A New Pack Is Formed

      I WENT TO PARK headquarters to check in and found out there was a change of plans. For the summer of 1996, I would be living at Madison Junction, thirty-seven miles south of Mammoth. That was a long way from Lamar Valley. The naturalist division wanted me to give wolf talks at Old Faithful so we could reach larger numbers of visitors, and a slide show every Friday evening at Madison Campground, sixteen miles north of Old Faithful. They also scheduled me to do two wolf-themed hikes each week at Harlequin Lake in the Madison area. The rest of my time was scheduled for roving interpretation with my wolf pelt in the geyser areas.

      I contended it would be better if I were based at Tower so I could continue to help people see wolves in Lamar, but my schedule of programs had already been published in the park newspaper, and it was too late to change anything. That was on May 13. I needed to move temporarily to an old trailer at Old Faithful on May 29, then switch into another trailer at Madison after it was renovated. I had the next fifteen days to look for wolves in Lamar.

      On May 16, Mike Phillips took a group of us up to South Butte, on the south side of Blacktail Plateau, ten miles west of Tower. Wolf 7, the female yearling who had struck out on her own after stepping out of the Rose Creek acclimation pen, had settled down in this area in the spring of 1995. The tracking plane had occasionally found her back in Lamar Valley in the fall and early winter. When she appeared there, one of 8’s big black brothers, Crystal Creek yearling wolf 2, was often nearby. In January, he followed the lone female back to Blacktail and they paired off, creating the first new pack to be established by the reintroduced wolves. In honor of wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, who in 1944 had been the first to suggest wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone, the pair was named the Leopold pack. They were now raising three pups in a forested area near South Butte.

      Mike pointed out the new wolf acclimation pen south of our position. That was where we had carried the fence panels last fall. Two unrelated wolves, a male and a female, had been placed there in January. Later the Leopold wolves had chosen their den site just a mile away. The original plan had been to release the two wolves in the pen in the area, but the Leopold den meant another site had to be found to set them free. A temporary pen was put up south of Old Faithful, near the Lone Star Geyser. The pair were moved to that pen, soon released, and named the Lone Star pack. Not long after leaving the pen, the female stepped into a hot spring and later died of her injuries. The male left the area, wandered throughout the park, and died two years later well to the east at Lake Yellowstone.

      I signed up as a Wolf Project volunteer, which allowed me to use telemetry equipment to help find and monitor the Leopold pack when I was not working my regular naturalist job. As a volunteer, I had to fill out detailed forms on the wolves I observed and list the times of all their behavior. I spent many days on South Butte throughout the summer, and my time there gave me a chance to study parental care of young pups, pup behavior, and wolf hunting methods. In addition, I got to watch a new pair of wolves, together only a few months, to observe how they interacted in the early stages of their relationship and witness how they bonded.

      Two days after going on the hike with Mike, I went back up on South Butte and spotted the Leopold alpha female bedded down just north of the small forest where she had her den. That was my first sighting of her, for I had not seen her at all in 1995. She later got up and went to a nearby elk carcass. Fog rolled in and I lost sight of her. When it lifted, 7 was gone and was probably in the den forest attending to her three pups.

      I stayed all day and in the early evening spotted the black alpha male. He approached the den forest from the west and disappeared into the trees. Right after that, the female also came in from the west. As she moved toward the forest, she stopped and stared into a gully at the edge of the trees, then ran down into it, like she was excited at seeing her mate.