ripple had learned of the dying aspens from his colleague Robert Beshta, who had independently come upon another disturbing mystery to solve in Yellowstone.
I first visited the Lamar River in 1996 and was amazed at what I saw. Stream banks were rapidly eroding, their ancient soils being washed downstream. Willows were eaten down to nubs and young cottonwoods were all but absent from the system.
It was a huge problem and the question was why? And I decided then and there that someday I would come back and attempt to unravel the answer to this question. Together, Ripple and Beshta began what would become an odyssey of discovery, venturing back and forth over the coming years to gather data and measure the ongoing evolution of Yellowstone's ailing ecosystems.
This must be one of the oldest trees in the park. Looking through historical photos and examining Yellowstone's surviving trees, what they quickly came to realize was that whatever was to blame, it had begun many years before. We found that nearly all of the aspen stopped reproducing in the 1930s and 40s, and that led us to examine the potential culprits behind this event.
The only major event that coincided with that last generation of aspen was the extermination of Yellowstone's wolves. For lack of wolves, Yellowstone's aspen had apparently stopped growing. Beshta, watching his cottonwoods, would soon come to similar conclusions.
When wolves disappeared from Yellowstone, cottonwoods stopped growing from little plants into large trees. They just shut down. Ripple and Beshta's discovery of Yellowstone's uncanny link between failing forests and missing wolves served as an omen for much of America. For not just Yellowstone. But the entire country had been nearly swept clean of its big predators during an eradication campaign that waged war on any animal deemed a threat to livestock or game populations.
By the 1930s, most of the lower 48 had recorded their last wolf. I grew up in a ranching family, and we'd been very much apart. of this history of eradicating predators. The paradigm of ranching was to clean the rangeland of all threats, not only to the livestock, but to the grazing base.
And that meant eliminating, you know, creating a silent landscape. The list of predators you had to get rid of. was just like this starting with the grizzly bears jaguars cougars wolves then lynx then bobcats and pretty soon you just sort of wiped it all out One man above all, the naturalist and writer Aldo Leopold, would capture the ambivalence of American society toward its most controversial predator. In his groundbreaking 1944 essay, Thinking Like a Mountain, Leopold penned what to this day stands as one of our most eloquent and celebrated pay-ins to the wolf, a wolf Leopold himself had helped shoot. In those days, we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.
In the second, we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy. How to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.
I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes. Something known only to her and to the mountain. Leopold's views on predators evolved across a lifetime.
He started out with a view like most people of his time and age that, as they used to say, the only good predator is a dead predator. And he carried that out as part of his official activity with the Forest Service. But it did not take long, maybe about a 10-year period during his middle career where he began to shift that view on predators.
Kurt Meine has traced the changes in Leopold's views that came with the emergence of ecology, the study of nature's myriad and vital connections. As Leopold himself helped to develop this new science, he would apply its principles to forestry and to wildlife conservation, and he would communicate those principles to an ever-widening audience of readers. Before 1927, 1928, People didn't think about food webs and food chains much.
They didn't think about the connections between plants and animals in the landscape. If you're managing forests, you're managing trees. If you're managing game populations, you are focused only on a few species. So it was really only in that period of the late 20s when this new science of ecology began to lift the veil, as Leopold said, on a new and much more complex view of the natural world.
And with Leopold's urgings, that complex view increasingly began to include nature's topmost predators. Leopold traveled extensively, examining the relationships between predators, their prey, and forests. From the high mountains and plateaus of the Southwest, to the canyon lands of Utah, to the intensively managed forests of Germany. Leopold brought back warnings of lands ravaged by too many deer and elk, lands conspicuously lacking their great predators.
There was no escaping the specter of forests damaged and weakened by the dense herds, a grim reality Leopold would discover as well at home on his farm in Wisconsin. In one of his field note entries, he notes the deer trails that are running through the area in front of the shack and how all the trees along those trails have been roused to death, all the young trees that he planted. Christina Eisenberg is a Leopold Scholar at Oregon State University and a conservation biologist, re-examining Leopold's controversial observations of the interactions between wolves, their prey, and forests.
With the encouragement of Nina Leopold Bradley, scientists like Eisenberg have continued the elder Leopold's work at the farm, near the well-known converted chicken coop that he fondly named the shack. Eisenberg notes that the impacts of high deer populations on forest growth, the phenomenon that Leopold described 60 years earlier, can still be seen. all chewed.
So everything here, not just the aspen in the white pine is showing, anything that's edible to deer is showing a browse line. And it got browsed every year, so it's about a meter in height, and it's about four years old at least. An aspen tree, if it's left alone, it'll grow a meter a year. So a four-year-old aspen, it'll be like about that tall.
So when you see something like this, you look at this tortured, tree, you know, and it's not being allowed to grow. It keeps trying to grow and it can't. Here's another old aspen. This one dates back to the 1920s or so and there really isn't anything in between these old aspen and these young aspen and this is because of too many deer and deer that are not afraid.
to stand around and just eat. So if wolves were in this system, although Leopold's hypothesis is that you would not see a stand that looked like this. You would get a lot of very different age classes happening in here. So Leopold steps forward starting in the early 1940s and through for the rest of his life until his passing in 1948. He would become a well-known public figure arguing for This more careful management of the deer herd and even allowing the wolves to be tolerated.
At the time that dad was advocating saving the wolves. It was a time of real depression for him because the Conservation Commission did not agree with Dad's philosophy. If we could keep them here, then they could continue to play this role. role as a partner in the evolutionary drama, as he would sometimes put it, of coexisting with the deer populations and, of course, with the people who had settled this part of our state and this part of our region. And it would become a very bitter and vitriolic dispute through the 1940s as Leopold tried to convey a very difficult lesson to a generation that was not quite ready to hear it.
And he was being condemned by the local newspapers, by the local hunters, by the Conservation Commission. They were all smiling at him and saying, well, they were belittling him. It was a very sad time for Dad.
He began, however, to find a new way of speaking, and this is a very important part of the drama, the political drama of that period. It wasn't any longer just to manage for this or that resource, or for maximizing timber or maximizing the deer herd. He began to talk about land health as the goal, saying that the goal of conservation should be to increase the capacity of land for self-renewal.
By that he meant... The soils, the waters, the plants, the animals, and of course our own human communities. That was a revolutionary new definition of conservation.
If we could increase the capacity of the land for self-renewal, then we could say it's healthy. If we lost something, if something was degraded, if populations went extinct or invasive species came in, or if soil erosion or water cycles were disrupted, then we were... living in a land that was not healthy. So this question of the role of predators and their relationship with their prey became central to this brand new way of thinking about conservation that Leopold would then go on to make immortal in his writing in the Sand County Almanac. I was a young man and full of triggerage.
I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Well, I still remember the first time I read Sand County Almanac as a kid. Because... He was living and working in his early phase in Arizona, the very landscape in which I grew up, and hit me like a bolt of lightning.
It made me all of a sudden look around on this landscape and say, my God, it really was different and it really was better. And it just kind of stuck with me until I finally had a chance, you know, 30, 40 years later, here I am in a position to do something about it, to make up for the mistake. And of course, he was the first guy to propose the restoration of Wolves and Yellowstone. Twenty-five years after Leopold's death, his wish for bringing wolves back was finally given life when in 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. The act aimed to prevent species from going extinct, not only by bolstering their numbers, but by helping those like the wolf reclaim lost lands.
The Endangered Species Act was a wonderfully far-sighted declaration of national policy because the need to restore endangered species, not just by not shooting them, but by taking affirmative steps to reoccupy a suitable habitat. Those steps to restore wolves to their former habitats have since led to a small population of red wolves living again in North Carolina. The Mexican wolf of the Southwest has been revived from a captive population of just seven animals to about 50 wild wolves now struggling to regain their home in the Blue Range of the Arizona-New Mexico border. And there are now more than 1,500 gray wolves cautiously spreading to old haunts in the northern Rockies.
When the last two wolves were vanquished from Yellowstone National Park in 1926, those in charge believed they had ridded themselves of a demon. What they were soon to learn was that they had, in fact, released one. Soon after the wolves'demise, the elk herds of Yellowstone burgeoned and began chewing their way through the park's streamside forests and shady groves of aspen. Yellowstone's managers with their park under attack struggled to stem the damage.
Over the decades, they trapped and transplanted, and even resorted to shooting Yellowstone's elk. And still, no sprout survived. No new forests were to grow.
The winter of 1995 came a revolution that was to shake the troubled ecology of Yellowstone to its foundations. After 70 years of absence, wolves were released in central Idaho and in Yellowstone. The wolf's return was one of the great stories in the history of wildlife conservation.
And it was only the beginning. Life in Yellowstone was soon to take a dramatic turn, not only for its elk, but for the myriad plants and creatures who shared this ailing web of life. Ecologists have long wondered how ecosystems are structured, and there are many factors at play.
And certainly, predation is one of the dominant factors. structuring ecosystems. Of all the scientists witnessing the unfolding drama around Yellowstone's returning top predators, Doug Smith, director of Yellowstone's Wolfrey Introduction Program, has the best seat in the country. Park Service's policy is to restore natural conditions. It's arguable, how could you do that without the top carnivore in place?
So I've been here since the beginning, since we released the wolves. I've been following them weekly throughout that whole time period. And you get a hunch immediately that things are different with wolves as compared to without them. The Leopold pack. This is the alpha male.
We put him down at five to seven years of age. He's missing some teeth here. He's also coming out of the drug. This is one of the most stable packs in the whole park.
They've had Blacktail Deer Plateau as theirs since 1996. So he's an old man. He's competing with other packs and he's bringing down elk and bison. This time lapse at a wolf kill in Canada's Waterton Lakes National Park offers a prelude to what was soon to become the daily spectacle in the new kingdom of Yellowstone.
With elk falling prey to Yellowstone's burgeoning wolf packs, the park suddenly became a scavenger's banquet. Coyotes and foxes, grizzly bears and black bears, eagles and vultures, crows, magpies, and record gatherings of ravens, all of them, plus 57 varieties of beetles, were found feasting on the wolves'leftovers. But it was not just the meat-eaters who would ultimately profit from the wolf's homecoming. Perhaps one of our most significant findings of having wolves back in Yellowstone is their effect on elk.
And we don't know if this is a behavioral effect or a numerical effect, or possibly both. But we think that wolves impacting elk in one of those ways has impacted the vegetation. With wolves back in Yellowstone, we had a rare opportunity to measure the impact of this top predator in a system that for 70 years had been dominated by its major prey, the elk.
We wanted to know how aspen, cottonwood, and willow might respond now that elk were adjusting to the return of the wolf. And amazingly, after 70 years, these stunted trees and forests began to grow again. Well this cottonwood is five meters tall. It's pretty amazing growth. This aspen sprouted in the very early 1900s when wolves were still part of this ecosystem.
And it stood here alone for more than a half a century without any new sprouts surviving to replace it. And then finally these young trees started growing again in the late 1990s. We were hard-pressed to find anything in the record of climate or even in Yellowstone's fire history that might explain why these aspen waited until the late 1990s to finally begin to grow. The only factor we can find coinciding with the failure of aspen to grow above the reach of elk over a period of many decades is the removal of wolves. And the only factor we can find for aspen to so suddenly take off is the return of the wolves.
It was as if the eternal winter had finally broken. Life had returned to Yellowstone. The ongoing transformation of Yellowstone is an ecological chain reaction that may well be triggered by the killing power of the wolf. More amazing still, it may also be that the wolf is exerting much of its power without even taking a bite. Having fewer elk in this system is finally allowing these stream sides to flourish.
But there's another force of life imparted by wolves that we think may be just as powerful, and that force is fear. We first began noticing these flushes of growth along certain stream side areas. And we asked ourselves, why here? Well, based on our observations and data, we came up with an answer.
There are places where elk, which can outrun wolves on the flat, seem to lose this advantage. In some of our streamside areas, it appears to be much harder for elk to either detect the presence of wolves... or escape from them. Notice this tangle of wood on the ground and imagine how an elk might view this obstacle if it had to escape attacking wolves.
We have two cow elk that were killed by wolves here. This is a very risky place for elk to be. And that can make the difference between a sapling that never gets above knee height and one that grows like this. Many consider wolves to be a very important effect on the release of willows and possibly aspen in the park. Others aren't so sure.
How can so much be attributed to just the return of the wolf? Scientists from around the West have converged on Yellowstone to better understand its rapidly evolving ecology. Among the many theories for the changes, in a land eternally rocked by climatic swings and episodes of raging wildfire, wolves have emerged as one of the pivotal forces of Yellowstone's nature. And so one of the most dramatic things we think wolves are involved with is a return of willows like this. And this is a food source for other animals like beavers.
Beavers use willows almost exclusively here. Known as an ecosystem engineer, the beaver, with its lodges and ponds, brings its own cast of wildlife, from fish and frogs to insects and bird life. Since the wolves'return, beaver colonies in the northern range of Yellowstone have increased from one to a dozen.
Other rare natives of the park appear to be prospering as well. Since the wolves returned, Yellowstone's struggling herd of pronghorn antelope have begun to recover. Where the wolves are busy running down trespassing coyotes, which once preyed heavily on young pronghorn, the pronghorn are now busy raising fawns.
The Land of the Wolf now features daily feasts of leftovers. Food for all, from beetles to grizzly bears. For some, like Ripple and Beshta, the return of the wolf has triggered a healing in a 70-year sickness. Finally spared of too many elk, certain streams in Yellowstone have become increasingly cloaked in willow. And with the willows, songbirds have returned to nest, and beavers to build their lodges, and fish and frogs to breed in their pools.
And so I know of no one who wouldn't agree with this statement, that Yellowstone with wolves is dramatically different than without them. In many ways it can be likened to a rock at the edge of the cliff that's been sitting there for decades, waiting for this release in vegetation to occur. It took wolves to push that rock off the cliff. So having grizzly bears and wolves and cougars back across the American landscape, keeping them in the Canadian and Alaskan landscape, are certainly some of the bigger questions we should be talking about.
These are questions that go beyond the science of top predators to the art of living among them. From the farm country of Minnesota, which has also been wolf country far longer than any place in the lower 48, come encouraging models of coexistence forged in time and patience. The wolf density in Minnesota is probably the highest density of wolves in the lower 48 states.
And currently, our wolf population is at about 3,000 wolves. There's extensive human activity within those areas. When we were shopping for farms, we were told there would never be wolves here because we're too far south, because we're between two major highways and relatively close to two large towns.
Janet McNally raises sheep on her farm just two hours north of the Mall of America, a land lately running with wolves. In 1991, I heard my first wolf howl. and after I picked my jaw off my chest, I sat there thinking how cool it was, but oh my, what's next? You know, it's like I knew that I was going to have trouble. In 93, we had our first wolf depredation, and then in 99, in the first 10 days of lambing, we lost 40 lambs.
Currently there are approximately 8,500 livestock producers in Minnesota's wolf range. In any given year, 70 to 100 of those will be directly impacted by wolf predation. So it turns out that about one or two of those will be directly impacted by wolf predation.
2% of the producers are impacted annually by wolf damage in Minnesota. So when you look at it from that perspective, it's not a huge impact to Minnesota agriculture, but if you're one of the producers in that 1% to 2%, the impacts can be significant if it's your livestock that are being killed by wolves. We understand that wolves are not cuddly animals.
They have big teeth and they love to eat things. And that's okay because that's what they're made to do. And along with that we understand that if we have livestock in an area where there are wolves, we have to protect that livestock.
But we don't just protect it by shooting wolves. We protect it with guard dogs, we protect it with fencing, we protect it with... with good animal husbandry techniques and management techniques to take care of those animals.
Way to me! Misty fern, come here! Come on, come on! There's actually two types of dogs we're using here.
We're using a border collie whose sole job is to move the sheep around and then the other dog is the guarding dogs and the only job they have is just to protect the sheep. They don't move them or anything like that. They are just there to protect them.
The most important thing we can do when when we're faced with a pack of wolves is to bring The sheep together to consolidate them and put all the dogs in there with them. We can actually stop wolf depredation overnight. A third element to this is that we started using electrified netting.
And then the last thing is to just keep them moving. We use rotational grazing, it's a part of our grazing management, but we found that when predator populations are high it's actually good.. management tool from the standpoint of preventing depredation too.
And it has a two-fold benefit. We're managing the forage better and we're also managing our predator situation better. There's no one thing. You have to do all of these things together to actually stop depredation.
That experience in 1999 was the last time we had any wolves kill any sheep. Because we've had wolves for so long, I think that's one of the reasons why wolf conflicts in Minnesota aren't quite as intense as they are in some areas. People have been around wolves for a long time, whereas when you look to Wisconsin or Michigan, wolves are a little bit newer there. So people aren't as familiar with them.
There's more unknowns. And so that can create some concern, fear. And out west where wolves were reintroduced, there's...
sort of that same dynamic as well as the feeling that, you know, the government did this to it. They brought the wolves back. So wolves were always here, even though their numbers were reduced, they were always here.
And most people now in Minnesota have, at least in the northern part of the state, have grown up knowing that there's wolves around. So that uncertainty, I think, is not there that can create some fear in people. We've had wolves as long as I can remember.
Robbie and I took over Parents Farm in the late 70s, 30 years ago. I was at my dad was a shooter. If it looked like a wolf and it was coming in here, anywhere near his gun, he shot it. And that's the way it was. And no questions asked.
Just deal with it and get it out of the way. David Radayich, his wife Robbie, and their son Lee raise cattle in the midst of one of the densest populations of wolves in Minnesota. At any given time, there may be as many as 10 wolves within a mile of their farm. The wolves, I see them in their daily life, running around, follow the tractors, catching mice, and we're making hay, harvesting corn. As soon as they see me, they keep eye contact, but they keep their distance, otherwise they run away.
But there are times when the wolves become more than curious neighbors, when the rediaches must act to protect their calves. And like Janet McNally, they make adjustments. We try different management things to keep the wolves at bay. We're feeding our cow herd at night, or right before dark, and that delays the cow's birthing process for five to six hours. So during the darkest part of the night, we're not having many calves at all.
I think that takes pressure off of our cow herd. And so if we can calve during the daytime, there's usually a little bit more activity going on, and I think the wolves are a little bit more afraid to come out into the open. Yet even with the rediaq's vigilance, there come occasions when deterrence fails. When to keep their cattle alive, a wolf must die. A call goes out to the Federal Animal Control Agency, U.S. Wildlife Services.
We try to respond within 24 hours of receiving a complaint. We're only removing wolves in response to depredations. We're not indiscriminately killing wolves across the landscape.
And over Over time we've developed a level of trust, at least in Minnesota here, with wolf proponents as well as the livestock producers kind of finding that middle ground. One of the reasons we have our farm here is because the benefits far outweigh the problems. Raising cattle, growing crops, whether it's wheat or corn or hay, anything has its obstacles. And wolves are just one part of the picture. How many of the people?
in this country can sit on their patio or look out their picture window and see a wolf run across the yard. It's annoying but it's absolutely beautiful. Farmers deal with nature every day they step out of the house and we deal with the weather, we deal with the trees, we deal with the grass, we deal with the animals, we deal with the wolves.
They were here before us and we've just learned to live with them. I'd say the main goals of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Wolf Management Plan are to, number one, allow wolves to exist where they may, no geographic or numeric constraints imposed on the wolf population. The goal, number two, is to manage human-wolf conflicts and address them where they occur.
And there will be no public harvest of wolves for the first five years following delisting, after which there could be but it will be based on a lot of public discussion and public comment to decide whether there will be a public harvest of wolves in Minnesota. Over the past decade, Minnesota's farmers have reached a healthy equilibrium with wolves, founded on vigilance and respect. And that respect extends to another North Country institution, the Minnesota Deer Hunter.
Deer hunting is a crazy passion here in Minnesota. We have a little over a million deer in Minnesota, and every year we have about a half a million hunters that go into the field chasing those deer. With all the wolves, do we have terrible hunting?
The answer is no. Now there are certain areas of the state, especially in the north central portion of Minnesota, where there are a lot of wolves and a number of packs. Or deer hunting is a little tougher because the deer are a little more wise.
They're always on the... on the edge because a predator is looking to eat them. The hunters are gonna find, and guides are gonna find, that they're gonna have to change some of their tactics on where they go and what they do, because the animals are going to change. The prey species, the elk, the deer, are gonna be moving more. In a way, that leads to, you need to be a better hunter.
You need to be a better guide to understand what's going on. Here in Minnesota, there used to be the mentality 30 years ago or 40 years ago, more like 40 years ago, that if you saw a wolf, it was better you shot it and left it, you know, let it die. That mentality isn't here now because we've grown to be accustomed to the wolf, we've grown to understand them more.
And I think you're going to see that same learning curve happen in western states. I would hope so because it is a majestic animal. It does have a place in our natural resources.
It does have a place in our environment today. The West is where the country's tolerance for living with wolves is now facing its greatest test. It is a land of great potential for the large carnivores, big on space and rich with prey. But it is also a land where livestock still rules the open range. It is a land of raw human emotions, infused with fear and distrust, ingrained from generations past.
If I see a wolf, if he's close enough where he's supposed to be burying my sheep, I'm going to shoot him. John Faulkner is a third-generation sheepman who runs one of the largest sheep operations in Idaho, much of it on public land. And ordinarily, he would have no hesitation if he saw a wolf near his sheep.
But in the Wood River Valley of Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest, John Faulkner and other sheep ranchers are attempting a different approach toward keeping sheep and wolves apart without deadly bullets. With the help from the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, Idaho Fish and Game, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Wildlife Services.
The ranchers of the Wood River Valley have been testing their non-lethal techniques in what is considered the Sheep Superhighway of Central Idaho, patrolled as it is by the resident Phantom Hill Wolfpack. On the hour, every hour, get up. I turn my telemetry on, see if there are any signals from the local wolves that have collars.
And I'm switching between the alpha male and the alpha female, which are the two wolves in the pack that have collars. I can only pick up signals from wolves that are wearing the radio collars. Jesse Timberlake is the manager of the Wood River Project for the Defenders of Wilderness.
As well as he must watch his sheep, Timberlake must watch his wolves. Last night there were wolves howling all around just on the ridge above where the sheep were. So when they do that then I get up and start walking around the sheep, make sure they're right. If the wolves keep on howling then I have an air horn, I might use a scale in the way, or a little starting pistol.
For more than a decade now, since wolves returned to the Rocky Mountains, the defenders of wildlife have been paying ranchers to compensate for their losses. Here in the Wood River Valley, where the losses were once more frequent, they've lately found that new precautions have largely precluded those payments. It's going to cost them more money to pay off us than what they're going to spend on their two people they had out with that one band over there. This year we didn't have any trouble over there but one. And they weren't there that night.
And they heard us off four or five wolves the next morning. Another collaborator in this groundbreaking experiment in non-lethal wolf control is Mike Stevens of Lava Lake Lamb, whose introduction to raising sheep in wolf country was a lesson never to be forgotten. In 2002, we had wolves come into that sheep band in three successive nights, and they killed a total of 18 ewes and lambs.
So that was a pretty big wake-up call for us. Then we started implementing a number of proactive measures at that time. That turns on the alarm, which has this high-intensity strobe light with two speakers.
that have noise that changes in a situation like this is just to alert the herder. Because a sheep are already in, they're not going to be in this enclosure, but we want to let the herders know you better get up because you've got wolves close by. Call it wolf. In the northern Rockies, where some perceive wolves as the biggest threat to livestock, the facts tell a different story. Wolves have been found responsible for less than 1% of the region's sheep and cattle losses.
Far more dangerous are disease and bad weather. Even the domestic dog, man's best friend, is recently on record for killing five times as many livestock as their wild cousin, the wolf. And so our view about wolves was that certainly they present some challenges for our operation, our sheep operation.
We're running about 5,000 sheep over a very large area. But we also recognize that wolves are an important part of a fully functioning ecosystem. And so when we first found that we had lost sheep to wolves in 2002, our first instinct was, well, what is a way that we're going to be able to coexist with these animals?
And we have pretty successfully in all those years since 2002 through 2008, we've had zero depredations with the exception of 2005. And in every one of those years we've used some combination of approaches including use of telemetry, really close communications with the agencies in order to understand what the wolf packs were doing, and then the use of flattery, night watches, etc. to deter the wolves from coming in. And we've had a number of instances where tracks were seen or wolf howls were detected within a quarter mile or less of the sheep band. Wolves will continue to be present in the landscape.
And so we believe that implementing these methods and approaches is necessary regardless of the legal status of wolves. So it's been fabulous from the standpoint of people working together to come up with a single outcome of let's reduce the impact of wolves on the sheep operations and then subsequently reduce the impact of wolf control or predator control on the wolf population. And to have just the loss of one sheep in a summer of grazing is pretty remarkable.
Whether it's wolves or bears or mountain lions, other coyotes, other predators also live within the system too. And so it's been a remarkably good year for the livestock operators as well as for the wildlife, the predator populations. The Idaho experiment in coexisting with wolves comes at a time when top predator science increasingly confirms its far-reaching importance.
Since the discovery of the wolves'healing role in Yellowstone, Bill Ripple and Bob Beshta have been exploring other ecosystems and finding similarly vital connections to their predators. Following the literary trail of Aldo Leopold, the two ventured to Zion National Park in Utah, where Leopold had warned of deer massing in destructive densities. It's just an incredible place as you look up at these valley walls. But as you begin to bring your eyesight down into the valley bottoms and you begin to look at what's happening along streamside areas, there's an ecological tragedy taking place today, and it's been going on for the last 60 to 70 years.
That tragedy had ironically been triggered with the crowning of Zion as a national park in 1919. With the coming swarms of tourists went Zion Canyon's top predator, the cougar. And with its big cats all but missing came swarms of deer to Zion Canyon. Ripple and Beshta found an ecosystem badly wanting for more cougars. Every year the large cottonwood trees in Zion National Park put out millions and millions of seed and across the sandbanks along the river margins at least some of those will establish and grow. However they get eaten off by the mule deer in the system and they will reach this brushy stage here but will never get any higher than this.
Eventually this plant will die. With the Cottonwood's death, the stream sides of Zion, like those of Yellowstone, began to crumble. And as they crumbled, they receded ever further from their life-giving forests, an insidious cycle of dying trees and sloughing stream banks, each feeding the demise of the other.
So we disconnect the river from the streamside plant community. Any of the animals, such as the lizards, the toads, or the amphibians, that would normally use that habitat have a tough time living in those environments. In addition, the shade that these trees used to provide to the river has disappeared.
The trees now are way back from the river, and we get direct sunlight into the river system. So we begin to affect aquatic species, such as fish, that live in these systems. But how to know if the missing cougar was ultimately at the root of Zion's problem? To Ripple and Beshta's good fortune, the park still harbored quiet sanctuaries, remote from the bustle of Zion Canyon.
And one of those lay only nine miles away as the raven flies, in a place called North Creek. This place here is very remote. There's no cars, no roads, very few people get in here. Cougar are scarce in Zion Canyon, common here. As the two scientists set about their now familiar routine of measuring trees and stream conditions, it quickly became apparent that North Creek held a richness of life.
far greater than its trees. I walked up and down these banks and I took an inventory and put them in this notebook here as to what species I found, what wildflowers, and frogs, toads, lizards, and butterflies. And we added all those up along the stream here and then we compared those with Zion Canyon.
The contrasts were nothing short of astounding. In their samples of North Creek, Ripple and Beshta counted 47 times as many cottonwood trees, five times as many butterflies. North Creek held as many as 200 times more toads and frogs. It harbored cardinal flowers and asters by the hundreds, where Zion Canyon harbored few. So these two results are really dramatic and we think this is linked back to the presence of the cougar here and the way cougar prey on deer and deer eat the plants and then the plants are highly connected to the biodiversity and the food web.
So one of the key points that we're finding for maintaining ecosystems is to have a presence of a top predator in the system, whether it's cougar in a mule deer system like Zion. or whether it's wolves in an elk system like Yellowstone National Park. The presence of that predator is crucial in maintaining that system through time. Ripple and Beshta would go on to research the role of top predators in more national parks, each drawing uncanny parallels to the other, each echoing the concerns of Leopold 60 years before. These supposed bastions of wild America Where, lacking their top predators, were destined to decay.
Scientists from around the world now confirm wildlands and oceans worldwide are falling under silent siege from within. Where they are missing their top predators, they are missing the key species that once sustained far richer, more resilient communities of life. Yet some of these wounded ecosystems still harbor hopes for healing. Amazingly enough, even at the dawn of an increasingly crowded century, we find unlikely wild lands surviving.
Grand, open spaces, perhaps still big enough to house the great beasts in numbers necessary to perform their vital role. But most promising of all... There is healing to be found in humanity's awakening spirit of compassion.
With a few concessions to the great predators with which we once intimately shared this planet, a more vibrant and wholesome life on Earth could once again be ours. The mountains and canyons are calling for their wild hunters to come home. There may still be room enough out there, if there is room enough within the human heart. Music It is one of the great paradoxes of our existence. Out of death comes life.
Ever since Darwin, predation has been proposed as one of the evolutionary drivers of the diversity of life. And now, at the dawn of the 21st century, Darwin's successors are adding hard evidence to the theory of entire chains of life flowering in the presence of great predators.