Wolves: A Violent Past and a Promising Future for a Vital Keystone Species
Wolves are a keystone species because they play a critical role in the health and function of North America's ecosystems. Without them, these habitats can lose ecological balance.
For tens of thousands of years, wolves have occupied grasslands, woodlands, deserts, forests, and tundra across North America. Wolves have played an essential role in maintaining ecological balance across North America as social, apex predators. Their presence shapes the course of waterways, the vitality of vegetation, and the behaviors and abundance of certain wildlife.
“Anywhere there were large ungulates,” reports Rocky Mountain Wolf Project advisor Rob Edward, “there were wolves.”
Honored by many Indigenous nations as sacred guides, wolves are keepers of ecological equilibrium, a true keystone species for Colorado and North America as a whole.
A True Keystone Species
Regulate Overgrazing
Wolves are unique carnivores because they confront their prey head-on as a unit, running directly through herds of ungulates in search of the weakest link. While also bringing nourishment to the pack, this hunting strategy encourages elk and deer to move around the landscape more often, protecting areas from overgrazing. This, in turn, allows for vegetation and soil to recover between browsing events. Wolves' hunting behaviors drive sustainable land use by herbivores.
Balance the Food Chain
Through natural predation, wolves help foment genetic health of ungulate populations. Because wolves target the vulnerable, sick, or weak, these carnivores help keep a herd’s overall vitality strong. Balanced ungulate populations can also help other species thrive, such as plants and insects. Additionally, the carcasses from a wolf pack’s kill support the nutritional needs of scavengers, like eagles, bears, coyotes, and ravens.
Improve Riparian Habitats
Keeping ungulate populations in check matters because, if they become overpopulated, they can destroy an ecosystem. Too many elk in a riparian area can overconsume willow, cottonwood, and aspen, which stabilize banks. These trees help protect against erosion and maintain the productivity and course of a waterway.
Increase Biodiversity
Improved riparian conditions have a rippling effect on many other species, notably beavers. A healthy riparian habitat encourages beavers to inhabit the area and build dams from willow and aspen branches, which eventually slows and deepens waterways. These conditions are ideal for many fish species. Songbirds and other wildlife also depend on healthy riparian habitats for hydration, shelter, and shade.
The Ecological Cascade
Wolves enrich the vitality of any region that they inhabit. From supporting birds and beavers to insects and grasses, wolves are intricately linked to the productivity and biodiversity of North American ecology.
Edward notes that, without wolves, there are “widespread negative ecological consequences.”
Beavers, willows, aspens, native fish, and many other species suffer when wolves aren’t keeping the elk and deer "on the move". Edward shares that reestablishing wolf populations to their native habitats can help to address these negative outcomes.
A Campaign of Genocide
Despite the many ways that wolves enrich our landscape, a violent past of excessive and inhumane hunting, trapping, and poisoning throughout the 1900s drastically reduced wolf populations across the continent. When European Americans first settled in the West, they brought their livestock with them. Clearing pasture and removing bison from the Great Plains were early steps toward making their ranches. They also overhunted elk and deer to meet the growing demands of the meat market on the East Coast. Between land conversions and drastic reductions in ungulate populations, wolves quickly lost both their food source and their native habitat.
Ranchers complained that wolves were preying on their livestock, causing a dramatic uproar that began what Edward calls “a campaign of genocide” against wolves.
By 1914, the federal government had established a special branch, dubbed the U.S. Biological Survey, committed to eradicating wolves across the US. Millions of dollars went to training young men to track, attract, and kill wolves and their pups. Edward shares that poison, traps, direct shootings, and even beating pups to death were all methods used. These massacres nearly wiped out wolves from North America. In many states across the US, no wolves remained. By 1945, wolves were extinct in Colorado.
A few fragmented populations survived the brutal period in Canada. As big game recovered and the war against wolves waned in the late 1900s, some packs migrated south into Michigan and parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Today, wolf populations have partially recovered in the Northern Rocky Mountains, with steady populations in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California.
The campaign to kill wolves, however, is not over. Certain groups continue to circulate inaccurate information that wolves are bad for the cattle industry, dangerous to livestock, and that they deplete big game populations. As a result, several US states, including Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, make it legal and encourage hunting wolves.
After enjoying protection under the Endangered Species Act since 1978, the gray wolf has barely regained footing in the Northern Rockies. Populations are still nowhere near what they once were, and states like Colorado have had little to no wolf activity in the past 25 years.
Reintroducing Wolves to Colorado
In November 2020, Coloradans passed Proposition 114, which mandates that wolf reintroduction must be in the works by December 2023 on Colorado’s Western slope. Edward explains that the western edge of Colorado is spacious, with roughly 17 million acres of public land. It holds one of the largest elk populations in North America. Although specific plans remain the purview of Colorado Parks & Wildlife, the reintroduction team will likely bring family units of wolves from the Northern Rockies to western Colorado’s public lands, beginning in early 2024. If the wolves respond well to the relocation, Edward is optimistic they may slowly repopulate much of western Colorado, wherever elk numbers are sufficient to support them.
When considering the challenges to this reintroduction, Edward admits that there will always be people out there who dislike wolves. Therefore, the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project team will continue to dispel misinformation about wolves and will build a program to support long-term coexistence strategies. The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project will be “beating the drum” for coexistence between humans and wolves, helping a variety of stakeholders to understand that it is both possible and beneficial to live alongside wolves.
Areas where agencies have reintroduced wolves, like the Northern Rockies, have already seen increases in elk populations, not declines. Furthermore, livestock kills by wolves are negligible. Edward claims there is no evidence that any rancher has ever gone out of business because of wolves. Furthermore, under Proposition 114, ranchers can rest easy knowing that the state will compensate them for any livestock lost to wolves.
Edward laments that socially perpetuated stigmas about wolves are likely not going away, but over time, as the science continues to come out... A safer world for wolves is possible.
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