Letting nature take its course: Wolves in Yellowstone National Park

Date:  October 16, 2018

Source:  University of Alberta

Since the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the park's ecosystem has become a deeply complex and heterogeneous system, aided by a strategy of minimal human intervention. The new study is a synthesis of 40 years of research on large mammals in Yellowstone National Park, conducted by University of Alberta ecologist Mark Boyce.

"Yellowstone has benefited from the reintroduction of wolves in ways that we did not anticipate, especially the complexity of biological interactions in the park," explained Boyce, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Alberta Conservation Association Chair in Fisheries and Wildlife. "How the vegetation in one valley responded to wolf recovery can be very different than in the next valley."

Some of these complex interactions include the increasing influence of bears on the survival of elk calves, the relationships between wolves and hunters, as well as the recovery of willow, cottonwood, and aspen trees in different areas of the park. In addition, bison have replaced elk as the dominant herbivore on Yellowstone's Northern Range, and bison numbers continue to increase.

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Aspen is making a comeback in and around Yellowstone National Park, because of predators

Date:  August 30, 2018

Source:  Oregon State University

Summary:

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park is tied to the recovery of aspen in areas around the park, according to a new study.

The study was published today in the journal Ecosphere.

This is the first large-scale study to show that aspen is recovering in areas around the park, as well as inside the park boundary, said Luke Painter, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. Wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995. The study shows their predation on elk is a major reason for new growth of aspen, a tree that plays an important ecological role in the American West.

Wolves are culling the elk herd, adding to the effects of bears, cougars, and hunters outside the park, which means less elk are browsing on aspen and other woody species. The presence of wolves has also resulted in most of the elk herd spending winter outside of the park, Painter said. Before wolf restoration, even when elk numbers were similarly low, most of the elk stayed in the park.

"What we're seeing in Yellowstone is the emergence of an ecosystem that is more normal for the region and one that will support greater biodiversity," Painter said. "Restoring aspen in northern Yellowstone has been a goal of the National Park Service for decades. Now they've begun to achieve that passively, by having the animals do it for them. It's a restoration success story."

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Wolf reintroduction: Yellowstone's 'landscape of fear' not so scary after all

Date:  June 22, 2018

Source:  S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources, Utah State University

After wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, some scientists thought the large predator reestablished a 'landscape of fear' that caused elk, the wolf's main prey, to avoid risky places where wolves killed them. This fueled the emerging idea that predators affect prey populations and ecosystems not only by eating prey animals, but by scaring them too. But according to findings from Utah State University ecologists Michel Kohl and Dan MacNulty, Yellowstone's 'landscape of fear' is not as scary as first thought.

"Contrary to popular belief, the wolf is not a round-the-clock threat to elk; it mostly hunts at dawn and dusk, and this allows elk to safely access risky places during nightly lulls in wolf activity," says Kohl, who completed a doctoral degree at USU in 2018 and is lead author of the paper. "Despite their Hollywood portrayal as nighttime prowlers, wolves tend to hunker down at night because their vision is not optimized for nocturnal hunting." With colleagues Daniel Stahler, Douglas Smith, and P.J. White of the U.S. National Park Service, Matthew Metz of University of Montana, James Forester of University of Minnesota, Matthew Kauffman of University of Wyoming, and Nathan Varley of University of Alberta, Kohl and MacNulty report their findings in an Early View online article of Ecological Monographs. The article will appear in a future print edition of the Ecological Society of America publication. The team's research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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Record tourism in national parks comes with increasing threats – antsy humans

Yellowstone and other major parks grapple with illegal camping, vandalism, theft of resources, wildlife harassment and other misbehavior from visitors

Associated Press in Yellowstone national park, Wyoming

Sunday 28 August 201617.31 BSTLast modified on Sunday 28 August 201618.45 BST

On the edge of a meadow in Yellowstone national park, tourist John Gleason crept through the grass, four small children close behind, inching toward a bull elk with antlers like small trees.

“They’re going to give me a heart attack,” said Gleason’s mother-in-law, Barbara Henry, as the group came within about a dozen yards of the massive animal.

The elk’s ears pricked up, and it eyed the children and Washington state man before leaping up a hillside. Other tourists – likewise ignoring rules to keep 25 yards from wildlife – picked up the pursuit, snapping pictures and forcing the animal into headlong retreat.

Record visitor numbers at the nation’s first national park have transformed its annual summer rush into a sometimes dangerous frenzy, with selfie-taking tourists routinely breaking park rules and getting too close to Yellowstone’s storied elk herds, grizzly bears, wolves and bison.

Law enforcement records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request suggest such problems are on the rise, offering a stark illustration of the pressures facing some of America’s most treasured lands as theNational Park Service marks its 100th anniversary.

Read more  

Hunting wolves near Denali, Yellowstone cuts wolf sightings in half

Date: April 28, 2016

Source: University of Washington

Visitors to national parks are half as likely to see wolves in their natural habitat when wolf hunting is permitted just outside park boundaries.

That's the main finding of a paper co-authored by the University of Washington appearing April 28, 2016 in the journal PLOS ONE. Its authors examined wolf harvest and sightings data from two national parks -- Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and Yellowstone National Park that straddles Wyoming, Montana and Idaho -- and found visitors were twice as likely to see a wolf when hunting wasn't permitted adjacent to the parks.

"This is the first study that demonstrates a potential link between the harvest of wildlife on the borders of a park and the experience that visitors have within the park," said lead author Bridget Borg, a Denali wildlife biologist who completed this research while earning her doctorate from the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The researchers looked at the dynamics between hunting and viewing wolves at these two national parks because they are the only ones where visitors have a good chance of seeing a wolf. Both parks have long-term monitoring programs that have collected years of data on resident wolf populations, including years when wolf harvest was permitted and years when it was prohibited near the borders of both Denali and Yellowstone.

Adjacent to Denali, wolves are primarily trapped during legal harvests, while states adjacent to Yellowstone permit shooting wolves during hunting season. Wolves have always existed in Alaska and are generally regarded as an important part of the state's ecosystem -- by trappers and wildlife enthusiasts alike.

Read on ...

Bad news, bears: Yellowstone grizzlies poised to lose protection from hunting

Leaked letter points to plan to remove park’s grizzly bear population from endangered species list, where it was placed in 1975

Oliver Milman

Tuesday 8 December 2015 17.46 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 8 December 201521.16 GMT

State and federal wildlife officials are set to strip grizzly bears of their protection from hunting around Yellowstone national park, with a plan that would remove one of the species’ last populations from the endangered species list.

A leaked letter from Dan Ashe, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, to state officials notes there is a “mutually understood process that will allow the Service to proceed with a proposed delisting” for grizzly bears in the Yellowstone region.

Yellowstone grizzlies were placed on the federal endangered species list in 1975, at a time when the population had declined to 136. It has now rebounded to between 674 and 839 in counts taken last year, with occupied habitat increasing by more than 50%.

This recovery has led to calls from Idaho,Montana and Wyoming – the states that contain and surround Yellowstone – to remove the bears from Endangered Species Act protections.

Under a plan being considered by the FWS, the bears would be delisted under a number of conditions, including that numbers not be allowed to fall below 600 “unless necessary to address human safety issues”. Allowed mortality rates for the bears would be increased as their numbers grow, with up to 10% of adult females and 22% of adult males allowed to be killed via hunting and other methods if the population exceeds 747.

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Bison in Yellowstone: What can the US do with its surplus animals as herds continue to grow?

Since mid-May five visitors have been hurt - gored, trampled or tossed into the air

JOBY WARRICK

YELLOWSTONE 

Sunday 16 August 2015

Even for a park with a history of unhappy encounters between people and wildlife, 2015 is shaping up as an eventful year for Yellowstone and its bison. Since mid-May, five visitors have been hurt – gored, trampled or tossed into the air – in run-ins with the park’s most famous residents.

The tourists all came away with treatable wounds. For the bison, however, the year’s brushes with humans did not always end as well. Since January, more than 500 of the woolly beasts – the most in years – have been chased on to trucks by government workers and hauled to slaughterhouses. Some 200 others that wandered off park grounds were rounded up in a similar fashion or stalked by hunters and shot. Next year’s numbers are expected to be still higher, a consequence of a surging population and strict rules that park officials themselves find difficult to carry out.

“It is hard to watch,” said Rick Wallen, Yellowstone’s lead wildlife biologist for bison, describing the methods used to capture and restrain the animals. “But we do it as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

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A Thousand Bison Sentenced to Die This Winter

By Taylor Hill | Takepart.com17 hours ago

With frigid temperatures and a shrinking food supply, winter can be tough on Yellowstone National Park’s wildlife. And for the area’s 4,900 bison, it’s not just nature’s elements they’re fighting against.

Upwards of 1,000 buffalo could meet their demise this winter through either hunting or through shipment to slaughterhouses, as park officials look to keep the herds contained and avoid a mass migration of the beasts into Montana.

It’s a balance the Parks Service deals with annually, but this year’s planned culling is one of the largest since the management program was created 14 years ago, up from the 650 killed last winter. According to the National Parks Service website, 300 to 400 bison will be removed by hunting, while 500 to 600 could be shipped to meat processing or research facilities starting in January.

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Yellowstone reject vaccination plan for bison

January 2014: Yellowstone National Park managers have rejected a plan to use air rifles to vaccinate the nation's last herd of purebred bison against the cattle disease brucellosis.This is despite worries from the ranching community that unvaccinated bison could put cattle in neighbouring states at risk from the bacterial disease, which can cause cows and bison to miscarry.

Park officials said they decided against vaccination because of its $9 million price tag, questions about its effectiveness, and its possible impact on the wild bison as it would required shooting the animals once a year for three decades.

"We have concerns about how that repeated contact might impact bison behaviour and their visibility to park visitors," said Al Nash from Yellowstone.

Nash also said there was no documented case of wild bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle, which he said signifies the success of existing measures designed to separate the park's herd from domestic livestock.

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Grizzlies Should Stay on Endangered Species List, Scientists Say

Yellowstone National Park grizzly bears could be removed from the Endangered Species list after a new federal report revealed that the bears are not threatened by the loss of one of their main foods, whitebark pine nuts.

But outside scientists are criticizing the report, calling it incomplete, politically motivated and flawed.

"It does not take into account the situation, the realities of the conditions on the ground in whitebark pine forests," said Jesse Logan, the retired head of the U.S. Forest Service's bark beetle research unit. Whitebark pines are increasingly falling victim to mountain pine beetles, which kill trees in the process of laying their eggs under the bark. Climate change has made the high-elevation whitebark pines more accessible to the destructive beetles.

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U.S. authorities probe killing of grizzly bear near Yellowstone

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the killing of a grizzly bear near Yellowstone National Park in eastern Idaho, not far from where a grizzly attacked two biologists this month, state wildlife officials said on Saturday.

It is generally illegal to kill grizzlies in the 48 contiguous states, where the bears are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. But the law does allow the animals to be killed if they are threatening humans.

The caretaker of a residence near the park shot the grizzly on Friday night, said Gregg Losinski, regional conservation educator with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

The caretaker was armed with a high-powered rifle while at the home because a grizzly had previously torn down a bird feeder on the property and eaten the seeds, Losinski said.

State wildlife biologists have collected tissue samples from the bear for DNA testing to compare with fur taken from a site nearby where a grizzly startled from sleep charged and bit two biologists on August 15.

Also on that day, a mother grizzly attacked and wounded two hikers who unexpectedly encountered the bear's cub, park officials said.

Grizzly and human conflicts happen mostly in the autumn when the bears are driven to seek food in order to bulk up before hibernation, said Losinski.

About 600 bears roam Yellowstone and its border states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-authorities-probe-killing-grizzly-bear-near-yellowstone-010200702.html

Of Bears and Berries: Return of Wolves Aids Grizzly Bears in Yellowstone

July 29, 2013 — A new study suggests that the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park is beginning to bring back a key part of the diet of grizzly bears that has been missing for much of the past century -- berries that help bears put on fat before going into hibernation.

It's one of the first reports to identify the interactions between these large, important predators, based on complex ecological processes. It was published today by scientists from Oregon State University and Washington State University in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

The researchers found that the level of berries consumed by Yellowstone grizzlies is significantly higher now that shrubs are starting to recover following the re-introduction of wolves, which have reduced over-browsing by elk herds. The berry bushes also produce flowers of value to pollinators like butterflies, insects and hummingbirds; food for other small and large mammals; and special benefits to birds.

The report said that berries may be sufficiently important to grizzly bear diet and health that they could be considered in legal disputes -- as is white pine nut availability now -- about whether or not to change the "threatened" status of grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act.

Read further

Elk Bones Tell Stories of Life, Death, and Habitat Use at Yellowstone National Park

Dec. 10, 2012 — Josh Miller likes to call himself a conservation paleobiologist. The label makes sense when he explains how he uses bones as up-to-last-season information on contemporary animal populations.

Bones, he says, provide baseline ecological data on animals complementary to aerial counts, adding a historical component to live observation. In his November cover article for the Ecological Society of America's journal Ecology, he assesses elk habitat use in Yellowstone National Park by their bones and antlers, testing his method against several decades of the Park Service's meticulous observations.

Now an assistant research professor in the new Quaternary and Anthropocene Research Group in the Department of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, Miller located and recorded the elk bone data while a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Chicago, and finished analyzing the data during a brief stint at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. His work with modern animals grew out of curiosity about the fidelity of the fossil record in archiving animals and ecosystems of the distant past.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121210101624.htm

Hunters Kill Hundreds of Wolves in US

Wolf hunting season has begun in several states, and hundreds of the animals already have been killed. It's the first time in years that wolves have been legally hunted in Wyoming and Minnesota, and the decision has drawn the ire of many conservationists and some scientists.

Gray wolves have long been a point of contention between ranchers, who see them as pests that eat their livestock, and conservationists, who see the critical part the play in the ecosystem. Recently, as state laws changed and the animals were taken off the federal endangered species list, hunters have taken aim.

About 50 wolves have been killed in Wyoming, where they can be shot on sight without a permit in about 85 percent of the state, according to news reports. Seven of the dead wolves once lived in Yellowstone National Park, where wolves are still protected; they wandered outside the park and were legally shot, Reuters reported. (Scientists put collars on the Yellowstone wolves as part of a park research program.)

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/24942-wolf-hunt-begins.html