REPORTER: Aaron Thomas
In the frozen wilderness of Yellowstone National Park, two young volunteers are on the hunt for wolves. They're looking for what's known as the Blacktail pack. They haven't been seen for days.
BRENNA: It's a good place to start looking. If you see a group of elk that are bunched up, tight together and are all looking in one area, looking pretty concerned.
KERSTEN: That's a good give-away there's wolves in there?
BRENNA: Yeah, exactly.
Finally, a pack the spotted across the valley.
BRENNA: This is so exciting to us that we - I don't think we can even explain it.
Wolves were once not only eradicated from the park but hunted to the edge of extinction in the United States. But today, Yellowstone's wolves are thriving. Brenna and Kersten are monitoring this pack's killing rate and group dynamics. Along the way, they get to know them as individuals, like Wolf 693.
BRENNA: She has always been kind of testy with other females, just something you kind of notice. She's been watched every since she was nine months old, at least. And it's just kind of a little quirk in her personality.
Wolf 693 is just part of a highly controversial program that's repopulating this entire region with Grey wolf packs.
DOUG SMITH, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK BIOLOGIST: The recovery effort went better than we thought.
Doug Smith is the national park's biologist who led the reintroduction project.
DOUG SMITH: This is a map of where the wolves are in Yellowstone National Park. It's old school, it gets the job done.
Doug has been keeping track of wolves here since they were released into the park, and neighbouring Idaho, nearly 20 years ago.
DOUG SMITH: All these packs out here started from - in the park and wolves moving out.
REPORTER: Right.
DOUG SMITH: So what wolves do is very similar to people, is a pair of unrelated individuals get together, they have offspring - we call them pups. They grow up. Like a person, when they reach 18 years of age, they leave home, go to school, get a job, start their own life somewhere else. Wolves do the exact same thing and that's how all these packs form. Because remember, there were no wolves here in this area 30, 35 years ago. Now we've got 1,700.
So successful was the recovery program that the reintroduced wolves are now reclaiming habitat across the northern and western United States. And many people are getting very uncomfortable with their spread. . 500km from Yellowstone, on the edge of this vast forest in northern Idaho is the town of Kamiah. It's a hub for the local hunting industry.
MIKE POPP, HUNTING GUIDE: We used to have a good elk herd here on my private. We had about 18 last year. We had three elk left, and this year we have none.
Mike Popp makes a living by leading hunters into the forest to find elk and other game.
MIKE POPP: There was one moose and that's good to see and there's a deer there.
The elk population here has been literally decimated, down to a 1/10 of its former count.
MIKE POPP: The biggest wild life disaster the lower 48 has ever seen.
Mike and other hunters saw what was happening deep in the forests in the early years of the wolves' return and they pleaded for the wolf hunting bans to be lifted.
MIKE POPP: We fought and fought and it took them 13 years to let us hunt. Then we had short seasons, we had small limits and the wolf population got to be so dense and out of control, the number of wolves that we were harvesting didn't make a dent.
But Mike's not giving up just yet. He's preparing, once again, to set some wolf traps during the short season.
MIKE POPP: I find on pre-baiting or pre-setting that when you use either wolf urine or coyote urine, it really helps.
REPORTER: Can I ask you get wolf urine from?
MIKE POPP: I think this is out of Minnesota. Evidently, someone has got a really cooperative wolf, huh.
REPORTER: Yes.
Wolves are incredible difficult to track or shoot. Not only do they have keen senses, but they're highly intelligent. . Mike and I set off on foot to look for recent signs of a pack. We soon find wolf tracks.
REPORTER: What do we have here?
MIKE POPP: This is an average-size wolf, Canadian Grey wolf. Some scat right here. You see the chunks of bone in it. Wolves are able to do that, even the femurs are just cut right in half, even on a moose bone. They've got just powerful jaws they can crunch the bones and get the marrow out of the inside of them. In this pack, particular pack here, there are just some whopping, big wolves, so I think if we go up here a little bit further we might be able to get them to howl.
Mike's life has become a frustrating fight to maintain his livelihood in the face of his rarely seen nemesis.
MIKE POPP: The Canadian Grey wolf is not an endangered species, there's over 2 million wolves worldwide. 150 miles north of here in Canada and Alaska, there's over 70,000 wolves. So this wasn't the last place that a wolf population could ever survive. Come on, come on Turbo.
As they've emptied the forests of prey, they've started moving closer to town. Many of the Popp family's dogs have been taken by them.
MIKE POPP: My daughter Irene's dog Vinny was taken about three years ago.
IRENE POPP: The dog never came back so my dad went to go find it and he found it there and there were a bunch of wolf pups by it and it was pretty bad.
Her dog's death made it all the more disturbing for Irene when she was stalked by wolfs themselves, while waiting at the bottom of her driveway for her school bus.
IRENE POPP: It's kind of scary, they came across the road, waiting for the bus.
REPORTER: What's it like living with them and having them around all the time?
IRENE POPP: It's kind of scary. Since we just had one up on the property a little bit ago, we can't go up there without a grown-up or a gun or something. So, yeah.
Mike says it's not only his family that's under threat. It's the entire community's rural way of life. And he believes it's deliberate.
MIKE POPP: Eco terrorist groups - or extreme environmentalists wanting to change the rules as far as access, as far as sport hunting, as far as the next generation enjoying learning about wildlife.
DOUG SMITH: The conspiracy theorists are completely wrong. Every single governmental meeting I've been to about wolves, not one has spoken about secretly or otherwise destroying to rural way of life. In fact, almost all of us, including myself, grew up in rural America. Why would we want to do away with it?
Doug Smith believes the reintroduction has successfully restored Yellowstone National Park's eco system to pre European conditions, when elk and deer numbers were kept in check by wolves. Without their natural predator, their populations had skyrocketed.
DOUG SMITH: They ate too much vegetation. When they eat the vegetation, they destroy habitat for other species, songbirds, beavers are two we've studied. So it was an ecosystem that wasn't natural or the way we wanted it to be.
MIKE POPP: It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy all the way around. They talk about a natural balance. Maybe they've obtained that because it's a tragedy for everything. It's a tragedy for wildlife and it's a tragedy for the human.
Jeremy Heft runs a small wolf education centre not far from Kamiah and he believes the animals themselves are not the problem.
JEREMY HEFT, WOLF EDUCATION AND RESEARCH CENTER: The wolves should not be feared by people for their own personal safety, but still people do.
Just getting food for his captive wolves highlights the image problem. The local hatred is so strong that those who are willing to hand over carcasses like these, do it anonymously to avoid recriminations.
JEREMY HEFT: Socially, it's been a long battle. It still is a battle and I think it's always going to be a battle. Because wolves - there's some aura about wolves that no-one seems to be able to explain.
Now anti-wolf vigilantism has taken off with pictures like this appearing on Facebook. Jeremy sees the hatred of wolves as totally irrational, but deeply rooted in society.
JEREMY HEFT: There's a long history of mythology surrounding wolves that paints a very dark, evil creature. And it actually goes back as far as the Bible, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, who's always the bag guy? Always the wolf, right?
Changing people's perceptions is a long, slow process, but Jeremy believes attitudes can change.
JEREMY HEFT: There are some live consist stock producers that after sitting down and talking to us, they understand the animal. Once they understand it, they say, "OK. Wolves are OK, until they kill my livestock and then I'm going to kill them." I don't have a problem with that.
For years, Jeff Siddoway had no problem with wolves. But now attacks on his sheep have become depressingly common. Last October they had their worst loss yet when a pack of wolves chased a flock to their death in a steep mountain gully.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: We had a pile-up of 119 lambs and 56, 57 ewes...
REPORTER: All in one night.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: All in one night. It's just perpetual. Over the last eight years, we've lost between 30 and $50,000 worth of sheep every year.
Those losses, combined with low prices for livestock, have made Jeff consider selling the family ranch.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: It just breaks my heart. That's what Siddoways do, we run sheep. That's what we've done for years, for generations and generations. 125 years.
REPORTER: You don't want to quit just yet.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: I don't want to quit? I don't. Literally, you think about that, it just brings tears to my eyes.
Jeff Siddoway says many in the state feel the same, but they've been lumbered with a problem that Washington created.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: I think a lot of us are just totally frustrated with the federal government and how they've handled the wolf reintroduction and how they've handled the compensation program. They're authorised to pay money to people that lose their livestock, but there's no money to pay.
So decades after wolves were originally eradicated, Jeff believes it's time to talk once again of hiring trappers or restarting last century's bounty system.
JEFF SIDDOWAY: I don't think you can expect the people of Idaho to live with the population that we have now. We have to push that population back down.
Longer hunting seasons and bigger quotas may one day drive down the wolf numbers in rural states. But back in their Yellowstone National Park safe haven, they're proving to be unlikely stars - drawing wolf-watching tourists from around the world.
RICK: There's so many similarities between human social behaviour and wolf social behaviour. Both species live in family groups. Both species have to cooperate together to earn their living.
REPORTER: So we can relate to them in a way that we can't to another species?
RICK: Yes, yes. There was once an anthropologist who said there is no two species on earth who are so similar in social behaviour than the wolf and the humans. The more I watch them, the more that I think that is true.
As much as we're afraid of wolves, we'll always be fascinated by them.
ANJALI RAO: Aaron Thomas there. Filming and reporting from the wilds of Yellowstone.
Reporter/Camera
AARON THOMAS
Producer
VICTORIA STROBL
Editor
AARON LEWIS
Original music composed by
VICKI HANSEN
Additional photography provided by Bob Landis