The Yellowstone Wolf: A Guide and Sourcebook
Few animals inspire such a mixture of fear, curiosity, and wonder as the wolf. By the mid-1900s, traditional misunderstanding and shortsighted wildlife management practices led to the elimination of wolves from practically all of the lower forty-eight states, including such otherwise healthy wildland reserves as Yellowstone National Park. The reintroduction of the wolf into Yellowstone in the mid-1990s has inspired endless fascination, passionate enthusiasm, and towering controversy. In The Yellowstone Wolf, Paul Schullery has assembled a comprehensive documentary reference work on the history, management, and the recovery process that restored these extraordinary animals to one of the world's last great wilderness landscapes. In this book you can hear the voices of a host of explorers, naturalists, park officials, tourists, lawmakers, modern researchers, and many other wolf-lovers and wolf-haters as they conducted a 150-year conversation about what may now be the most famous wolf population in the world.
Because some of the work on this book was completed as part of the author's National Park Service duties, all author's royalties from this book were donated to a dedicated research account of the Yellowstone Association, a non-profit educational partner of Yellowstone National Park.
"Paul Schullery's book, with its gathering of many voices from many times, tells you the whole story, from the days when wolves roamed the primitive Yellowstone wilderness, through the hard struggle to eliminate them, to a more tolerant age, when we realized that wolves have much to offer the human spirit."—Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior
"Yellowstone wolf reintroduction was one of the conservation highlights of the century. Paul Schullery has accomplished what few others have been able to: a comprehensive history of the entire effort under one cover. For those wanting one source for the whole story, with rare insights and park documents not published anywhere else, this book is a must."—Douglas W. Smith, Yellowstone Wolf Project Leader
Excerpt from The Yellowstone Wolf: A Guide and Sourcebook, from the "Introduction:"
The story of the wolves of Yellowstone has become one of the most dramatic sagas in American conservation history, rich in a symbolism that has proven irresistible to journalists, historians, and activists (both wolf lovers and wolf haters) beyond counting. I have put this book together to make sure that the original, authentic voices heard during the history of Yellowstone wolf management are also heard today. Those historical and historic voices speak in this book, in all their glorious disagreement, ignorance, intuition, and foresight. The only voice missing is that of the wolf itself, and if you want to hear it you must first ensure that it survives to be heard, and then you must come here and listen for yourself. I have already heard it, and I tell you that it has changed a landscape I thought I knew into a landscape of wondrous new possibilities.