At the forefront of the movement to reverse five millenia of predator prejudice have been the nature writers, who can be nominally divided into two subgroups. In the first group are professional book authors such as Roger Caras, Barry Lopez and Jan DeBlieu, who have acted as translators of more specialized technical discourse. The second band of practitioners consists of professional scientists such as Aldo Leopold, Adolph Murie, and David Brown, who have acquired the writing skills necessary to bring the public closer to the subjects of their study. There are articles, essays, and books which have had an enormous positive influence, as evidenced in public policy changes (the Endangered Species Act), reintroduction projects and dramatic reversals in public opinion, as demonstrated in scientific polls commissioned by the National Park Service.
This anthology began with Leopold's, "Thinking Like a Mountain" because the incident described the killing of a Mexican red wolf in the Apache National Forest in 1907...marked a turning point in the author's life and, as a result of the influential essay written in 1944, in the American consciousness. When the wolfers of the U.S. Biological Survey were done with the large-scale persecution of predators, the species was extinct everywhere but northern Minnesota; even in Yellowstone National Park.....the wolves were gone. Leopold was so ashamed to have been associated with this debacle that he wrote the essay as a sort of apology. Years later, after he had left government service for a professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Leopold was moved by a recently published study of the wolf to ask an obvious but long-overlooked question: "Why did the heavy wolf population of presettlement days fail to wipe out its own mammalian food supply?"
That question was answered by Adolph Murie, who was the first naturalist to undertake a comprehensive study of the wolf in the field. In 1939, he was directed by the National Park Service to determine the relationship between wolf predation and Dall sheep populations in Mount McKinley National Park. Murie was the perfect person to undertake this study, because he had just completed a ground breaking analysis of the relationship of coyote predation and deer and elk populations in Yellowstone. Following two years of observation, he published his wolf findings, The Wolves of Mount McKinley in 1944. He came to the startling conclusion that "wolf predation probably has a salutary effect on the sheep as a species. At the present time, it appears the sheep and wolves in Mount McKinley may be in equilibrium." This statement sent shock waves through the entire scientific community and through the National Park Service, which had been looking forward to eliminating the wolves in order to produce more caribou, moose, and sheep for tourists to watch.
Unfortunately, Congress passed a special bill in 1946 authorizing the McKinley wolf eradication program; as a result, caribou populations burgeoned to more than 20,000 by the 1960's and then plunged to their present numbers (around 2,000). Half a century after its publication, Murie's impeccably researched monograph continues to influence managers and scientists Barry Lopez has called it "a classic...the first unbiased ecological treatise on wolves."
A generation of gifted writers and scientists in the 1950s and 1960s built upon the foundation laid by Leopold and Murie in the 1940s.
Important works to read are "The Wolves of Isle Royale" by L. David Mech; "The Custer Wolf" by Roger Caras; Lament the Red Wolf" by Edward Hoagland; A Chorus of Wolves,", by Jan DeBlieu; and my personal favorite, "Of Wolves and Men"
by Barry Lopez.
Source:
Out Among the Wolves: Contemporary Writings on the Wolf ©John A. Murray, Rick Bass, et al, 1993.
