“Some of us are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them,” Shakespeare wrote in "Twelfth Night"; to that, I might add, some are never aware of their greatness but possess it anyway. Such was the case of O-Six, a female wolf who lived in and around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, and who — thanks to a few obsessive wolf-watchers and the ubiquity of social media — managed to live as a free-roaming wolf, unencumbered of gates or walls, while still having her existence carefully recorded to the extent that fame followed her around the world.
The story of the Yellowstone wolves, and how they came to be reintroduced to the park, is a parable of politics and ecology. Humans extirpated most of the wolf population of the continental United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, as they did with other large keystone predators like the grizzly bear. In the mid-nineties, conservationists began to suspect that many of the ecological problems that Yellowstone had could be cured merely by reintroducing wolves.
And so a pilot program was born. Most scientists agree that the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone had a rebound effect on many other species; the elk population, which was overgrazing plants and grass, was reduced, resulting in some trees, like aspens, becoming healthier. The number of coyotes declined, while the number of foxes and raptors increased. And perhaps most dramatically, beavers — which were nearly completely gone from Yellowstone — made a vast resurgence.
Nate Blakeslee, a writer for Texas Monthly who lives in Austin, Texas, just published a new book, “American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West,” about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. In telling the story, Blakeslee chose to focus in on the issue vis-à-vis the allegory of one single wolf, O-Six. As she lived her wolf life, the human world was having political arguments over the future of O-Six and her ilk, and making policy decisions that would come to affect her as well as the ecosystem at large. I spoke to Blakeslee about O-Six, the controversy over wolf reintroduction, and how he managed to write a book about a wild animal that he never even interacted with personally. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Salon: To start, what does it mean to be a famous wolf? How did O-Six get thrust in this position?
Nate Blakeslee: Yeah, that’s a strange concept. How can you be famous wild animal? How can you be both a celebrity and yet be a truly wild animal? It’s a function of the unique situation that you see in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is the one place in world where you can reliably spot wolves from the roadside with a spotting scope. Ever since they were brought back to Yellowstone in the mid ’90s, this new pastime of wolf watching has been happening in the park. Every now and then, one particular wolf will catch the watchers’ fancy. O-Six was not the first famous wolf in the park. In that first decade, there was this pack known as the Druids. I write about them a bit in the book. They were the face of the reintroduction program and several documentaries were made about them, and they were famous in their own way. But when O-Six rose to prominence, she was probably the first wolf that came to the watchers’ attention during the Facebook era, you know, when social media existed.
Interesting. So O-Six owes her fame partly to social media, the prominence of smartphone cameras?
Blakeslee: You had all these visitors, these tourists taking pictures and video, and posting accounts of what they saw her do online, and so her legend spread that way virally, online. Then, eventually, she just became one of the attractions in the park -- something you would come to see, like Old Faithful. There are guide services in the park that will take you on wolf-watching tours, and she became a staple of those.
Wolves are often very solitary or don’t like attention. Can you actually schedule and see her reliably or she doesn’t shy away from tourists?
Blakeslee: Well, you’d have to get a little bit lucky. I mean, the most popular area to watch wolves is this wide-open, relatively treeless valley in the northeast section of the park, called the Lamar Valley. That’s where they were first brought back when they were reintroduced in the ’90s. To [scientists’] surprise, the wolves did stay there and they didn’t seem to mind the fact that there was this road and there were cars and people standing along the road. They didn’t approach cars and people, but they became tolerant of them, willing to live their lives within a mile or two of the road.
Keep in mind the tool that [wolf-watchers] used to observe these wolves. It’s not like a regular pair of binoculars. They use a telescope mounted on a tripod. They call them spotting scopes. You can watch a pack of wolves that is three, even four miles away, and see everything that they’re doing. If they’re only a mile away, you can see everything. You can see the expressions on their faces.
That’s why it’s possible for people to become so familiar with one particular wolf and feel like they get to know her personality -- and you get this sense of intimacy, even though you never really get that close to the wolf.
For someone who might not know much about the history of wolves in the U.S., can you explain why they were brought back to Yellowstone?
Blakeslee: Wolves had all been hunted out essentially by the end of 19th century, out of the Northern Rockies, just as they had across the vast majority of the lower 48 states. They had been trapped out by fur trappers or later hunted out by ranchers to protect livestock. [In the continental U.S.] they were only found on the margins — the upper peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Everywhere else, they were essentially gone.
And in Yellowstone, there was this enormous explosion in the elk population, because elk is what the wolves had preyed on there for thousands of years. [The elk population explosion] was so dramatic that it started to degrade the habitat. The park rangers responded by starting to cull the elk themselves. They basically replaced wolves with guns, and there were thousands of elk being killed every winter when there were no visitors around to see it. It became like Yellowstone’s dirty secret.
Many believed wolves would be a more holistic way to fix this problem, this broken ecosystem. That idea was first floated in the 1940s, but it was controversial then. Those same ranchers that had hunted them out are all still there. They’re still running cattle there to this day, and elk hunting is really a big business in the Northern Rockies.
Everybody in the hunting business knew that wolves eat a lot of elk. They resented the idea that this competition, basically, was going to be brought in by the federal government, who they were not too keen on to begin with. It became this federal government versus local control argument, which is really common in Western politics today. In fact, this fight over wolves is just one small part of this much broader struggle over how land in the West, public land in the West, should be used and who should get to make those decisions. That’s a long answer to a short question about why it was controversial to bring those wolves back in the first place.
Ecologically speaking, what has changed in Yellowstone since wolves were reintroduced?
Blakeslee: Everything that the biologists predicted would happen has happened. I mean, we’re 20 years into this experiment now, and wolves have completely saturated not only Yellowstone but also most of their former habitat in the Northern Rockies, which is to say in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Especially in Yellowstone, which has been a habitat that’s been most studied, there was a dramatic decline in the elk population [after wolves were reintroduced]. Because predation had been gone for so long, the elk in the park had stopped behaving like wild animals. They started acting more like cattle.
And elk are really big animals. They are like beef cattle with long legs, basically. They don’t live lightly on the landscape. They would congregate in valleys, they would congregate along streamsides where their preferred food was. They ate a lot of willow and a lot of aspen, stunting the growth of generations of those plants. This in turn caused degradation of the streamside, which damaged trout habitat.
Willow is food for beavers, and so the beaver habitat was damaged -- and then when they brought the wolves back, all of that was reversed.
But there were also some unusual effects that maybe weren’t anticipated. Yellowstone had an enormous number of coyotes -- way too many coyotes — because they had no canine competitor.
When the wolves were brought back, they immediately started killing coyotes. They killed coyotes that tried to come in and scavenge on the elk carcasses that they brought down. But also when a wolf would move into a new territory and dig a den, they would dig up any coyote dens they would find just to make the area safer for their own pups. The coyote population was cut in half in that northern range of Yellowstone where the wolves were first brought back. You saw this rebound in the rodent population. It’s all part of a jigsaw puzzle that all fits together because the coyotes were eating rodents.
But the wolves don’t eat the rodents?
Blakeslee: Right, the wolves don’t eat the rodents. They sort of play-chase of them sometimes. But it’s not a staple of their diet. They eat almost exclusively elk. The rodents came back, which brought back weasels, which brought back raptors. There was this avian renaissance in the park that nobody knew they were missing. Coyotes also killed a lot of pronghorn, that was a staple of their diet, and wolves don’t. So you saw the pronghorn bounce back.
Any time a wolf brings down a carcass, it provides food to a wide range of animals — scavengers in the park. It also provides food for grizzlies. One of the grizzlies’ main staples is these little whitebark pine nuts that they eat in the fall to get enough protein to hibernate. But the whitebark pine production had just plummeted, probably because of global warming. Biologists in the park theorized that they would now see a decline in grizzly populations, fewer cubs every year, and they were going to see less-healthy bears -- and it didn’t [happen]. One theory is it’s because these elk carcasses, which grizzlies come along and steal from wolves, had just become this very tiny source of nutrition in the park [for the bears].
It’s interesting that, in addition to having a wolf population, Yellowstone also has grizzlies, right? These two different keystone predators. But they have different diets and ecological niches, right?
Blakeslee: Definitely. The wolf was a much more critical predator to lose, because grizzlies [will] eat essentially anything. [Grizzlies] will spend a whole day eating bugs and moths, they’ll eat berries. They eat grass, they’ll graze on grass like cows do. They eat protein where they can get it, but they don’t kill a lot of adult animals. They’ll kill elk calves; occasionally, [grizzlies] will run down a sick elk.
But wolves, each pack is eating an elk every three or four days. And the wolf was the most widely distributed land mammal on the planet for tens of thousands of years. Basically, everywhere in the northern hemisphere, almost everywhere, you [used to] find wolves. There is this enormous wolf-shaped hole not only in this ecosystem but in ecosystems all around the globe. We see the effects of that, of wolves having been here, but we don’t always recognize these effects. The reason an elk can run 35 miles an hour is because that’s how fast wolves can run. They can’t be faster than that because they never needed to.
And the reason elk can go straight up the side of the mountain? That was a trait developed in response to thousands of years of predation by wolves. The reason elk are so nimble, the reason moose are so big — this particular predator has shaped all of these prey animals that we see around us. We see these lingering effects of wolves.
Even our language is full of all these wolf references. We have all these wolf metaphors: “the wolf at the door,” “leader of the pack,” “wolfing” down your food. We all say them and yet none of us have ever seen a wolf.
When we were an agrarian society, wolves were just a daily fact of life. They were everywhere. If you were on the frontier, and you were trying to raise cattle or sheep or goats, the main obstacle to success for you was the wolves that were out there. They had to be, from your perspective, gotten rid of.
Let’s go back to talking about O-Six specifically. How do you go about telling the story of one wolf’s life? What kind of sources did you talk to and incorporate to get there?
Blakeslee: I read a lot of wolf books in preparation for this project. Some of them are classics I would happily read again, but I never read one that was really story- or character-based that really hooked me. That’s what I wanted to do. The only reason it was possible is because O-Six was so famous for a wild animal. For most wolves, you might not know enough details to build a story and make [them] a character. With O-Six, you did.
The reason [I could write this book] was not because of the hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people that would see her once and post a picture to Facebook, it was because of this much smaller group of these die-hard wolf aficionados; people who would come to the park every single day, track the wolves with their radio collars, get them in their scopes and then watch them for hours and hours. Two people, in particular, would take notes every single day. One of the real breakthroughs for the project was one woman, a retired school teacher from San Diego. Her name is Laurie Lyman. She lives in Silver Gate, [Montana], right outside the northeastern entrance of the park. She watched O-Six virtually every day for three years and took notes every day.
She gave me this treasure trove of materials. It was like the diary of a wolf pack. I had never seen O-Six myself in person and I felt I understood who she was as a character and why she was so beloved. I also realized that what you could do with that material is write a nonfiction book that reads like a novel, like a Jack London story. Many of the main characters are not humans but animals, but it would all be true. It was an amazing opportunity to do a different kind of writing than I had done before, and that’s what made me excited about it.
So you felt like you knew O-Six, and her personality, even though you’d never, say, petted her or “met” her.
Blakeslee: Yeah, and that was a revelation for me. I didn’t realize… well, first of all I didn’t realize how powerful these sighting scopes were. I didn’t realize that you could actually see the expressions on their faces. I thought you could just see these little dots running across, but no, you could see them and you could watch them interact with the other wolves in the pack.
Laurie was there when O-Six first met her mate and her mate’s brother. I had a scene in the book in which this trio first meet. When I say it was a treasure trove of material, it was a treasure trove of material. I mean, there was a lot of mundane stuff in there too.
The other source of notes was Rick McIntyre. He’s the park's wolf guru. He’s the guy who was so famously obsessed with wolves that he comes to the park every single day, rain or shine, whether he’s on the clock or not, and watches wolves all day long. He has a little tape recorder and he writes down every single thing he sees. When you read through his notes, it’s like, “O-Six stood up, faced west,” or, “sniffed the ground, laid back down.” I have pages and pages of that.
Laurie’s notes were more of a summary of what she saw that day. What I would do is I would read through hers, I would pick out scenes that seemed pivotal on the life of the pack or that demonstrated some quality of wolves that was new to me and I thought would be new to readers too, and then I would go to his notes to beef up the scenes. And then I had interviews with whoever happened to be there that day to see what they remembered. Between those sources, I was able to draw those scenes pretty thoroughly, and pretty dramatically in some instances. There are just some amazing scenes and drama, the kind of stuff that cinematographers that work in Yellowstone try so hard to get on film.
How would you describe O-Six’s personality?
Blakeslee: Well, she was not cuddly. She was an extremely strong leader. She was a once-in-a-generation hunter. Wolves hunt elk, which are obviously much larger than they are. The average female wolf is about 90 pounds; and male wolf, 110, and these elk could be 500, 700 pounds.
They run them down and pull them down with their teeth, which is extremely dangerous. Wolves are often injured and killed during this process. Usually the whole pack will chase, but the females tend to be lighter and faster. They’ll run the elk to exhaustion. Then, the larger males will come around and get them by the windpipe, bust the pipe, and that’s the end of the chase. She perfected the art of doing that by herself because she was a lone wolf for an extended period of time after she left her natal pack and went out, looked for her own territory. That’s how she first really came to the attention of her watchers, is that she was so good at taking down an elk by herself. A number of people had never actually seen that before and so that was a phenomenal thing to witness.
She met this pair of yearling brothers who were also out wandering on their own, looking for a territory and a mate. She was two years older than them. They were extremely naïve. It was this puzzle to Rick and Laurie and the other watchers why she decided to hook her wagon to them. I said in the book, they were more like trainees than equal partners when she brought them on. They really didn’t know how to hunt. She basically had to train them as if they were her own pups. She was the unmistakable leader of that pack and continued to be throughout the three years that she ruled over the Lamar Valley.
O-Six was also capable of empathy, as are all wolves. The scenes at the den are just remarkably tender scenes. Empathy is a trait that we associate with people. You might be tempted to say, “well, that’s anthropomorphizing.” But unlike mountain lions or bears or creatures that spend 90 percent of their life alone, wolves spend almost all of their time in the company of other wolves. They learn how to cooperate with other wolves because they hunt collectively, they feed the pups collectively, they defend the territory collectively. The ability to get along with other wolves, to read their emotions and respond accordingly, is a trait that has been selected for, just like speed or that marvelous sense of hearing that they have, or agility or strength. You can see it. You can see it through the scope. You can see wolves taking care of one another and you can see wolves taking care of pups, playing with pups. You can see all kinds of remarkable instances of that in sometimes really surprising in unexpected ways.
So if O-Six and her pack are like the protagonist, who would you describe as the antagonist?
Blakeslee: Well, the book is narrating O-Six’s personal story, but it also leaves the park and it tells the story of this struggle going on in the courts and in Congress over how wolves ought to be managed. The reintroduction program was so successful and wolves spread so far and wide that by, let’s say, 2005, the debate was over whether or not it was time to start hunting them again, whether the program was a success and they no longer needed federal protection and we could allow the states to manage them however they wanted, which inevitably would mean a hunting period. That fight was going on the whole time that we were following the life of O-Six.
It culminates finally in the first legal hunting season in Idaho and Montana and then eventually in Wyoming. I guess you would say the antagonists are those state politicians who never agreed with the policy goal, and bringing wolves back to begin with, and who did everything they could to get them off the endangered species list, to get hunting going just as fast as they could.
Then, I wanted to have the perspective of ranchers and hunters in there, just so the readers could get the full of story the politics around the issue.
[Note: book spoilers follow.]
There was one person in particular, a hunter who lived east of the park in Crandall, and ... I’m not going to beat around the bush. The climax of the book, sadly, is O-Six briefly taking her pack east of the park into this area known as Crandall, this national forest area where hunting is allowed. All the packs in the park will leave the park from time to time; they roam really wide, their range is huge. She happened to take them east of the park during that first legal wolf hunting season in Wyoming. She was one of the first wolves shot in Wyoming legally in 50 years at least.
There was an enormous backlash [after she was shot]. It was in the New York Times. Soon, it was around the world. The world’s most famous wolf shot in Yellowstone. Everybody was talking about whether or not wolves ought to be hunted. It was irresistible for reporters, like who could’ve imagined that one of the first wolves shot during Wyoming’s legal hunting season was the park’s most celebrated animal, arguably the world’s most famous wild animal.
The guy that shot her did not give any interviews. Why is it they kept his name out of the paper? So that he wouldn’t be the next Cecil the Lion killer, maybe. But when I finally came calling, which is about a year and a half to two years later, he had changed his mind and he was ready to talk. He was ready to tell his side of the story. I knew that readers wouldn’t want to hear it.
I know that my reaction and a lot of people’s reaction, when they read in the Times that O-Six had been shot, was, “Who would do such a thing and why?” The only way to answer that question is to find the person that did it and ask them. That’s what I did. He agreed to a series of interviews over the course of the year in his little cabin. It was an extremely surreal experience for him. He shot this wolf just after dawn by himself in one of the remotest places in the lower 48. He had no idea he was shooting a famous animal. He didn’t even know it was Yellowstone wolf. She was wearing a research collar by then, but in the wintertime the collars are hard to see because their coats get really thick. He killed her at like 200 yards. He couldn’t even see the collar. The next day, the whole world is talking about what he did, judging what he did. And so, it was a very surreal experience for him, and very frustrating, and he was ready to talk. His story and his perspective is in the book, too.
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Blakeslee’s book, “American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West” is available now from Crown Books.
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