Wolves live in family groups that stake and mark their territory, and they vigorously defend their land. Yellowstone research shows that most adult wolf deaths in the park are attributed to territorial disputes. However, two- and three-year-old wolves frequently disperse, leaving the pack to find a mate and establish his or her own family. Wolves are fabulous long distance travelers. Migrating wolves face challenges in the Western states because current law protects them in some areas but not others. Even Yellowstone Park wolves, during hunting season, are unprotected once they step outside park boundaries.
A movement afoot recognizes the challenge that humans and wildlife face living together on this planet. The Spine of the Continent Initiative, envisioned by Michael Soulé and supported by scores of other scientists and conservationists across North America, seeks to establish landscape connectivity and migratory corridors throughout our continent, allowing those creatures who migrate north and south to safely navigate their journeys, while also allowing wildlife to flow between our currently separated national parks, wildlife refuges, and other such areas. Without connected corridors, populations can become isolated and diminished, putting them genetically at risk. Imagine expanding our wilderness areas so that in corners and strips and stretches they touch each other, allowing wildlife safe, continuous passage from one area to another. Mary Ellen Hannibal, in The Spine of the Continent, explores the story of the pronghorn antelope of Wyoming, showing how multi-generational migratory patterns dictate a herd’s activity, and how man’s activity can affect these patterns. A narrow road that bisects a migratory path can wreak havoc with a herd’s journey, as can fences, because pronghorns, while capable of jumping, will not jump over a fence, preferring to slither underneath if there is enough of an opening. If there isn’t enough slithering room, they will often turn away from their path and that fence, and change a migratory pattern. What the pronghorn have done for thousands of years can be undone by a few strands of tightly strung barbed wire.
To establish a safe migration corridor for the pronghorns, two biologists rallied agencies with jurisdiction over the herd’s territories—from the Bridger-Teton National Forest and the Grand Teton National Forest to Wyoming Fish and Game and the National Elk Refuge to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the BLM—and private property owners, as well. The result is a protected pathway for this herd to travel, one free of fences and traffic. Spine of the Continent supporters want to expand this type of effort across the continent. The swath of creature-safe migratory pathways ideally extends from northernmost Canada, through the United States and down into Mexico, following the ridges of five thousand miles of the Rocky Mountains. This contiguous corridor will require hundreds of negotiations to finance and establish wildlife rights-of-way easements, passage over or under freeways, and other innovations in order to succeed. A long, connected path of wilderness protected from automobiles, guns, fences, and other human hazards, this stretch of land will enable safe migration and intermingling for hundreds of species, millions of animals, albeit one fenceless parcel or wildlife overpass at a time.
Yellowstone and other rigidly protected areas become anchors with “overlapping zones of various protection regimes and conservation goals radiating out from them, like petals from the center of a rose,” as Emma Marris describes in Rambunctious Garden. As humans move further and further into places once remote and difficult to reach, what we consider natural areas tend to contract, able to support fewer and fewer individuals within a species. Since they require greater ranges, large species populations first decrease, then possibly disappear from the area. But many small species will disappear from these diminished natural areas, too, because a difficult year—one of drought, sickness, pestilence—can wipe out an entire, reduced, population. By protecting wildlife in these connected zones, we increase the chances that species will become neither endangered nor extinct.
The Endangered Species Act itself speaks to the need to protect more than just a specific fish, plant, or creature. Its purpose is “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved, and to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species.” The ESA makes explicit that the ecosystem underlies the existence of the individual. To protect the creature, its habitat must be conserved. As federal judge Beryl Howell wrote in her December 2014 decision regarding the continuing protection of gray wolves in the western Great Lakes, the ESA “reflects the commitment by the United States to act as a responsible steward of the Earth’s wildlife, even when such stewardship is inconvenient or difficult for the localities where an endangered or threatened species resides.”
For wolves, the expanded protection of wildlife corridors will allow for increased interaction between packs, which supports creation of new packs and fosters genetic strength. Although a female wolf will typically not breed with her father, other inbreeding occurs when populations are limited, leading to situations similar to that currently happening on Isle Royale in northern Michigan where, because of the island’s inaccessibility, the wolf population is weakened and likely to eventually die out due to lack of diversity. The larger wildlife landscapes of the Spine of the Continent initiative allow for healthier wildlife populations, protecting creatures from genetic demise.
A challenge in promoting connectivity projects such as the Spine of the Continent lies in their use of mapping, however, since maps draw targets by showing areas of potential change, areas presently inhabited by human beings. Viewed as threats to wildlife, people who live in targeted places on these maps are sometimes considered liabilities. Few want to be seen that way, or worse, asked to leave. Those who live and earn their livelihood in places mapped as potential migratory routes are understandably concerned and even angered. Tensions mount over this issue, and discussions of wildlife corridors can quickly become contentious. I sit for a few minutes to slip on the moccasins of those landowners and imagine their world. I find giving up my home and lifestyle for pronghorns and grizzlies a difficult thing to swallow.
Wolves, to retain genetic diversity and healthy social structures, require space to roam. While the typical territory of a wolf pack is approximately ten square miles, wolves can cover up to a hundred miles in a day. A GPS radio-collared wolf, known as OR7, has been tracked moving from his pack in northeast Oregon to California and back. He left Oregon in 2011, and traveled over three thousand miles in three years. He’s been nicknamed Journey. Echo, the wolf sighted on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in late 2014, had been collared near Cody, Wyoming, more than four hundred miles away. Though many young adult wolves disperse to begin new packs, the rest remain loyal to their pack and its territory. Those wolves typically roam, then return home. However, when wolves currently protected within national park borders travel outside of those boundaries during hunting season, they are vulnerable to hunters. Radio-collared wolves that are part of long-term research studies within these national parks have been killed while outside park borders, whether two or twenty miles beyond that safety line. The Spine of the Continent plan proposes to reduce the likelihood of such shootings by providing protected space around and between parks, allowing for the natural movement of mountain lions, wolves, and grizzly bears. Enlarging and connecting wilderness allows increased range for animals that have an innate need for space.
My family moved out west when I was eleven, my dad eager to get back to big land where he could ski mountains instead of valleys. The home my parents chose was in an offbeat sub-division at the top of a mountain pass fifteen miles east of Salt Lake City, where not everyone had water rights, but most had garages right next to the road. Snow fell deep and often. Our first year, it snowed September first and June first and on a regular basis in between. The house came with a snowplow, which my dad quickly upgraded, plowing our massive driveway storm after storm. That first winter he began making plans to build an addition that would place a new garage within ten feet of the road, not the thirty-plus where the existing garage currently sat.
Our low-slung, split-level, wood-sided house sat