What Yellowstone Wolves Can Teach Us About Conservation and Why We Need to Learn It Now.

CNN reports today that Sweden will once again cull its fragile wolf population, citing difficulties for people and livestock living in proximity to wolves.

Sweden is an expansive country, with approximately 97% of its land area being uninhabited wilderness. (NCESC).

Given this, one might assume Sweden is teeming with wolves—perhaps thousands of them.

Instead, Sweden, which boasts about 69% forest cover, (NCESC).

has only a few hundred wolves. This scarcity is no accident. In the 1970s, Sweden pushed its wolves to the brink of extinction. Now, as the population struggles to recover, the government has issued permits to cull 10% of these highly threatened animals.

This policy reflects a callous disregard for nature, a failure to learn from past mistakes, and an alarming lack of ecological understanding.

The excerpt below, from my book The Evolution Gap, explores the incredible story of rewilding in Yellowstone National Park and the profound, positive impact the reintroduction of wolves has had on its ecosystem.

Reprinted from The Evolution Gap:

Rewilding often involves the restoration of extinct or displaced species to their native habitats. The Yellowstone National Park story offers an illuminating glimpse into the possibilities of rewilding. Yellowstone was established in 1872 and conceived as a "public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." The preservation or conservation of nature wasn't a consideration.

Initially, the park’s creation delayed the extermination of wolves, sparing them and other predators from the government's predator-control programs for a time. This respite was temporary. Park officials persistently culled wolves from 1915 until 1926. When the last wolf pair was found near Soda Butte Creek and killed, this marked the extinction of wolves within Yellowstone.

There were still occasional wolf sightings, but no consistent or viable wolf population in the park. The last recorded killing took place in May of 1943 when Leo Cottenoir, a Native American sheep herder on the Wind River Reservation, shot a wolf near Yellowstone’s southern border.

The swift, man-made extermination of wolves in Yellowstone parallels the broader story of the Evolution Gap. Changes introduced too rapidly for adequate adaptation give rise to unintended and far-reaching consequences. This echoes our struggle to adapt to the relentless pace of the modern world.

Once the wolves were gone, the elk population ballooned, leading to overbrowsing and wide scale habitat destruction. Initial attempts to manage this issue, such as capturing and relocating the elks, failed. This led to culling, demonstrating the consequences of the artificially created Evolution Gap.

In 1944, renowned wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold advocated for reintroducing wolves into areas such as Yellowstone, where they had been eradicated. Despite the forward-thinking nature of this suggestion, it took several decades to implement, due to opposition. Ranchers worried about the threat wolves posed to their livestock, while well-meaning but misguided environmentalists were apprehensive about the perceived danger wolves represented to smaller predators, such as coyotes and foxes.

A quarter of a century ago, the rewilding of Yellowstone officially commenced with the reintroduction of 31 wolves. The transformation showed the power of rewilding.

The fears that ranchers harbored about wolves preying on their livestock resonates with our reluctance to relinquish some modern comforts. In fact, actual losses to wolf predation were less than 1% of the region's total livestock losses, according to later studies. The fear was mostly unfounded (as is our natural resistance to changes in our diet and lifestyle, such as reducing sugar intake).

With the reintroduction of wolves, Yellowstone's ecosystem underwent several unexpected changes. Initially, elk populations declined more quickly than projected, while coyotes, faced with competition from the reintroduced wolves, had to move to steeper terrains, easing the pressure on the fox population, resulting in an increase in their numbers.

Meanwhile, beavers saw a resurgence, their numbers growing from a single colony in 2001 to ten colonies in 2011. This was largely attributed to changes in elk feeding patterns and a consequent decrease in pressure on willow trees at the river banks. This shift had a ripple effect on other species such as moose, otters, and minks, and led to the creation of new ponds and wetlands. It also assisted in erosion control and water flow regulation.

A study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology revealed that an increase in the bear population followed the reintroduction of wolves. This was because the wolves' leftovers provided a new food source for the bears.

The wolves' return even had an impact on the landscape itself, as Ripple and Beschta found in their 2003 study. Wolves prefer to hunt in open spaces and often use riverbanks to corral their prey. In response, elk had to avoid those areas and the recovering vegetation, and increased beaver activity, reduced erosion and reshaped the waterways, creating new, more stable channels.

Recently, while on the topic of beavers, the United Kingdom has made efforts to reintroduce them after they were hunted to extinction about 400 years ago, mainly for their fur to make hats. Exmoor, a picturesque national park situated between Somerset and Devon, now boasts its first beaver dam in four centuries.

Beavers, which have specialized tails, powerful teeth, and a unique second set of eyelids, thrive in aquatic environments. They prefer deeper waters, so they construct dams and modify waterways. These dams are crucial in regulating water flow, preventing soil erosion, and creating deeper aquatic zones, which in turn foster a richer biodiversity, providing habitats for fish, birds, insects, and various mammals. These beaver-made barriers play a significant role in flood prevention and maintaining water reservoirs during dry spells.

Ben Eardley, the National Trust project manager, highlighted the rapid impact of the beavers' reintroduction. Speaking to the BBC in November 2020, he remarked, "We've already observed kingfishers at the site, and as the beavers continue to expand their dam and pool systems, we anticipate a surge in sightings of other wildlife, encompassing amphibians, insects, bats, and birds."

What do the Yellowstone wolves and British beavers have in common with our discussion? Think of your body as a unique ecosystem, like Yellowstone or Exmoor, an ecosystem that, over recent generations, has been nudged out of its natural equilibrium. Just as rewilding has emerged as a transformative approach in ecosystem restoration and conservation, similar thinking supports our personal quest to harmonize our primal instincts with the complexities of contemporary life and could, perhaps, in that context, be called Personal Rewilding.

Before we explore personal rewilding, it's imperative to understand the basic premise that underpins the concept of rewilding itself. When scientists reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone or beavers to Exmoor, they did so with the knowledge that these animals were an integral part of these ecosystems in the past. To rewild a place, you must understand how it existed before it was thrown out of balance, or in this case, which species were missing.

- Eric Edmeades