Interview - Yellowstone - Rick McIntyre

RICK MCINTYRE

WOLF EXPERT

After decades of watching packs in the wild and explaining their complex lives to onlooking humans, Rick McIntyre is arguably the best-known expert on Yellowstone’s wolves. The carnivores’ 1990s return to the park transformed Yellowstone’s ecology—one of the most fascinating and nuanced threads in Wildsam’s new field guide to the first national park. 

Our writer Rebecca Jacobson first met Rick out in the field while watching wolves in the Lamar Valley, the wild park expanse known as “America’s Serengeti.” She recently caught back up with him to learn more about a unique career entwined with the story of these wild hunters.

Rick, you’re known as one of Yellowstone’s foremost wolf experts, and you’ve spent countless hours in the field watching the park’s packs. How did you get there?

After college I started working for the National Park Service. My first job was as a firefighter in Sequoia National Park in California. After that, I got a job in Denali National Park. I started in Denali in the 1970s. I worked there for 15 summers. That was the first place I started to see wolves. They were fairly difficult to see—if you had maybe two or three or four sightings a summer, that was considered to be pretty good.

There was a lot of talk in the early ’90s of a wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone. I was writing two wolf books in the early ‘90s, so I came down to Yellowstone and interviewed a lot of the biologists and people with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So I had a pretty good background and that led, in the spring of 1994, being offered a summer naturalist job. I was called the wolf interpreter.

You were interpreting wolves before any arrived?

This was the year before the reintroduction. All of my programs were about the possible wolf reintroduction, the potential wolf reintroduction. I'd speak about how wolves were definitely a native animal, just like the elk, the bison, grizzlies, coyotes, et cetera. They were all killed off by the park rangers. The last ones were killed in 1926. It's a sad story. They were doing the exact opposite of what they should've been doing.

Wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995. Was that when you became such a point of connection between park visitors and the packs?

My goal, when I got to Yellowstone that summer, was to see at least one wolf in the wild. If I could do that, boy, I would feel that would be a great accomplishment. My first full day in the park, I saw the entire Crystal Creek Pack of six wolves, and we saw them most days for the next couple of months in Lamar Valley.

So that was unexpected. We hadn't really planned on that visibility. So what do you do? I was used to talking to park visitors about wolves, used to going out and looking for wolves. So it was just a natural thing for me to go out early in the Lamar Valley. You have your best chance of seeing wolves at first light. I would find wolves and stay there through the time I was officially working. It would be normal for visitors to pull into the lot, and ask what I was doing, what I was seeing. People just couldn't believe that they could see these wolves.

How would you describe the public reaction to these animals? It seems like there’s an enduring fascination.

It was not quite at the level of Beatles hysteria in the '60s, but kind of close. I think wolves are so relatable to people because it's fair to say that there are no two species on earth that are so similar in social behavior as wolves and humans.

That brings us back to the uniqueness of our situation in Yellowstone. We watch a pack of wolves very often, over years. We can see pups when they're very young. We can see them as they grow up. Maybe they leave their family and try to make it on their own. Or maybe some of them can become the leaders in the next generation.

When we met up in the park, we were watching the Junction Butte pack. What are some of the dynamics in play with that group?

That's one of the largest packs that we've ever had. Recently, they have a new alpha male and a new alpha female, and they seem to be doing very well. They had a total of 18 pups this spring.

Part of their story over the years is there's been a lot of contention among the adult females as to who's going to be the top one, the alpha female. A lot of infighting, a lot of intrigue, a lot of alphas had been overthrown over the years. One will get injured, another one will take advantage of that and take over. And the current alpha female, she's been in that position for about a year and a half, and we're not sure of all the reasons, but things just seem to be going a lot smoother under her leadership.

Also the longtime alpha male, 1047, he got injured this summer, and as a result, lost his alpha male position. One of the other males took over, but the new alpha male is treating the old former alpha male very well. So there was no exile or anything like that.

The pack is just being very well-run now compared to going back a few years ago, where among the adult females, there was just a lot of intrigue, stories that almost could have been part of a Game of Thrones episode.

Do tell, Rick.

A year and a half ago, the alpha female was 907, and her same age sister was 969. They were both grays, and they had gone back and forth many times over the years as to who was going to be the dominant sister. So one would be for a while, then maybe she would injure her paw, and the other one would take advantage of that injury and take over. 

Then there was a younger female, a black one, who to us seemed like just one more wolf in the pack. But a year ago last spring, during the denning season—it’s hard to say what was actually in the mind of the wolves—what we saw appeared to be an alliance between the young black female and 969, the older female, who had been displaced by the other older sister 907.

And so the black female appeared to make an alliance with the older female, 969, and then as a team, they attacked the alpha female and beat her up. Now, my guess was that the older sister, 969, assumed that once they deposed 907, since she was the older sister and her ally was her little sister, of course, she would take over being the oldest. But guess what happened?

The little sister took over.

“It’s fair to say that there are no two species on earth that are so similar in social behavior as wolves and humans.”

Illustrations by Walker Noble Studios

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