What the NPS Did to Its Own Park

The killing started in nineteen fourteen. Federal hunters employed by the Bureau of Biological Survey entered Yellowstone National Park and began systematically eliminating predators. The targets were wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes. The park had been created to protect wildlife. The hunters killing wolves inside it were government employees. This is not a contradiction that anyone in the agency appeared to notice at the time.

The justification was simple and popular: elk and bison herds existed to provide visitors with wildlife viewing. Wolves and mountain lions ate elk. Grizzly bears raided elk calves. Therefore the predators had to go. The ranchers whose cattle grazed on adjacent federal land were also enthusiastic about the program. The Bureau of Biological Survey was happy to help.

By nineteen twenty-six, wolves were functionally extinct inside Yellowstone. Mountain lions were severely suppressed. Elk populations exploded with no predation pressure. They grazed riverbanks into bare mud. Willows disappeared. The riparian ecosystem degraded. Beavers, whose dams depended on willows, declined. The park that had been created to preserve a natural ecosystem had, through active management, destabilized it in ways that would take decades to recognize.

The grizzly bears were a separate chapter. Well into the nineteen sixties, the park ran open-pit garbage dumps near the hotels, where bears fed nightly to the delight of visitors. When the dumps were finally closed in the nineteen sixties and seventies, habituated bears that had lost their foraging instincts raided campgrounds and were destroyed as problem animals. The park killed bears it had taught to expect human food.

The wolf reintroduction of nineteen ninety-five was a tacit admission of what seventy years of management had cost. The Lamar Valley today is the recovery. It took this long.