After months of investigation, the state agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, found no evidence of wolves in the area at all.

Yet when the news of the cattle deaths went public last October, the agency issued a press release stating it was “investigating a report of dead domestic cow calves on White River National Forest lands near Meeker that show damage consistent with wolf depredation.”

A month later, the agency’s Northwest regional manager testified before the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission that though some of the cattle had injuries that appeared to come from wolves, he added: “It’s perplexing; it’s confusing; it’s frustrating, trying to figure out exactly what occurred in this incident.” The story of wolves as the culprits, however, made national headlines.

Wolves are coming back to the state naturally and because in 2020, the public passed Prop 114, mandating restoration of wolves by the end of this year. Through a Colorado Open Records Act request, the Humane Society of the United States obtained documents and photos about the livestock deaths, and shared them with Carter Niemeyer, an expert on wolf-livestock conflict. He is also a member of the state’s Technical Working Group on wolf restoration.

In his February 14 report, Niemeyer found that “the evidence at Meeker is inconsistent with wolf attacks.” Niemeyer and veterinarians concluded that the cattle more likely died from “brisket disease,” which commonly afflicts cattle living at high altitudes.

Misunderstandings like this one, which lasted weeks, aren’t helpful. Do wolves ever come into conflict with livestock? Yes, but it is relatively rare. In the Northern Rockies where wolves are established, they account for less than 1% of cattle losses. Disease, birthing problems, weather and theft take nine times as many cattle than all predators combined, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

In Washington state, which is home to at least 33 wolf packs after nearly 15 years of wolf recovery, more than 80% of the packs have no conflict with livestock in an average year. 

Overall, the threat of wolves to the livestock industry is negligible. For the few livestock producers who are impacted by wolves, it is, of course, economically painful and time consuming.

But options exist for ranchers to safeguard their livestock. Old-fashioned riding the range to drive off wolf packs, cleaning up carcasses so they don’t attract wolves, penning up livestock at night, installing scare devices, and using guard dogs are all deterrents that can work.

Unfortunately, data from the United States Department of Agriculture suggest that few livestock owners use these effective, non-lethal mitigation measures.

But many livestock producers across the west — in southern Alberta, the Big Wood River Drainage of Idaho, the Tom Miner Basin and Blackfoot Valley of Montana and elsewhere — do use a variety of these deterrents, which make it possible for their herds to live alongside both wolves and grizzly bears.

To its credit, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has produced a resource guide for livestock producers. To do an even better job as wolves integrate into western Colorado, the state must improve the way it investigates livestock deaths.

These investigations must be timely and transparent — as in other Western states such as Washington — and withoutscapegoating. The Colorado legislature could do its part, too, by providing funding for a trained, rapid-response team that would immediately investigate livestock injuries and deaths.

According to Niemeyer, authorities must respond as if they were investigating a crime scene — checking out dead livestock within 24 hours to prevent losing evidence from tissue decomposition or scavengers.

Only when a cause is determined, based on evidence, should information be made public. If wolf recovery is going to be successful for both wolves and people, everyone involved — livestock producers, wolf advocates, agencies — must work together. What happened in Meeker has been a valuable lesson in what not to do.

Story Warren is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a program manager in wildlife protection for the Humane Society of the United States.

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With armed guards, he was used to moving through wild places in Africa full of dangerous animals. He said he always felt vigilant on those trips, but in Wyoming’s Winds? We weren’t going to be threatened by anything larger than a GORP-seeking squirrel.

But now, grizzlies have returned to the Wind River Range, a 100-mile string of craggy peaks southeast of Yellowstone National Park. The big bears once owned the West, and now they are reclaiming some of their traditional turf.

At their peak, as many as 50,000 grizzly bears roamed the western United States. By the time the Endangered Species Act passed in 1975, however, their numbers had dwindled to less than 1,000 in the Lower 48, and they inhabited a mere 2% of their former range there. Only 220 to 320 grizzlies were believed to live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem at the time of listing.

Once protected, grizzlies expanded out of the park and are now found throughout the region. For me, that makes a difference. It’s not just that I carry bear spray and store my food in bear-proof containers, or that I make noise when I’m hiking through areas of low visibility. It’s subtle: I’ve become hyper-aware.

Sudden noises make me start. I don’t like to be alone unless I have an unobstructed view of my surroundings. I never wander off in the dark by myself. Yet being in bear country feels invigorating.

“Grizzly bears are what makes a place wild for me,” says Barb Cestero, who directs The Wilderness Society’s Greater Yellowstone and High Divide Landscape Program in Bozeman, Montana. “It’s about being present, in the moment, alive, and aware that you have to avoid surprising a bear and getting into trouble. That’s a lot of words to describe the indescribable.”

Indescribable or not, most people feel a mixture of fear and awe in bear country. Whether you like those feelings depends on your perspective.

As most of us know, development and climate change have squeezed the grizzlies’ habitat. These days, people in the Northern Rockies encounter grizzly bears on backpacking trips but may also run into them in their neighborhoods. The bears are getting into food sources like garbage, livestock, bird feeders, chicken coops, apple trees and beehives.

That means people pay attention when they leave their houses because stumbling outside in darkness can be dangerous — as Tim Henderson learned in 2007.

Henderson lived in a cabin in the western foothills of the Teton Range near Tetonia, Idaho. One evening, after hearing his dog barking, he went outside to check. She barreled toward him with a grizzly bear in pursuit, and the bear turned on Henderson.

“I like to refer to the encounter with the bear as just that, an encounter,” Henderson says. “Unfortunately, what makes splashy headlines is ‘an attack,’” which hospitalized him with injuries to his head and elsewhere. Yet he says he thinks of himself as the intruder.

“Keeping that in mind lets me enjoy the reason I moved here — for the mountains.” But these days, Henderson carries bear spray even in places where most people think it’s unnecessary.

Encounters between grizzlies and humans usually go badly for the bears. By August, wildlife managers had killed 11 grizzly bears in 2022 because of conflicts with people. Statistics aren’t available for human fatalities from bear attacks for 2022, but 2021 was a particularly deadly year with five deaths. Still, you can’t call that a trend.

Frank van Manen, a research biologist for the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, told Backpacker Magazine that in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, human fatalities from bear attacks are rare. “There was a fatality in 1986,” he said, “Followed by a 25-year period with no fatal incidents, and then several years with multiple incidents.”

As grizzly bear territory merges with human territory, the potential for conflicts will surely increase. Many communities are trying to cope by passing ordinances to help minimize the risk of dangerous encounters.

It’s not easy living with grizzlies. But we can choose whether to embrace the awe and fear that their presence brings, or we can begrudge them. For me, those emotions make me feel more alive.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. She writes in Idaho.

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When Westerners think of Yellowstone, probably what comes to mind are its grizzlies, exploding geysers, wolf packs and bison traffic jams, not to mention bubbling, iridescent hot pools that attract swarms of visitors from all over the world. The park is a jewel of the Northern Rockies, but to this journalist who has covered its stories for 35 years, the real miracle of Yellowstone is its intricate world of wildlife.

Yet any discussion of wildlife here comes wrapped in a paradox. Despite Covid-19, or perhaps because of it, in 2021 Yellowstone smashed monthly, seasonal and annual visitation records, notching nearly 4.9 million visits. That is 860,000 more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic struck. This year, given social media and marketing aimed at the park’s 150^th anniversary, it’s possible that Yellowstone could surpass the 5 million mark.

Even if it doesn’t hit that milestone, many locals who have visited the park for decades say its roads and its capacity for serving visitors are already overwhelmed, as are many public facilities in the gateway towns of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Although the crushing visitation happens on a tiny percent of parkland, all these curious tourists create waves of troubling ripple effects.

Yellowstone is neither a standalone island nor a drive-through zoo. It is unique, the last ecosystem in the Lower 48 to contain all of the original mammal species that were on the landscape before Europeans arrived on the continent.

Now, based on the diversity and health of its wildlife populations, Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1872, when poachers, bounty, and market hunters nearly wiped out all wildlife in the country.

Grizzly bears have been rescued from a population free fall. Wolves were brought back by the Interior Department under Bruce Babbitt in the mid-1990s, and the park’s bison population, which  numbered just 23 at one point in the late 19^th century, is at 5,000.

Had Yellowstone not been created, had winter range beyond Yellowstone not existed, and had environmental protection laws not been put in place, it’s doubtful that those original species would have survived. Many biologists think most would have been lost.

Not all are celebrating Yellowstone’s birth. Some have portrayed the park as an emblem of injustice that resulted in the removal of Indigenous people from native homelands. These critics see a park which non-white citizens say they have never felt invited to embrace as part of their heritage. This needs to be addressed by the National Park Service and remedied.

What cannot be repaired, once broken, are the fragile threads of biological connections holding the ecosystem together. And those connections extend for miles outside the park boundaries, through migration trails and rivers.

These days, the boom in outdoor recreation in the West has been crowding the park’s adjacent national forests. The high numbers rival public-land use levels around Moab, Utah’s Wasatch, and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, places that don’t have Yellowstone’s diversity of wildlife. Another threat is that neighboring states like Montana have promoted the killing of park wolves and bison when they cross Yellowstone’s invisible boundary.

Private lands surrounding Yellowstone are also getting built up, transformed by mostly unplanned development. Such development is the biggest threat to the survival of grizzlies and other park species, warns Chris Servheen, who served as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national director of grizzly bear recovery for 35 years. Wild animals always suffer when roads, houses and people move into their territories, Servheen says. Coexistence may be the goal, but humans always win any dispute with wildlife trying to survive.

Five years ago, Dave Hallac, who managed the science division at the park, told me he was worried not just about the Yellowstone ecosystem suffering “death by 1,000 cuts,” but death by 10,000 scratches, as more people scramble for their piece of paradise. The trend has only accelerated.

What is the most enduring “value” of Yellowstone? The park reveals that humans deeply appreciate this special place of wildness. But the park also has an urgent message to those same humans: Our consumption of wild places means we must deliberately decide to accept limits. This is a good thing—and an increasingly rare thing.

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and founder of Mountain Journal in Montana, mountainjournal.org.

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