PIEN HUANG, HOST:
2025 marks 30 years since the federal government reintroduced wolves to the western United States, one of the most successful and controversial wildlife programs in U.S. history. To mark the anniversary, reporters Heath Druzin and Clark Corbin embarked on a thousand-mile road trip through wolf country to talk to the people who brought wolves back and those who never wanted them to return. Their journey is documented in the Boise State Public Radio podcast, "Howl." Heath Druzin, welcome.
HEATH DRUZIN, BYLINE: Thanks. Good to be here.
HUANG: So you went deep into the Yellowstone and Idaho backcountries for your reporting. I mean, what was it like for you to hear wolves howl for the first time during your reporting trip? Do you remember where you were?
DRUZIN: Oh, yeah. So the first time I heard it, I was walking by myself, and this mama wolf with three pups just kind of came trotting out of the sage brush about 200 feet in front of me. And I was like, whoa, OK.
HUANG: Wow.
DRUZIN: This is happening. I guess I better just stay calm. And after we kind of looked at each other for a little bit, she walked away and apparently linked up with her pack because then they all started howling. I was just enveloped in wolf howls by myself in the wilderness.
HUANG: Wow.
DRUZIN: And it was cool and eerie and even a little unsettling all at the same time. It was an incredible experience.
HUANG: Yeah, let's hear a little bit of that howling now.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOLVES HOWLING)
HUANG: You actually went backpacking with Doug Smith, the wolf biologist who helped put wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. Here he explains how the return of wolves and other predators even affects trees through a process known as the trophic cascade.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "HOWL")
DOUG SMITH: So a trophic cascade is kind of - deals with how ecosystems are structured. There's top-down control. That's predators eat prey, and prey eats vegetation. So predators are indirectly impacting vegetation through the impact they have on prey, which are things like elk and deer, which eat the vegetation.
HUANG: When you were out with Doug Smith, did you actually see what that trophic cascade effect looks like?
DRUZIN: We did. Wolves are obviously apex predators, right? Like he was saying, they eat elk and deer mostly. But he was showing us that they were having effects on trees. The animals they ate, because they were worried about being eaten by wolves, they didn't hang around as long eating these young trees. So whereas in the past, they were sitting there and kind of chewing these aspen trees to the nub before they could grow, now they're on the move, on the lookout, and you're seeing these trees grow much taller than they did in the past. And Doug would show us this, these healthy groves of trees that just weren't there 30 years ago.
HUANG: Not everyone was excited to see the wolves back, though, right? Like, what did people that you spoke with tell you about that?
DRUZIN: One of the people I spoke to is this fourth-generation Idaho rancher named Jay Smith. His cattle graze near one of the places where wolves were released in 1995, and he says his losses because of the predators have piled up over the years.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "HOWL")
JAY SMITH: There's no rhyme or reason. You know, in 30 years, we never know what to expect. One year we'll lose 20 head of cattle, and one year we'll lose zero. And we just never quite know how to explain or how to do better or how to mitigate that risk. It's very variable, and it's very unknown. I think that misuse of the Endangered Species Act is economic and domestic terrorism.
HUANG: What are some of the challenges that ranchers and others who say wolves hurt their business have been facing?
DRUZIN: Well, the main thing is that when wolves run into livestock, they see an easy meal. That obviously hurts your business if your business is raising cattle and sheep. Now, how big a problem that is, you know, people will disagree. If you look at the raw numbers, there's a fairly small number of cattle and sheep that are eaten compared to the millions that roam around wolf country. But the effect is concentrated on people like Jay who have their cattle in these wild places. So there's kind of an outsized effect on a fairly small number of ranchers.
The other people it affects, which you might not think of, is farmers. Wolves don't really hang out as much in heavily agricultural areas because there's a lot of human presence. Well, that's at least the theory. So elk will kind of hang out in alfalfa fields and other places, and, you know, they'll eat the crops, and they'll trample the crops. And it can be a burden on farmers, as well.
HUANG: Given these challenges, do you think that it's possible for humans to coexist with a healthy wolf population?
DRUZIN: There is a coexistence expert - a wolf expert and activist - we talked to named Suzanne Stone in the podcast. She wants to see fewer wolves and fewer livestock killed. So she's working with ranchers, for the most part, on finding methods to keep wolves from eating their livestock in the first place so they don't have to go kill them when there's a problem. And it's a pretty cool part of the podcast 'cause she uses some off-the-wall ideas that work. She's got different colored flags which don't look like anything to us but freak out wolves, and we don't really know why. She even used AC/DC, like...
HUANG: (Laughter).
DRUZIN: ...Playing rock music to scare wolves, even those inflatable people that kind of blow in the wind at used car lots.
HUANG: (Laughter).
DRUZIN: And in her area, she's had minimal losses of both wolves and sheep over almost two decades of work in the area.
HUANG: Yeah. What would you say is the outlook for wolves now? Are their numbers stable?
DRUZIN: So it kind of depends who you talk to. Everybody agrees that wolves have rebounded beyond anyone's expectations. There are something around 3,000 wolves out there in the western U.S. right now. And that was from an initial release of just a few dozen in 1995. But there are scientists who say that the official numbers might be overcounting wolves and that relaxed hunting laws might be threatening them right now.
HUANG: That's Heath Druzin, host of Boise State Public Radio's podcast, "Howl." You can listen more wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks so much for joining us, Heath.
DRUZIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXO SONG, "MONSTER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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