Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas Smith & GARY FERGUSON

Author:Douglas Smith & GARY FERGUSON [Smith, Douglas & FERGUSON, GARY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Animals, General, Wildlife
ISBN: 9780762785667
Google: U4a51XDu26IC
Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
Published: 2012-04-17T20:33:30+00:00

Even in the research community, not everyone’s pleased about how easy it is to see wolves in Yellowstone. Veteran Canadian wolf biologist Lu Carbyn once commented that Yellowstone has changed the face of the wolf mystique. It used to take tremendous effort to see a wolf, he explained, and now here was Yellowstone, where a person could drive out and find them anytime he wanted. Lu seemed to be suggesting that something was lost, that making the experience of wolves an everyday occurrence, as opposed to something rare as it had been in the “old days,” wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

Many of North America’s best biologists have a great keenness for the wolf research conducted from roughly the late 1930s through the 1970s—an era defined both by an unspoken passion for the wolf itself, as well as by a string of hearty, patient men willing to make long and determined treks by snowshoe through the remote lands of Canada, Alaska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Men like Sigurd Olson and Adolph Murie; Durward Allen, Dave Mech, and Doug Pimlott; Lu Carbyn, John Theberge, Rolf Peterson, and Paul Paquet; Vic Van-Ballenburghe, Robert Stephenson, George Kolenosky, and Gordon Haber, to name a few. It was a time of strong traditions. A period when “wolf meetings” consisted not of two or three hundred people flocking into a convention center, as happens today, but rather a small cadre of biologists huddled around a woodstove in some remote cabin in the North Woods. My own professional work with wolves began toward the end of this era, and as a young upstart, I was well aware of what a privilege it was to be standing in such proud company. Yet even with all that, I’m more convinced than ever that the visibility of Yellowstone’s wolves is by and large a good thing. In fact from where I stand, this unpredicted visibility seems arguably one of the best reasons to have brought wolves back.

The vast majority of what people experience of nature these days, after all, comes from television. And maybe it’s there where Lu’s concerns are most fully realized. Entertaining, and even educational, as it may be, television flattens wildlife watching—purging the physical discomforts, removing all the time normally spent waiting for something to happen. Every inconvenience is left behind on the cutting room floor. The result is often a kind of tepid album of greatest hits, a nonstop string of events that even most of us working in the field see only a handful of times in our lives. While it’s true that wolves show themselves frequently in Yellowstone, their appearance is nonetheless still in the context of the larger wild preserve—uncut, unedited. A person has to at least be willing to make direct contact with nature, to experience an unfolding of life that goes far beyond the animal he’s come to see. In that sense wolf watching in Yellowstone is an experience of nature much as it’s always been.

It’s hard to deny that many people who’ve

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.