Wolves
Food Chain Radio Show #1193
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Call of the Wolves
Guest: Tea Alfero, Founder & Director, The Wolf Connection Conservancy & Author, The Wolf Connection
When a young lad hunting and fishing in the wilds of the big sky country of Montana, I was most grateful that all the hungry wolves had been dispossessed from those wilds. Nothing personal, mind you…
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Call of the Wolves
Then, back in the mid nineties, I returned to the Big Skies to host a sheep rancher on a Food Chain Radio kitchen table remote broadcast. His ranch was in the lee of the Beartooth Mountains outside of Yellowstone Park. The mountains filled up his kitchen windows.
The show was about the re-introduction of wolves into the Yellowstone ecosystem, and I was there to get the ranchers’ side of the story.
My rancher guest did not have a lot to say about the re-introduction. “The wolves come and eat my sheep,” he said. “And there is not much I can do about it.”
Fortunately for the radio show, a youngish man came bounding through the kitchen door without so much as a knock. In his hand he held a tracking antennae, and when he saw us sitting at the kitchen table, he said, “She’s back!”
When the rancher introduced him as one of the biologists in the wolf re-introduction program, I talked him into joining us on the radio, and then I asked, “Why are you bringing back the wolves? Is it to control the population of deer and elk?”
“Oh no!” he replied, “We’re bringing back the wolves because city people want them!”
The biologist was right. City people travel to Yellowstone Park from all over the world to stand along the road through the LaMar Valley hoping for a glimpse of a wolf, or two, or maybe even a pack!
So, why do they stand there, often in sub-zero temperatures, hoping for a glimpse of a wolf? And yes, I found myself to be one of those standing along the road a time or two. Yes, I have seen wolves in the wild, and better yet, I have heard them in the woods at dusk psyche each other up for the hunt. And, being so captivated, I have followed their re-introduction through the years with a number of Food Chain Radio shows.
So we ask…
Leave a comment below: Why do the wolves call to us?
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