Coming to Cody to give a speech on the relationship between wolves and elk isn’t done so without first recognizing the subject will be debated with highly-charged emotions from both sides. Kristin Barker, research coordinator for the Beyond Yellowstone Program, knew she was going to face a full house of well-informed spectators.

“It might seem a little ballsy of me to give a talk about wolves in Cody, Wyoming. That's because when people usually think about wolves, they see them in black and white, typically as one extreme or another,” she said.

The biologist has taken risks before. Sitting in her office years ago, she would stare out the window at nearby mountains while hating her job.

“My soul was slowly dying,” she said.

So Barker decided to change her life. Already having received a degree in English, she went back to school, earning her Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis focused on ungulate migrations and wolf-elk interactions in the Intermountain West — a big change by any measure.

Through her career Barker has been fortunate to work as a research assistant, teaching assistant, environmental facilitator, crew leader and field technician. She had finally escaped being trapped in a soul-sucking office job, finding more intimate experiences in the mountains each year since making the change than most see in a lifetime.

“Though I genuinely enjoy every aspect of designing and conducting research, fieldwork will forever be my favorite part,” she proclaimed on her website.

Barker shared her experiences and research in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem with an engaged crowd at Coe Auditorium in the Draper Natural History Museum; part of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. In her introduction she acknowledged the room was likely filled with folks of varying opinions about wolves and the reintroduction of the apex
predator to the ecosystem in 1995.

Are wolves the ecosystem angel that is tirelessly restoring natural processes to their historic things, she said, or are they the ecosystem devil that is just eating thousands and thousands of animals and killing things for fun?

In jest, she said she would “conservatively estimate that 12.75 bajillion studies have been conducted” in the Yellowstone ecosystem trying to answer the question.

However, instead of looking at wolves as good or evil, Barker, using GPS collar data and tons of field work, has concentrated her efforts documenting the relationship between wolves and their main prey species. She sees wolves as just another species that has co-evolved in concert with all other species that have come together to make up the ecosystems.

“They're an integral part of those systems, but all in all, they're just another animal trying to survive in a pretty harsh place,” she said.

In-depth study

There is evidence wolves have brought the ecosystem into better balance after they (and all predators) were largely extirpated from the landscape prior to receiving protections. Once wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone, researchers have documented more willows and aspens growing to maturity in the valleys and drainages of the ecosystem, which has been a positive for several other wildlife species and landscapes.

Yet, there have also been studies that don’t support the storyline in similar areas. So after all of these decades of trying to understand how predators affect their prey, why do we have all these conflicting results?

Barker points to the many complicating factors studying the issue, such as location, constantly changing weather patterns, often unpredictable elk migrations and varying amounts of human presence, including conflicts, in the ecosystem as factors.

“There have been studies all over ecosystems, with lots of species including wolves, [that document how they] change their behaviors when they come into contact with humans or when they think they might,” she said.

Barker spent three winters — the most dangerous season for elk due to their desperate search for food — near Jackson studying the predator and prey relationship by tracking both species with GPS collars and by visiting more than 1,000 field sites, which included 170 wolf kills. About 87% of the kills were elk and about 8%-10% were moose.

The region she chose to study has areas where wolves can be hunted and where they are protected, which allowed the team to compare behavioral responses of wolves that have and have not been exposed to harvests. Among their findings, they documented several different scenarios, from elk avoiding wolves by spending more time traveling to elk knowing wolves were near and yet not reacting to the risk.

“Sometimes [wolves] show up and [the elk] would kind of like give them a side eye and go back to eating,” she said.

Herd size, which is difficult to quantify using GPS collars, the availability of food and the depth of snow, as well as other factors, all play a roll in the species’ decisions on risk acceptance. Another factor is the length of time a herd has been playing a cat and mouse game with predators. The more they have been conditioned to wolves, the less likely wolves will push them off their feed grounds, she said.

Wolf mortality

All of the complicating factors and studies suggests further research is warranted, but one factor that further strains the ability to study the relationship is wolf mortality, which includes removal by state and federal officials for conflicts (usually for killing livestock), and both legal and unreported, illegal hunting.

Recently retired Yellowstone National Park biologist Doug Smith said changes in regulations have complicated wolf research.

States offering hunting seasons and recently increasing limits of wolves that can be harvested, especially near park borders, has hurt scientists’ efforts to document the species’ impact on the ecosystem, he said.

The loss of Yellowstone wolves is a huge setback, Smith said in a recent presentation. “We had in Yellowstone one of the best models for understanding the behaviors and dynamics of a wolf population unexploited by humans.”

After more than 20% of Yellowstone wolves were killed by hunters just outside park boundaries in a single year, he said researchers will do what we can to keep the science going, “what we have left of it.”

Last year the Wyoming Game and Fish Department implemented the biological objective to stabilize the wolf population at approximately 160 wolves in the Wolf Trophy Game Management Area, according to the department’s most recent annual report. A mortality limit of 47 wolves was divided between 13 hunt areas. Wolf hunting seasons were open from Sept. 15 to Dec. 31, 2022, with each hunt area closed at the season end date or when the mortality limit in the hunt area was met, whichever occurred first. A total of 31 wolves were killed during the 2022 season.

A total of 95 wolf mortalities were reported in the state, including wolves harvested or removed for conflicts, which accounts for about 90% of the total. The other 10% died of natural causes, including being killed by other wolves.

Neighboring states

In Montana, hunters reported killing 250 wolves during the 2022 hunting season — about half of the limit the state was prepared to allow, which amounted to about 40% of the wolf population in the state. The changes did not result in higher statewide harvests by the end of the following January. What had changed is where wolves were being killed, according to the Wildlife Management Institute. The number of wolves killed just outside of Yellowstone National Park in Montana increased from two-to-four in previous years to 20 wolves by the end of last season. The harvest included some of the most frequently viewed and photographed wolves in North America.

Even Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte got in on the action, trapping and shooting a wolf just outside of Yellowstone in 2021. He was issued a warning ticket by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks for failing to take a mandatory trapping education course before killing the wolf.

Idaho also has been aiming to shrink its wolf population. There is no daily or season limit on wolves in the state, but hunters may only take as many wolves as the number of legal tags they possess. Either sex may be taken. The regulations imposed in 2021 allows hunters and private contractors to kill 90% of the state's wolves, or about 1,300 of the estimated 1,500 wolves in the state.

The rule changes and killing of wolves near Yellowstone resulted in the Department of Interior issuing a 12-month status review of the species in 2021 after the Center for Biological Diversity, the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund, and the Sierra Club made petitions to the agency to protect wolves. After the review, a 2022 court order resulted in gray wolves in the contiguous 48 states — with the exception of the Northern Rocky Mountain population — now being protected under the Endangered Species Act (as threatened in Minnesota and endangered in the remaining states).

Meanwhile, Barker finds herself back in an office, at least temporarily. Barker said the research collaborative is relatively new, and, as the coordinator, she is spending most of her time trying to figure out work that needs to be done on the landscape. As much as she’d love to get out in the ecosystem, most of her current workload is defined by issues that need to be done just for “applied science purposes” and collaborating with scientists and officials to do additional research projects on issues such as how fences affect migrations.

For more information visit Barker’s website at kristinbarker.com. See the Draper video of speech at youtube.com/watch?v=ETAP_es1BFY&t=390s.