Laura Lundquist, Chronicle Staff Writer
GARDINER – A gray wolf crouched at the crest of Junction Butte in Yellowstone National Park early Monday morning, her attention focused on the valley below.
Yellowstone wolf biologist Doug Smith said the wolf and three or four others trotting through the trees belonged to the Junction Butte Pack.
The wolf raised her head to voice a lazy howl, to the pleasure of about three dozen human observers peering through spotting scopes from the road.
Almost half of the observers were veteran wildlife professionals, many now retired, who came together for the first time exactly 20 years ago.
That’s when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nonprofit groups and park employees transplanted what would eventually be a total of 66 gray wolves into Idaho and the park.
On Monday, the group returned to the park to celebrate that effort and see the fruits of their work two decades on.
Their excited chatter was silenced as a second and then a third howl rose from the valley. All the spotting scopes swung together in the direction of the howls, and people started counting wolves as the howling chorus continued for a few minutes.
Eleven wolves materialized in the valley, and the word passed that they belonged to the Prospect Pack.
The two packs kept their distance, observing an unseen boundary between their territories.
People who watch park wolves on almost a daily basis joined in and later said they hadn’t observed so many wolves and such interaction in a long time. Smith agreed.
“We were a whisker away from not seeing anything,” Smith said. “This is a good day. It’s almost like karma.”
An hour later, the group gathered under the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance of the park for a small ceremony to mark the day.
“Twenty years ago, few of us thought it would happen. This may not ever happen again,” Smith said.
On Jan. 12, 1995, a horse trailer with eight wolves, the first of 35 from Fort St. John, British Columbia, passed under that same arch, the culmination of several years of preparation, environmental studies and lawsuits.
In the end, it was a Republican senator from Idaho, James McClure, who carried legislation, starting in 1990, to reintroduce the wolf, and a Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who helped it through, as long as wolves could be shot outside the park.
John Varley, former director of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, credited former National Park Service Director Bill Mott, then 82 years old, with taking up the torch in 1988.
“I don’t know what we would have done without Bill Mott – he sold it. I wish he could have been around to see the wolves going through the arch,” Varley said.
What is karma to Smith is a curse to some in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, who still don’t want wolves on the landscape.
Ranchers, hunters and outfitters sometimes vehemently oppose wolf management even after the initiation of wolf hunting and trapping. They still want wolf population numbers to be knocked down to about 300 in the three states.
But Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife pointed out that was the minimum to allow wolves to survive under state management, not the maximum.
She quoted former USFWS wolf recovery coordinator Ed Bangs and his thoughts on the Endangered Species Act.
“He compared the ESA to an ambulance used to get the critically endangered patient, the wolf, to the hospital, which was the states. In Idaho, the wolf arrived and the first thing they did was try to turn the wolf back into a critically endangered patient. That’s not recovery,” Stone said.
In 2013, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks reported a minimum number of about 630 wolves and 28 packs with breeding pairs.
Idaho residents and politicians have been more aggressive, killing wolves in hunting derbies and state-sponsored eliminations of packs.
Stone said in Idaho, she’s seen more animosity to wolves in the last three years since the hunting season began than 20 years ago.
“We’ve gone from 1,000 wolves to around 550. Yet there’s a push to reduce the numbers to 100 or 150,” Stone said.
Some Montanans feel the same way.
Montanans in Sanders County will hold their own wolf and coyote hunt this weekend.
Carter Niemeyer, a former Wildlife Services wolf trapper who helped with the introduction, said opponents still raise the same claims that the wolves are a different species, carry disease and have extreme impacts on cattle and elk. It’s just that now those opponents are also in Oregon and Washington as wolves colonize regions farther west.
“There’s a certain component that doesn’t accept wolves. And it runs deeper than wolves, to property rights and anti-government feelings. I don’t know if there’s any public relations that could have been done to change that,” Niemeyer said.
But the people in attendance on Monday always wanted wolves, even knowing what they were up against.
Former park interpreter Norm Bishop said that during the 1990s, he got into the habit of saying, “If wolves are reintroduced…” when he spoke to various groups.
Then while talking to a school group in 1999, he started to say that and stopped himself as the realization hit him that he no longer needed to say “If.”
“There was about 30 seconds there before I could recover myself,” Bishop said. “We had done it.”