‘Fearlessness of people and roads’ may have killed wolf pups, Yellowstone rangers say
A vehicle strike killed two wolf pups last month at Yellowstone National Park, and experts said Wednesday that the animals’ comfort with humans might be to blame.
The young wolves — a black male and female from the Junction Butte Pack — were hit and killed around sunset Nov. 19 along a road between the park’s northeast entrance and Tower Junction, park rangers said in a news release this week.
“Having studied these pups since birth, I believe their exposure to and fearlessness of people and roads could have been a factor in their death,” Yellowstone’s senior wolf biologist Doug Smith said in a statement. “Visitors must protect wolves from becoming habituated to people and roads. Stay at least 100 yards from wolves, never enter a closed area, and notify a park ranger of others who are in violation of these rules.”
A necropsy confirmed the vehicle strike killed the wolves, according to rangers at the large park straddling Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Rangers added that “Yellowstone law enforcement officers are investigating the incident.”
Rangers described the group of wolves the pups belonged to as “one of the most frequently observed packs in the park” with a territory from Tower Junction to Lamar Valley.
Rangers closed the area around a popular hiking trail in the summer of 2019 because 11 adult wolves from the pack were attending to a den of pups nearby, and the park wanted to keep parkgoers and the wild animals apart.
Rangers noted that “most people quickly moved away” from the wolf pups when they were spotted near that popular trail.
But others were less careful.
“Some people violated the required 100-yard distance from wolves and approached the pups when they were on or near the trail to take a photo,” rangers said. “Other people illegally entered the closed area to get near the wolves. Having grown accustomed to hikers, the pups then came close to visitors along a road.”
Yellowstone staff even tried to make the pups more worried around roads and humans over the last five months by hazing them several times, but the “effort was never fully successful and the pups continued to demonstrate habituated behavior due to continued close encounters with visitors,” park rangers said.
This story was originally published December 18, 2019 at 1:37 PM with the headline "‘Fearlessness of people and roads’ may have killed wolf pups, Yellowstone rangers say."
