In search of wolves

Just head for the valley, get out your binoculars

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

A few miles south, down in the park, the wolves are thriving on a diet of extremely rare elk chops. Forget everything you learned on television about wolves. They do not have small litters of pups in Yellowstone. It is not just the Alpha female who gets to have pups. There are packs of wolves in Yellowstone where every female has had a litter this year, and some of them have had as many as eight and 10 pups. This is unheard of, but so is putting a couple of dozen wolves out in the middle of a few hundred thousand elk who have, apparently, forgotten what wolves are and what wolves do.

Irven DeVore, a distinguished primatologist (the study of apes and other beings like you and me) at Harvard University hooked up with some mammalogists (wolves and elks and also you and me) to visit Yellowstone last winter and had the privilege, if not necessarily the pleasure, of watching a few wolves eat an elk. ``That elk had no idea,'' he remarked, ``that these wolves weren't just oversized coyotes. There wasn't a chase. They just walked up to that elk and ate it.''

Finding a large carnivore in Yellowstone is not as easy as it was in the days when people fed the bears at the roadside. Grizzly bear sightings are remarkable, and a grizzly that stays in view of one of the park's paved roads will stop traffic in both directions for a couple of miles. Wolves have the same effect, but they move around more than grizzlies and seldom stay long enough to attract more than a few hundred automotive naturalists before moving off into the woods or over the ridgeline, out of sight.

With a long day to make a short drive, it seemed like a sensible idea to put away the fishing tackle (Yellowstone, on a bad day, is still the best trout fishing country in the Lower 48) and make a small attempt to find a wolf.

The best country for wolves this summer had been the Yellowstone River valley below the falls and over on a tributary, the Lamar River basin. The reason has more to do with human ability than actual wolf presence. The lower Yellowstone and Lamar valleys are less traveled by automobiles, and the landscape is prairie-like for the most part, not forested.

The plan (even when you're relaxed, it doesn't hurt to have a plan) was simple, just head for the Lamar Valley between the Tower-Roosevelt intersection and where the country pinches in around the road at Soda Butte, park the car, walk up the hillside until you had a sweeping view of the valley, and get out the binoculars and start looking for wolves along the treeline and in the swales where they would be out of sight of the highway but visible to the brave, solitary, resourceful amateur mammalogist, moi. Even with a plan, it is good to be flexible.

Less than halfway from Gardiner to the place I had in mind, the Lamar Valley near Slough Creek Road, I noticed a road sign for something called Blacktail Plateau Drive. It was a one-way dirt road, six miles in length, a second sign explained. No problem.

And halfway down the dirt, a very large coyote ran across the road in front of the car. That is what my brain said: ``Big coyote.'' Like the elk, I hadn't seen a wolf in my life. Well, unlike the elk, I'd seen a couple running around a cage in the London Zoo. Then the brain took a timeout: too huge around. Too tall. Tail too brushy. Shoulders too heavy. A series of ``toos'' added up to wolf.

So, taking a lifetime of wildlife watching experience in hand, I parked the car off the road, got the binoculars, and started scanning the ridgeline toward which my wolf had disappeared. He (she, it, whatever) would have to come up out of the low country and cross that ridge, that's what the well-trained brain said. Another vehicle stopped, and a man and a woman got out with their binoculars. This is what happens in Yellowstone when anyone sees anyone else peering through lenses at the distant vistas. ``Wolf,'' I whispered. ``Went that way.''

A few minutes later, I felt a gentle nudge. ``Wolf,'' the man said in a conversational tone. ``Actually, four of them. Over there. Behind you.'' A long way behind, two or three football fields away, up on a bench were wolves. And suddenly, the brain also remarked that those hadn't been dogs barking, those were wolves having a discussion about where to go to eat what.

We watched wolves for an hour. A couple disappeared, one at a time, over a more distant ridge line. The remaining two did interesting wolf things. They sat down. They sat up. They lay down. They got up. They ignored each other. They sat around together.

It was not as good as watching them eat an elk, I suppose, but it was enormously satisfying. In the entire hour, no more than four cars stopped to not dance with the wolves but to peer at them through binoculars, spotting scopes, and long camera lenses. It was a civil, polite, small crowd. Newcomers would be advised exactly where to look (to the naked eye, the wolves were the size of poppy seeds on the other side of the kitchen table, so to speak).

We departed, one by one, newcomers arrived, one by one, and I am sure that as long as the wolves were visible, someone was there to watch them do their wolf act. We were a happy few, a band of wolf-watchers, with an almost private, and certainly elite, wolf-viewing party on Blacktail Plateau Drive.