In 1995, fourteen wolves were loaded into plywood crates in Canada and driven south into Yellowstone National Park. They were the first gray wolves to live in the park since the last resident pack was exterminated in 1926. Wildlife managers called it a reintroduction. Critics called it overreach. The wolves, indifferent to the debate, got on with being wolves.
Thirty years later, there are roughly 100 wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. I have spent the past decade photographing them.
What a predator does to a landscape
The most striking thing about Yellowstone since the wolves returned is not the wolves. It is the rivers.
Elk, without wolves to fear, grazed the river valleys heavily — the flat, accessible terrain where willows and aspens grow. Wolves changed the elk’s behavior. They avoided the valleys, or moved through them quickly. The willows grew back. The beavers returned to build dams in the willows. The dams changed the hydrology of small streams. The streams slowed and widened. The banks stabilized.
Ecologists call this a trophic cascade: a predator’s influence rippling down through a food web and reshaping the physical landscape. Yellowstone’s rivers are, in a measurable sense, different rivers than they were before the wolves arrived. The wolves did not directly change the rivers. They changed the behavior of the animals that did.
Ten years of photographs
What I have tried to capture in ten years of work is not the drama of the hunt — which happens rarely and in conditions that defeat most cameras — but the texture of ordinary wolf life: pups learning to howl, adults traveling the miles-long territories that define their days, the pack’s social geometry visible in who walks where, who defers to whom, who leads.
Wolves are not charismatic in the way that lions or elephants are charismatic. They are watchful, efficient, and deeply attentive to one another. To photograph them is to spend a lot of time watching something that is watching you back, trying to decide whether you are worth worrying about.