In 2011 wolves were finally delisted from the Endangered Species Act, quietly pushed through the halls of power in Washington by a democratic senator facing re-election in a marginal Montanan seat. "Wolves were definitely thrown under the bus for political reasons," says Mike Leahy from Defenders of Wildlife, a powerful conservation advocacy group that strongly opposes the delisting of wolves." I think the Obama administration responded to the politics of the situation. Never before had a Secretary of the Interior taken a step to undermine the Endangered Species Act like this... the democratic leadership in the Obama administration all went along with that. We were really disappointed in how the politics played out there."
The loss of 832F was felt around the world, but also, surprisingly, in the midst of Montana itself. Nathan Varley and his wife, Linda, are a couple whose economic survival is intricately intertwined with that of the wolves. But unlike those in the elk hunting industry, Nathan and Linda need wolves alive. Growing up within the park community Nathan knows Yellowstone better than most, working first as a wolf biologist and then seven years ago setting up a wolf watching eco-tourism company, one of several to have sprouted up in the wake of growing national and international interest after wolves were reintroduced. Today Nathan and Linda take small groups of tourists on foot into the park, relying on expert knowledge and careful reading of conditions to guide paying members of the public to witness the spectacle of wolves in the wild. 
But what makes this places special is the way in which ranchers have grouped together to learn to live with wolves. This is the Blackfoot challenge, a community-centered initiative using science, sound management and a healthy dose of common sense, to help ranchers co-exist as best they can with grizzles, and in recent years, with the wolf. 
Jim Stoner, rancher and Blackfoot Challenge Founder, crouches down on the hill side, furiously hammering away at the frozen earth to anchor in another pole with which to suspend the fladdry he has just unrolled from the back of his RV; handkerchief-sized pieces of red fabric flapping off a single electronically charged wire. "If a neighboring ranch has a problem with wolves we can load this machine up and go down and we can deploy a mile or two of this product in short of an hour... you know it's a new product and people kind of look at it and go wow that's kind of crazy... but we've seen it work ourselves. We've seen wolves on one side of it and our cows on the other," he says grinning.Wolves were once federally protected but now can be hunted again, making the fate and future of the wolf more controversial than ever. UK journalist Jim Wickens reports from Wyoming and Montana to provide his unique insight into the wolf wars of the West. His blog accompanies the exclusive Earth Focus report, Shades of Gray: Living with Wolves, now online!
A sharp intake of breath. The bow tightens. A momentary silence, and then a whip-like crack as a silicon-tipped arrow flies, hammering into a tree trunk 30 meters away with a determined thud. We are with the president of Helena Bow hunters, a proud organization of local people who hunt down elk, deer, mountain lions, and even bears with just a bow and arrow. Reviled by animal rights advocates, bow hunters are a fairly cautious lot. But after a lot of effort we managed to track down the president to ask about wolves.
As anyone who has ever lived abroad will attest to, the international media love to frame US hunters as a uniform bunch of tea-party, gun-toting, trophy-chasing elderly white men from Texas. Forgive the painfully simplistic stereotype, but I'm sure you get the point.
Predictably perhaps, I was in for a shock. In our naivety, we hadn't been expecting a woman, let alone a nurse in a beat-up old car, to be meeting us at the archery range on the outskirts of Helena. With a wide smile and a contagious fire in her eyes, Joelle Silk then spent the next two hours shooting down the stereotypes that cling to attitudes regarding hunting in the US. A deep knowledge of Montanan forest ecology, a passion for the outdoors and a distinct humbleness marked out Joelle from anything I was expecting to find. For the last 20 years she has immersed herself in traditional bow hunting, a past-time that requires the hunter to get within 30 yards of their quarry, requiring immense skill, patience and dedication. Joelle had got involved with hunting two decades ago when she worked for the national park service, seeing it as a way to feed herself with a limited income. And she was quick to explain that for many people in Montana who live on below average national income, the bagging of an elk or deer can keep a family fed for months. There are people out hunting for trophies, but for Joelle and indeed almost every interviewee we had met in Montana, the annual 'elk tag' fee that people buy over the counter enables people to eat a meat that is natural, hormone-free and a world-away from the factory-farm hell where the majority of meat and dairy on sale in American supermarkets comes from.
The problem is that wolves like elk too. A lot. Since wolves were introduced to Yellowstone the elk herd has dramatically reduced. It is, according to wolf advocates, a 'leaner but meaner elk herd' that we see today in Montana. But there is no doubt that the huge herd sizes have gone and that elk have dispersed around the state. Ordinary blue-collar folk in Montana are finding it harder to locate the elk, and so it is not surprising that they feel threatened by wolves, a species that is now competing with them for the cheapest, healthiest and arguably the most ethical source of meat in the state. Earlier on in the day I had spent time chatting with a middle-aged Montanan couple sat in the booth next to us in a diner. The lady said that when her kids were growing up, she wouldn't have known how they would have got by were it not for the free meat that wild-elk in the freezer provided.
However understandable these fears might be, fish and game authority figures do suggest otherwise: the elk herd in Montana is currently at or even above the desired size of 150,000 animals, and that is with a wolf pack in excess of 600 animals. But there does seem to be little doubt that wolves are dispersing elk, breaking them into smaller groups and dispersing them out of traditional grounds, basically making the chase just a little bit harder for would-be hunters and home providers.
Joelle doesn't seem too worried about this, but adds that her members are simply relieved that finally Montanans can begin to manage wolf numbers through a legalized wolf hunt, as they do any other species from ungulates through to bob cats or mountain lions.
As I have come to learn over this last week, for outsiders looking into this debate, the empowerment aspect of the Rocky mountain wolf hunts should not be underestimated. Numbers aside, and irrespective of the ethics of hunting carnivores such as wolves with traps, guns, or bows; paradoxically it seems to me that wolves may just stand a better chance of acceptance within Montana precisely because they can be legally hunted and killed.
Although she won't admit it on camera, I suspect that Joelle might be one of many secretly hoping that wolves remain in Montana for a long time to come.
Read the previous installment of Jim's wolf blog, "An Unexpected Lurch to the Left."
Jim Wickens is one of Britain's leading investigative journalists and the co-founder of both the Ecologist Film Unit and also Ecostorm, the environmental media agency. Jim has spend the last decade documenting unreported issues around the world, including exposing illicit whale-meat smuggling networks in Japan, filming the brutal Namibian seal hunt, documenting soya-related murders and poisoning in Argentina, breaking the story of fracking problems in the US, and filming illegal trawlers far out to sea on the Burmese border.
Wolves were once federally protected but now can be hunted again, making the fate and future of the wolf more controversial than ever. UK journalist Jim Wickens reports from Wyoming and Montana to provide his unique insight into the wolf wars of the West. His blog accompanies the exclusive Earth Focus report, Shades of Gray: Living with Wolves, now online!
I had forgotten that the snowy bend we were approaching was, in fact, a sheet of black ice. Jet lag, long hours, and perhaps an innate anglo tendency to drive on the left, all played in the factors that led me to overlook this. What followed was a slow-motion skid -- I turned the wheel right, but our car had other ideas, sliding gracefully off the road and into a meter-deep ditch, clanging with the fencing as we hit. Cameraman Brian of course, as with all camera operators the world over, was more worried about his gear than any physical damage his own body might have sustained in a car crash. Instead of a warm shower and a hot dinner back in Helena, we were now face down at a 45 degree angle, in a ditch, in the dark, half way up a snowy mountain. It was going to be a long night.
Earlier that day we had met with a remarkable young rancher called Garl.
Welcomed onto his ranch, we spent the afternoon with him plodding around a snowy field full of jet-black Angus cattle. As with many ranching operations in the Rockies, Garl rents huge swathes of upland pasture from the government, paying a peppercorn rent in order to let his cattle graze out the summer in the high plains and woods, before coming back down in the fall and being shipped off to feedlots. Several years ago though, Garl began to notice his counts were dropping and he suspected wolves were to blame.
But for Garl, wolf losses are part of a much bigger problem: what he sees as a predatory dominance of the packing industry by a small handful of companies who effectively dictate market access and cattle prices across Montana. It is a corporate grip that has squeezed his family's livelihood for generations. Garl began to think outside the box, changing the ranch into grassland beef operation and in recent years building a slaughter and processing plant on the farm. The family get more money from their value-added beef processing plant and the animals get an enormously better deal too living out their lives on grass, instead of the brutal journeys south to feedlot CAFOs that so many cattle in this state take every fall.
But what does this mean for wolves? Situated 30 miles as the crow flies -- or rather as the wolf runs -- from Yellowstone, Garl knows that wolves aren't going to disappear anytime soon, so he has begun to develop an upland farming system that he thinks is better both for the wildlife and also for his cattle numbers. He now rotates the animals, keeping them in smaller areas at a time rather than simply turfing them out for months. The result this summer has been a marked decrease in unexplained stock deaths and it's not hard to see why, he says. The ranch hands can now keep an eye on the cattle better, and the herd itself has begun to behave as more of a pack, operating together to ward off predators in a markedly different way than they did when they were dispersed and isolated.
The system Garl is innovating promotes locally produced grass-fed meat, prevents over-grazing in the uplands and effectively allows for large carnivores to better co-exist alongside his animals. It's early days but the results so far seem to suggest that the fortunes of his livestock, of the wolves and indeed of his family pocket book, may all be turning around for the better.
Hours later, in the dark, in the ditch, and waiting for the pick-up truck to pull our damaged car back onto the road, I reflect upon what we have witnessed. A Rocky-mountain rancher who clearly recognizes that the impact of wolves on his livestock operation is but a small and diversionary part of a much wider and more profoundly urgent discussion regarding the economic disempowerment of livestock producers within the US by corporate agribusiness.
Garl is an insightful and compelling voice on this issue, but not one that the mainstream media would normally give space to, drowned out amidst the bombastic rhetoric that surrounds wolves on both sides. It is a hysteria that in my mind seems to be precluding a wider discussion about agriculture today: a debate where the predatory feeding habits of corporate agri-giants on family farms in America, finally get as much attention as that of the Yellowstone wolves.
Read the next installment of Jim's wolf blog, "Stalking Stereotypes."
Read the previous installment of Jim's wolf blog, "The Blackfoot Challenge."
Jim Wickens is one of Britain's leading investigative journalists and the co-founder of both the Ecologist Film Unit and also Ecostorm, the environmental media agency. Jim has spend the last decade documenting unreported issues around the world, including exposing illicit whale-meat smuggling networks in Japan, filming the brutal Namibian seal hunt, documenting soya-related murders and poisoning in Argentina, breaking the story of fracking problems in the US, and filming illegal trawlers far out to sea on the Burmese border.
Wolves were once federally protected but now can be hunted again, making the fate and future of the wolf more controversial than ever. UK journalist Jim Wickens reports from Wyoming and Montana to provide his unique insight into the wolf wars of the West. His blog accompanies the exclusive Earth Focus report, Shades of Gray: Living with Wolves, now online!
We're having coffee in the welcoming warmth of a rancher's home. Tracey, Sheila, and their two young sons sit with us, a friendly family of busy Rocky mountain ranchers who have made time to talk with us before rushing off to watch their son in a sports game.
Ranching in Montana had no space for romanticism. Even their youngest son aged 10, tells me straight that he wishes the wolves weren't here. In years gone by, the family describe how the bumper sticker regarding wolves round these parts was typically a variation of the "3 S's" -- the "shoot, shovel, and shut up" philosophy, adopted by exasperated ranchers who had been driven to despair at not being able to protect their livestock with lethal control, even if wolves were worrying them.
They love the wildlife, Sheila explained, trying to convey the difficult position that ranchers have found themselves in over the last decade. Five years ago however, she said, even if she had accidentally killed a wolf, she wouldn't have wanted to mount the animal in her living room, but rather run it over again and again, such was the level of frustration. It's not hard to understand why. The ability to protect one's livestock is a basic right of self-defence for ranchers the world over. And as we are hearing on this journey, the federal interference that for so many years prevented ranchers from shooting wolves in order to protect their herds effectively disempowered them, which in turn seems to have bred a deeper resentment of the federal government, and of the wolf.
Remarkably however, the Blackfoot Challenge is quietly changing all of that. It consists of a group of people who have come together to find ways to live with wolves. "They are here to stay, so you can either get mad or do something about it," says Jim Stoner, a joke-cracking, sparkly-eyed rancher and a pivotal figure behind the Blackfoot challenge. Jim oozes enthusiasm while he demonstrates one of the ways that they are reducing livestock deaths in the valley. It's called fladry, an odd word for a simple idea: long reams of electric wire with bits of red tape. They don't know exactly why it works, but it does -- the wolves don't cross the lines, he tells us, and vulnerable livestock are protected as a result.
Locked onto the back of his quad bike, his mobile fladry machine serves as the equivalent of a rapid response unit in the valley. When wolves are getting close to livestock, the Challenge folk are quick to roll out reams of this flapping electrically charged wire, quickly sending hungry and opportunistic wolves scurrying back into the woods. The wire is part of a bigger picture: a complex tapestry interweaving science and stewardship that covers everything from GPS tracking and range riders who follow the wolves in the valley, giving weekly movement reports to farmers, through to better stock fencing and carcass removal from fields.
Predicting the behavior of an animal as wily as the wolf is not easy. It's a complex unpredictable interface says Seth, but it's not rocket science, and most importantly, it seems to be working. Since 2008 in an area of 800,000 acres only 3.2 livestock have been confirmed to be killed by wolves each year, an astonishing statistic for such a wide valley with 10 packs of wolves living within it. These results are at odds with the kind of car crash figures for wolf and livestock deaths reported in neighboring valleys. Seth is keen to point out that trust and humility in his work within the Blackfoot Valley is the most important factor of all here, as he works to bridge a long-established and historically bitter divide between government scientists and land owners.
Elsewhere on this trip we have found deep-seated resentment of the federal government and 'their' wolf introduction program. What I found so remarkable about the Blackfoot today however, is that in the midst of this supposedly state-wide hostility, hundreds of farmers are managing to live alongside dozens of wolves relatively peacefully. But that's not all, as Jim explains smiling. What has happened is that in the face of adversity from wolves and grizzlies, the community has actually come together much closer than they were beforehand. "Wolves," says Jim, "are an opportunity."
Read the next installment of Jim's wolf blog, "An Unexpected Lurch to the Left."
Read the previous installment of Jim's wolf blog, "Coal Smoke and Cattle Sales."
Jim Wickens is one of Britain's leading investigative journalists and the co-founder of both the Ecologist Film Unit and also Ecostorm, the environmental media agency. Jim has spend the last decade documenting unreported issues around the world, including exposing illicit whale-meat smuggling networks in Japan, filming the brutal Namibian seal hunt, documenting soya-related murders and poisoning in Argentina, breaking the story of fracking problems in the US, and filming illegal trawlers far out to sea on the Burmese border.
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