“This is likely natural variation due to a combination of factors including a possible disease outbreak,” the report says. Canine distemper has killed pups here in past summers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where the 41 came from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Go back a century and there were none. The Park Service quit killing predators in 1926, and by then Yellowstone didn’t have one wolf pack left, Park Service biologist Douglas W. Smith wrote in the project’s 1997 annual report<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first 14 gray wolves (Canis lupus) showed up in 1995 from Alberta. They sat in acclimation pens for 10 weeks before the park let them out, and they became the Crystal Creek, Rose Creek and Soda Butte packs. British Columbia sent 17 more in 1996. The other 10 were Montana pups, taken from a pack in the state’s northwest corner that had been broken up for going after livestock. So, 14 plus 17 plus 10: that’s the famous 41.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was supposed to be more. A 1994 plan figured on Canadian shipments for up to five years, but Smith wrote that by 1997 the newcomers were having more pups and dying less than anyone had bet on, and the extra trips got scrapped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Isle Royale, for what it’s worth, went the smaller route, and its wolves were rebuilt from 19 animals<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wapiti Lake is the big one, 18 wolves, and here’s the odd bit: zero pups. Up on the northern range, 8 Mile and Rescue Creek each finished 2025 at 16, Junction Butte at 15 and Bliss Pass at 6. In the interior, Mollie’s had 7 and Cougar Creek had 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there’s the 1470F group, two wolves that formed a group in early summer and go by the ID number of wolf 1470F. Meanwhile the Dunanda Falls pack moved off toward Idaho and Wyoming, and Hawk’s Rest just fell apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Somebody has to go look at all this on foot. During a single 30-day stretch in March 2025, the crew hiked or skied 686 miles (1,104 kilometers) to check 623 GPS clusters. A cluster, for a wolf, means its collar pinged two or more times within 100 meters (about 328 feet) over three days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wolves killed 153 animals that staff found that year. Seventy-two were elk and 41 were bison, a bigger slice of the menu (26.8 percent) than in any of the last 31 years. In one Park Service photo the Junction Butte wolves are feeding on a bison that dropped into a deep water hole, with older bones lying around what the report calls a “terrain trap.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for elk, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks counted 7,226 in the Northern Yellowstone herd from a helicopter in April 2025, most of them (6,124) outside the park. It’s a minimum, and still the biggest tally since 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s where it gets prickly. In February 2025, William Ripple of Oregon State University led a paper in Global Ecology and Conservation reporting that willow crown volume at 25 streamside sites jumped 1,500 percent from 2001 to 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our findings emphasize the power of predators as ecosystem architects,” Ripple said in a statement<\/a>. His own release did admit “not all sites are recovering.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Utah State University wildlife ecologist Daniel MacNulty and colleagues answered in the same journal. Their complaint, roughly, is that the volumes were worked out from willow height and then predicted from height, which they say makes the link “mathematically guaranteed to look strong even if no biological change occurred.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “But our re-analysis shows their conclusion is invalid because it relies on circular reasoning and violations of basic modeling assumptions,” MacNulty said in a release<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of those willow numbers trace back to fieldwork by Hobbs, Cooper and colleagues. Starting in 2001 they put up fences to keep browsers off some plots and built fake beaver dams on others. Twenty years on, a Colorado State summary<\/a> of their January 2024 paper in Ecological Monographs says, the willows only grew tall where they had both: dams and no browsing. Keeping elk down is “a necessary but not sufficient condition to restore willow stands in Yellowstone,” it says. And bison got abundant as elk declined, so the nibbling never really stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n David Cooper, now an emeritus senior research scientist at Colorado State, signed onto the critique as well. “The data instead support a more modest and spatially variable response influenced by hydrology, browsing, and local site conditions,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody pretended cattle and sheep would be safe. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the released wolves as “nonessential experimental” under the Endangered Species Act, which gave managers wiggle room, and planners expected wolves to eat some of the region’s 412,000 livestock. In 1997 alone they killed 68 sheep and 6 cows, and seven wolves were legally killed for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The boundary still bites. Of six collared wolves that died in 2025, hunters in Montana legally shot 1507F and 1479F, and 1331F got caught in an illegal snare at the south end of Paradise Valley. Other wolves killed two. Old 1048M died of organ failure at nearly 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our goal is to clarify the evidence, not downplay the role of predators,” MacNulty said.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yellowstone wolves totaled 84 on December 31, 2025, by the National Park Service’s count, and the photo that best sums … <\/p>\nWho’s out there now<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/yellowstone-wolves-reintroduction-packs-elk-willows-2.jpg\")
The willow argument<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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