Rocky Mountain Massacre:
It had been a long and bloody winter for wolves living on the park’s northern border, and it wasn’t over yet. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, the wolf known as 1233 crossed the invisible line separating Yellowstone’s protected lands from the national forest territory of Southwest Montana. A shot rang out.
When park officials visited the scene, they found a pool of blood, crimson on the fallen snow, just outside the Yellowstone boundary line. The wolf’s body was gone.
For years, Montana had imposed strict quotas limiting the number of wolves hunters could kill in the two districts north of Yellowstone. Last year, those restrictions were lifted. Hunters gathered along the park’s border in anticipation.
The first killings were reported less than a week after the season opened in September: two 8-month-old pups and a yearling. They were members of the Junction Butte pack, the most famous wolves on Earth. Living embodiments of one of the most celebrated conservation comeback stories of all time, their very existence helped make 2021 Yellowstone’s busiest year on record.
Doug Smith was in his office in Mammoth, Wyoming, home base for Yellowstone staff, when the news came. Smith has been with the Yellowstone Wolf Project since the beginning, serving as senior biologist and head of the program for 24 of its 27 years. He was surprised and troubled. The killings had started so soon. Being late summer, the wolves’ fur was still light and ratty — without the luxuriant winter coat, it had no economic value. What’s more, the pups had never left the pack before. “Their first movements and they’re dead,” Smith told me. “It was hard to take.”
“The level of mortality is historic and catastrophic. And I’m worried about next winter, because the thing is, compromise and reasonability seems to be gone.”
Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly assured a worried public that the park was working with Montana officials to reinstate the quotas. The reinstatement never came. When Montana’s hunting season ended in March, the state’s game agency reported 273 wolves killed. The National Park Service counted 25 Yellowstone wolves among the dead, with 19 killed in Montana, all in the hunting districts where the quotas had been lifted, as well as four in Wyoming and two in Idaho.
Roughly a fifth of Yellowstone’s wolf population was gone, with one pack seemingly eliminated entirely. It was a death toll unlike anything Smith and his colleagues had seen since wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies in the 1990s. “The level of mortality is historic and catastrophic,” he said. “And I’m worried about next winter, because the thing is, compromise and reasonability seems to be gone.”
Completely unharmed
