Call of the Wild

 

The hair on my neck stood up.

Alone in the dark in Idaho’s Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, I heard a wolf howling near me.  I was on a solo backcountry elk hunt, settling into my primitive camp for the night, when the unmistakable sound rang through the mountains.

It had been many years since the howl of a wolf echoed in these woods, because the species had been extinct here for the past fifty years. But in 1994, a reintroduction program had begun, and I was hearing firsthand the successful results of that effort.

But I was miles from any semblance of civilization, my only light coming from my headlamp and trusty backpacking stove. And just up the canyon in the dark was an apex predator and probably a few members of his family. 

It’s easy to let your mind play tricks on you in these situations. I won’t deny being nervous.

From a young age, we are conditioned to fear the wolf. It begins with stories like the Three Little Pigs, Peter and the Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood. In these childhood tales, we are taught the wolf is a killer. Our conditioning continues into adulthood with stories like The Grey, the action-horror movie starring Liam Neeson in which a pack of wolves mercilessly haunts the steps of six oil workers after their plane crashes in Alaska.

But childhood stories and Hollywood movies are entertainment, not facts. And I knew the facts about wolves, as well as the stories.

I knew from scientific studies that worldwide since 1950 there had only been a handful of humans attacked every year by wolves, about the same number as by the American black bear (and far fewer than by the brown bear). And of those wolf attacks, only a dozen or so resulted in a fatality.

The studies also showed that when an attack did occur, it was rarely because wolves saw humans as prey. Most often they occurred because the wolves were rabid, had been provoked, or had been otherwise conditioned to seek food associated with humans.

So, I knew that when traveling in the backcountry, there are much greater dangers than wolves. I remembered that in the U.S. alone, hornets, wasps, and bees kill about sixty humans per year, and lightning kills another twenty. In fact, bees and lightning kill more humans in one year in the U.S. than all the wolf fatalities combined worldwide going back to 1950.

Certainly, I knew that wolves can be dangerous and should be respected. All wild animals do. But as I recounted the facts, my nervousness soon turned to joy in getting to experience the wilderness as it was before humans tamed it by exterminating wolves. A big smile crossed my face. I loved the howl of the wolf as much as I loved the bugle of the bull elk.

As I crawled into my sleeping bag, I thought about Aldo Leopold, the renowned outdoorsman and conservationist, who wrote poetically about the wolf’s howl, which he heard in the Carson National Forest of New Mexico when he worked there as a forester in the early part of the 20^th century.  Leopold wrote:

Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call.  To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine forest of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet.  Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself.  Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

And at that moment, trying to think objectively about the howl I just heard, I flicked off my headlamp and drifted into a restless sleep filled with dreams of wilderness, wolves, and elk.

Reintroducing wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which includes parts of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, was a radical change of policy for the federal government. In the first half of the 20^th century, federal agents shot, trapped, and poisoned wolves out of existence everywhere in the United States except for Alaska and isolated areas in Minnesota. In Montana, 100,000 wolves were turned in for bounties in one decade alone, and by the 1940s, wolves could no longer be found in the Yellowstone area.

Wolf extermination was official government policy in those days. It was believed to be necessary to protect farming and ranching interests and to promote public safety. Even Aldo Leopold got in on the action as a young forester in New Mexico. He wrote, “In those days, we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.”

But unlike most of his peers, Leopold’s wolf hunting experience proved to be a quasi-scientific discovery and even a spiritual transformation. As a forester, he noted that as wolves were removed from the forests, plants were grazed to the ground by deer and elk. He recognized that healthy ecosystems required biodiversity, which included wolves. In addition, as a philosophical man, he came to realize that ethically, wolves – indeed all plants and animals – had an intrinsic right to life.

Leopold’s views presaged and even inspired a conservation ethic that over time grew into a movement to reintroduce wolves to many of the areas from which they had been exterminated, including Idaho. By the mid-1980s, a family of wolves trekked down from Canada and established themselves in Glacier National Park in Montana. At that time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service floated the idea of formally reintroducing wolves into the United States under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was enacted in 1973. It passed overwhelmingly in the House and Senate and was signed by President Richard Nixon who said, “This is an environmental awakening. Wild things constitute a treasure to be protected and cherished for all time.” The ESA required the recovery of endangered and threatened species by relying on the best science available.

By the time of its passage, the United States had already lost the great auk, the Carolina parakeet, and the passenger pigeon. It was in danger of losing the bald eagle, peregrine falcon, California condor, and gray wolf. The decline of the bald eagle (the country’s national symbol), however, is what provoked the nation into saving American wildlife.

But it wasn’t until 1994 that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbit, finally approved a plan to officially bring wolves back to Yellowstone National Park and to central Idaho. The plan called for the release of thirty-one Canadian gray wolves into Yellowstone and thirty-five into central Idaho. Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness received eleven of those, while the area near Salmon, Stanley, and Indian Creek, Idaho, received the other twenty-four.

The reintroduction was wildly successful. The wolves quickly adapted to their new habitat, which was rich in prey, and began to mate and reproduce. In Idaho, within three years, the wolves established ten breeding pairs and numbered one hundred individuals, far above initial recovery goals.

But in the beginning, the program’s success was far from certain, more because of political than ecological reasons. In early 1995, the Idaho Legislature rejected the Wolf Recovery and Management Plan that was put forth by its own Legislative Wolf Oversight Committee. The plan would have allowed Idaho Fish and Game to take a leading role in wolf recovery in Idaho, in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This surprised no one, given Idaho’s ultra-conservative politics – dominated by farming, ranching, mining, and lumber interests. In addition, Idaho’s hunters decried the introduction with the argument that it would lead to the cataclysmic decline of the state’s elk herds, the most popular big game animal in the state. The prevailing attitude of the anti-wolf advocates was “shoot, shovel, and shut up” – shorthand for kill all wolves, bury them, and don’t tell anyone.

Without a state partner to lead the way, Idaho’s wolf recovery was in jeopardy of failing before it even got started.

Fortunately, the Nez Perce Tribe stepped in to assume the lead role in the state. Because of the tribe’s connection to wolves and history of coexistence with them, it was more than willing to engage on wolf reintroduction. And the tribe took pride in protecting a species with which it had previously shared a homeland. The Nez Perce Tribe’s positive attitude couldn’t have been more different than that found in Idaho’s capital, and it literally saved the state’s wolf reintroduction program.

With a partner finally in place, Idaho’s wolf reintroduction took off without the help of the state’s own fish and game department. The rest, as they say, is history.

By 2023, Idaho counted more than 1,200 wolves in the state. The reintroduction, in fact, has been so successful that the gray wolf is no longer even listed under the ESA. Although coming late to the party, the Idaho Fish and Game is now successfully managing gray wolves in accordance with state management plans, under which its wolf populations have remained secure and well above recovery objectives.

There is, of course, a risk of oversimplifying a complex subject involving the wolf-elk-human relationship. But it does not appear that the cataclysmic decline of the elk herd which was predicted by hunters has materialized. According to Idaho Fish and Game statistics, the elk harvest has grown by a whopping sixty-eight percent, from about 15,500 in the year 2000 to more than 26,000 in 2024.

But the gray wolf is not the only success story written by the Endangered Species Act. The bald eagle, peregrine falcon, California condor, whooping crane, Hawaiian monk seal, Oregon chub, and Apache trout are all species that have been brought back from the brink of extinction because of sound environmental and scientific initiatives carried out under the authority of the ESA. In fact, a 2019 scientific study found the ESA has prevented the extinction of 291 species since 1973, and 54 of those species have sufficiently recovered to be removed from the endangered and threatened list altogether.

Despite its overwhelming success in preventing the extinction of species, however, the ESA is needed now more than ever. Scientists believe the current species extinction rate is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate – that is, the speed of extinction that would occur if humans were not around. This phenomenon has become known as the “sixth mass extinction,” which, unlike previous extinction events caused by natural phenomena (like the dinosaurs being wiped out by an asteroid), the sixth mass extinction is driven by human activity, primarily the unsustainable use of air, land, and water, as well as climate change due to factors such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Relatives of the gray wolf – the Mexican gray wolf and red wolf – are among the species most critically endangered with extinction. In 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated there were only 286 Mexican gray wolves remaining in the wild in Arizona and New Mexico. This population is the result of the capture of some of the last remaining Mexican gray wolves in the wild in Mexico and a binational captive breeding program between the United States and Mexico.

The red wolf is in even worse shape than the Mexican gray wolf and is the most endangered wolf in the world. It was once widespread throughout the Southeastern United States. Today, however, the only known wild population – about 20 individuals – is found on the Albemarle Peninsula in North Carolina. The primary threats to the red wolf population are habitat loss, illegal hunting, motor vehicle collisions, and hybridization with coyotes.

Just when it is needed most, though, the ESA is under threat – not from the usual suspects of farmers, ranchers, logger, miners, and misinformed hunters, but from the federal government itself. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a national energy emergency, an order that specifically targeted the ESA in order to undermine it. The order stated, among other things, that the ESA cannot stand as an obstacle to the extraction of energy sources such as crude oil, natural gas, uranium, and coal.

In furtherance of Trump’s anti-wildlife agenda, Brian Nesvick, Trump’s pick to be the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (responsible for protecting the nation’s fish and wildlife and their habitat on public lands), has proposed to rescind the definition of “harm” under the ESA. Rescinding the definition of “harm” would result in habitat modification or destruction no longer being considered a violation of the ESA, as those actions are defined today.

The term “harm” is found in the ESA’s statutory definition of “take,” and for decades has been defined through regulation as any action that either kills or seriously injures protected wildlife through actions that include habitat modification. Removing the regulatory definition of “harm” would ultimately redefine what constitutes “take” of a species.

The proposal is likely to become finalized next year, and “take” of a species would no longer include activities that modify or degrade species habitat as long as species are not directly killed or injured. The term “take,” however, would still prohibit activities that directly injure or kill wildlife.

Nesvick’s proposal is nothing but a land grab for oil and gas, timber, mining, farming, and ranching interests. By eliminating habitat destruction as a cause of action under the ESA, corporate interests will be much freer to engage in land-use activities that affect protected species habitat.

The fact is, however, there is no actual national energy emergency. According to the U.S. Energy Information Association (EIA), the U.S. produced a record amount of energy in 2024, more than 103 quadrillion British thermal units, which itself was a one percent increase over the previous record set in 2023. The EIA wrote, “Several energy sources—natural gas, crude oil, natural gas plant liquids, biofuels, solar, and wind—each set domestic production records last year.”

Trump’s national energy emergency executive order was simply a lie designed to undermine the Endangered Species Act. “Drill, baby, drill,” Trump promised his supporters on the campaign trail, and his executive order, coupled with Nesvick’s assistance, helped fulfill that promise.

The problem with Trump’s and Nesvick’s attack on the ESA is that a single species interacts with many other species to produce healthy ecosystems which benefit people. The extinction of a single species can have a ripple effect on critical ecological functions that support human life – factors such as a stable climate, predictable regional precipitation patterns, clean air and water, and productive farmland and fisheries.

The renowned naturalist John Muir famously captured these associations when he wrote, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” This is the same principle Aldo Leopold articulated when he wrote about the negative effects of wolf removal on the mountain ecosystems of New Mexico.

Trump and Nesvick have a different view of nature than Muir and Leopold did. To Trump and others like them, nature is subordinate to humans and exists solely for human use and benefit. Trump’s view is nothing new, and, in fact, it has largely been the land ethic humans have pursued for most of history. Leopold labeled it the “Abrahamic view,” and expressed it elegantly as the following: “Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham's mouth.” To Trump and Nesvick, milk and honey are corporate profits.

And so, after more than fifty years of successfully protecting endangered and threatened wildlife, the Endangered Species Act itself is in danger. Nesvick’s proposal will undoubtedly be challenged in the courts, but should it prevail (as is likely), the nation will face a scenario in which a few corporations benefit and profit from the destruction of species at the expense of everyone else as well as the natural world.

And once again, we may not know the call of the wild.

 

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