Survivor

Nature travel has its drawbacks. Especially when sub-freezing temperatures and snow flurries are part of the picture. But winter in Yellowstone has an upside, too. It8217;s the best time of year to spot wildlife: Bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn antelope, bison, coyotes, even wolves, successfully reintroduced to the park 10 years ago and now its main winter attraction.

We8217;d signed up for a two-day wolf-watching programme that would begin before dawn the next day. But, hey, maybe we could find a wolf or three on our own, we thought, as we drove the icy park road from the north entrance.

As we were gazing at a frozen waterfall, a wolfish face popped up over a snowy berm about eight feet away. Its snout was dusted with crystals of ice. I gasped in delight. Hal clicked off a few frames before it darted away.

Then I spotted a sign half-buried in snow: 8216;8216;Don8217;t harass the coyotes,8217;8217; it read, 8216;8216;for your sake and theirs.8217;8217;

8216;8216;You don8217;t suppose that was a coyote instead of a wolf?8217;8217; Hal asked.

8216;8216;No,8217;8217; I said flatly. 8216;8216;Coyotes don8217;t look that good. They have mangy coats and sort of slink around.8217;8217;

Of course, it was a coyote. They were all coyotes, we learned the next morning in our Winter Wolf Discovery course, which included park accommodations, trailing wolves, and exploring the starkly beautiful Lamar Valley.

8216;8216;Sometimes it8217;s hard to tell the difference,8217;8217; said naturalist Greg Wright, who taught the programme. 8216;8216;Coyotes are smaller, their faces are more pointed; they yip instead of howl. The best clue, though, is that they came near you. A wolf wouldn8217;t. Wolves shy away from people.8217;8217;

But wolves were what we wanted to see. And to see Canis lupus, the planet8217;s largest wild dog, you have to know where to look. Wright did. Within an hour of the 6.15 am start of our class, we saw wolves8212;and heard them too8212;as three packs howled to mark their territories in the pre-dawn light.

The Lamar is wide and open, a long, glacier-scoured basin where large herds of elk and bison forage in the winter for grass, trying to find enough food to survive until spring. Wolves8212;and unforgiving temperatures8212;are their nemesis.

To the east are the 10,000-foot peaks of the Absaroka Range and to the west, near the park8217;s northern entrance, were the spectacular terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, staircases of super-heated geothermal pools that sent clouds of steam into the frigid air.

The main attraction in the Lamar Valley was a family of wolves called the Druid Peak Pack, named after a nearby mountain. Locals dubbed them the 8216;8216;Hollywood wolves8217;8217; because they were featured in two National Geographic TV specials.

Wolves weren8217;t always in such favour in Yellowstone. They were wiped out of the park at about the same time they vanished from the rest of the West, poisoned or shot by bounty hunters or settlers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were classified as an endangered species in the 1970s, but environmentalists had to battle ranchers and hunters for 20 years before the wolves were allowed to roam Yellowstone again.

Ranchers feared they would leave the park and prey on livestock; hunters feared they would deplete the supply of game animals.

In 1995 and 8217;96, biologists captured 31 gray wolves in the Canadian Rockies and set them loose in Yellowstone. The project was an unqualified success. The wolves quickly staked out territory, formed packs and began reproducing. Today there are 169 wolves in 15 packs.

When we arrived in the Lamar Valley in a grey twilight, it was 7 below zero and snowing lightly, but the cold was quickly forgotten. Two wolves were on a ridge high above us; we heard them howling.

8216;8216;Awesome morning for wolf-watching,8217;8217; said Wright, breaking out spotting scopes for us. The howlers were being answered by other wolves that seemed to be northeast of us. When the wolves moved on, we did too.

Although we didn8217;t realise it then, we had arrived at a dramatic time. The female leader of the Druids had been killed that morning in a territorial battle with another pack. Within six months of our visit, her longtime mate, a husky grey wolf named 21, was also found dead.

Douglas Smith, wildlife biologist and director of the park8217;s Wolf Recovery Project, said 21 probably died of natural causes. The pair had led the pack for four years and reared two dozen pups. Their deaths marked the end of an era. 8216;8216;There8217;s an ebb and flow with every pack,8217;8217; said Smith, who has been with Yellowstone8217;s wolves since their reintroduction to the park. 8220;The Druids are at a low ebb: there were 37, now there are seven. But I think the pack will survive.8217;8217;

Just as the other wolves of Yellowstone will survive.

We had come to the park to see fairy tale villains. Instead, we had found heroes of a sort. Survival experts that have thrived despite decades of cruel treatment. Wolves in the wild.

LAT-WP