Yellowstone National Park’s wolves have been contentious ever since they were reintroduced in 1995. Within the park, the roughly 100 canines are protected from hunting and trapping, and are a massive draw for tourists. But once they leave, those protections vanish, and the few wolves that venture out often die, quickly.
Recently, Nick Mott, a Montana-based reporter for Mountain Journal, and Mike Koshmrl, a reporter with WyoFile in Wyoming, teamed up on an article that looks into the role Yellowstone wolves play in the ecosystem and in our economy. They shared their findings with Wyoming Public Radio’s managing editor Nicky Ouellet.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Nicky Ouellet: You followed two wolves from the Wapiti Lake Pack to get a better understanding of what happens to wolves after they leave the protections of Yellowstone National Park. One went into Wyoming, one into Montana. Tell us a bit about them and their journeys, Nick, starting with you.
Nick Mott: [The Montana wolf known as 1331F] was born into the Wapiti Lake Pack. She mothered some puppies and, in late 2024, her radio collar data shows she started to move away from the pack. She went from the Hayden Valley area, where Wapiti Lake is based. She went up to Mammoth Hot Springs area for a bit, and then she went north of the park.
North is where most wolves coming out of Yellowstone go. In part, that's because that's where ungulates go in winter and wolves follow, looking for food.
Nicky Ouellet: Ungulates being deer, moose, elk.
Nick Mott: Exactly, hoofed things, in particular elk. So she went north of the park, crossing this boundary where things are very safe [and] she cannot be hunted or trapped, to an area where hunting and trapping is very common, and people actually post up and wait for wolves to cross.
She made it extremely far for Yellowstone Park wolves in Montana, about 10 miles. In January 2025, park officials were driving north of the park with telemetry equipment listening for collared animals, and they heard what's called a mortality signal, indicating that she hadn't moved in 12 hours or more. Eventually, she was found in a trap on land managed by a very prolific wolf trapper.
Nicky Ouellet: And Mike, you followed a wolf that went into Wyoming.
Mike Koshmrl: Yeah. This was back in 2022. [1329M] was a younger male, black wolf, really striking green eyes.
When it was about a year old, it took off, which is not uncommon for a male wolf that is in the pack it was born into. To have an opportunity to breed, it would have to take off and go do its own thing.
It took off in the springtime and went into what we call the trophy game area in Wyoming, which is a zone around the national parks in the mountainous parts of the Yellowstone ecosystem where wolf hunting is really tightly controlled.
The hunting season was actually closed, so it made it all the way through this trophy game area. [It] was wandering farther flung, getting down into west central Wyoming. It was in the Salt River Pass area. And in June of 2022, it made its way into a trap and it died in that trap.
NO: Can you talk a bit about the three states that abut Yellowstone. How have they decided to manage wolves? Let's start with Wyoming.
MK: In the late ‘90s, early 2000s, when the states were starting to plan for taking over management of wolves, the political powers that be in Wyoming were very insistent on not managing wolves as a game species that you manage to keep on the landscape. In the vast majority of the state, 85% of the state, they are classified as a predator, and there's essentially no rules on killing them. That's had the effect of eradicating them from areas outside [of] where they do manage them.
That's right around the national parks, in a lot of the wilderness areas, the wild western mountains. In those areas, they manage for a population of 160 wolves outside of Yellowstone. There's very regulated hunts, and a totally different ballgame once you get outside into what they call the predator zone.
NM: Idaho wants to get down wolves to essentially the smallest legal number.
In Montana, seasons started when Endangered Species Act protections were removed here in 2011. Fights really ramped up around 2021 when the state Legislature passed a bill mandating that the state reduce the wolf population to a “sustainable level,” but it didn't define what that level was.
The Fish and Wildlife Commission here started trying all these different methods of reducing the wolf population, making things like night hunting or neck snaring. In 2021, one big deal thing that happened is they removed quotas entirely around Yellowstone National Park. About one in five park wolves were killed.
Since then, those quotas have gone back into effect. But there's still all kinds of drama about how many and how wolves will be killed in the state.
NO: You talked to some folks who said that hunters are actually performing a really needed service by keeping wolf populations in check and helping them to act like wild animals again, because the wolves that are in the park have lost their fear for humans.
MK: I did interview a guy who works for an organization that essentially tries to reduce wolf populations and reimburses hunters, essentially pays them a bounty-type payment. He made the point that Yellowstone should do more to prepare these wolves for that reality. If a wolf pack has a litter of puppies near a trail or a trailhead where people know they are, and there's gonna reliably be people watching them, he said, ‘Why don't you close the trailhead? Why don't you try to do a little more to instill a healthy fear of people?’
I do think that will just be inherently difficult, because the whole Yellowstone experience is seeing wildlife. It's in the mission of the park service to help people experience those wild places and that includes seeing wolves.
NM: But people like that gentleman really argue that there's a clear need for wolf harvest in all surrounding states where there are wolves, and that need can be broken down into two categories. One, for livestock producers and two, for hunters.
Even if a wolf is only killing one cow, [it’s] something that affects your bottom line. Data does show that wolves don't actually kill that many cows. Of course, some people will argue that a lot of stuff that gets killed never gets documented.
The other impact, though, is on game animals, especially elk. The northern Yellowstone elk herd is a prime example of that. There were roughly 20,000 elk in that herd prior to reintroduction. Today, there's about 5,000. There was world class hunting in the region north of the park prior to wolf reintroduction, and some people that remember those days are resentful that the hunting isn't the same anymore.
Of course, wolves are not the only reason for that. Other hunters are, and so are other predators and other environmental factors. But wolves certainly play a role and they can also be a scapegoat.
NO: I am super curious how economics plays into the decisions that we're making about managing wolves.
NM: In Montana, economics has very much been a part of the discussion. The economy in southwest Montana around Yellowstone has shifted since wolf reintroduction. Hunting these elk in the Northern Range was a huge industry.
But in the wake of wolf reintroduction, we've seen Yellowstone Park tourism skyrocket. We've seen the guiding and outfitting business inside the park skyrocket as well. To business owners north of Yellowstone, many say killing more wolves based in Yellowstone or even the Yellowstone region actually hurts our business.
NO: We've been talking a lot about when wolves leave the park, what impact that has on the nearby ecosystems. And I'm curious [about] the effect that hunting outside the park has on wolf populations in the park.
MK: I did some reporting in the wake of winter 2021-2022. That was the record deadliest year for Yellowstone wolves. I believe that 25 wolves got killed outside the park. And they, at that time, observed some behavior that they attributed to those losses.
One pack just disappeared entirely. They also noticed a lot more breeding. There were, I think, three packs that had multiple litters that year, which is compensation, perhaps, to having a reduced population and also a product of the kind of social structure of wolves being disrupted.
In the minds of the biologists watching it unfold, there were effects ecologically inside the park as a result of that hunting outside the park.
I really don't think that there's going to be a world or an outcome where Yellowstone wolves don't get killed. It's a species that will always disperse and there's always gonna be these jurisdictional lines, and they can come up with some unique management strategies to reduce the mortality, and it's worked. But I do think that hunting and trapping-related mortality will likely always be a part of the story of Yellowstone's wolves as long as we have wolves in the region.
NM: We should also say that these issues aren't new. At the same time though, there've been surveys on tolerance toward wolves in the region, and those surveys show that our tolerance has increased drastically, almost across the board for everybody. I think wolves maybe aren't as contentious as this particular controversy over hunting park wolves may lead many people to believe.
