Montana: 40 years of wolf recovery
From the Flathead Beacon in Kalispell, Montana:
In 1979, when Diane Boyd arrived on the doorstep of Glacier National Park to study wolves, the species’ erasure from the landscape provided the young researcher with something of an ecological blank slate, as well as a cultural one — wolves represented a mere blip in the biota of Northwest Montana, and hadn’t yet become the easy-to-loathe avatar of government-mandated wildlife management policies.
At the time, the 24-year-old University of Montana researcher had no inkling that the species she was about to dedicate her entire career to studying would eventually become the most successful recovery story of an endangered species in the United States’ history of wildlife management, nor did she realize it would become one of the most reviled, figuring prominently into a political debate that has never been more strained.
