Hunters have killed some of Yellowstone National Park’s best-known alpha wolves, animals vital to studies conducted in the park since wolves were reintroduced there in 1995. Among those killed was an alpha female, known as wolf 527, who was born into Yellowstone’s Druid Peak pack, featured in a PBS
documentary entitled “In the Valley of the Wolves.” Before she, her mate — the pack’s alpha male — and her daughter were shot this month, wolf 527 was wearing a radio collar that enabled researchers to track and study her and her pack. Doug Smith, the biologist in charge of Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction program, said the new pack wolf 527 helped form — the Cottonwood Pack — was a “key pack on the northern range” of the park, adding, “Whether the pack exists anymore or not, to us the pack is gone.” Wolf 527 was killed in a special hunt designed to cull Yellowstone wolves killing livestock and elk on the park’s northern boundary. Montana officials, surprised by the large number of Yellowstone wolves killed, called off the special hunt, even as an expanded wolf hunt begins in Montana this week. More than 1,600 wolves exist now in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and state officials are allowing 75 to be killed this season in Montana and 220 in Idaho.
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