Howl: The dark side of wolf reintroduction (Kevin Berger, February 21, 2025, Nautilus)
In 1985, a female wolf with a creamy white coat was traversing the mountains surrounding the Moose Creek meadow, searching for a mate. She found him and by May that year had built a den just north of Montana’s Glacier National Park, where the white wolf nursed and played with her seven new black pups. She had five more pups the next year, this time inside the park.
The white wolf was canny and intelligent. Boyd used her best tricks to try and capture her. She wanted to replace her radio collar before its signal failed. But the “white phantom” kept outwitting her. The white wolf would paw the dirt around Boyd’s traps, expose the buried piece of metal, and pull the trap to the ground, sometimes without springing it. She would defecate to the side of the trap, “proclaiming this turf as hers,” Boyd wrote.
Family dynamics in a wolf pack never stand still. In 1987, the white wolf was deposed as the breeding female from her pack. Her allure, though, hadn’t faded, and in just months she found a new mate and gave birth to her third litter of pups. Something roiled her previous pack, and some of the members rejoined the white wolf to help raise her new family.
In September that year, five of the white wolf’s pups ran afoul of Canadian hunters and poachers, who shot and killed them. The remaining wolves who had lived with the white wolf fled south to their old pack in the sanctuary of Glacier National Park, “seemingly understanding the danger of the British Columbia wolf hunting season,” Boyd wrote.
The white wolf, solitary again, wandered for years through the Northern Rockies. She was 9 years old in 1992, elderly for a wolf, and lingered in the foothills near a forestry camp in Alberta, Canada, where an outfitter shot and killed her.
Before she died, the white wolf trotted across the Moose City meadow toward Boyd’s cabin. She locked eyes with Boyd and then turned around and trotted back in the direction she had come from, disappearing into the willows. Boyd wondered why the white wolf had come. Did she recognize her scent from her traps? Boyd decided the white wolf had “dropped by to let me know that she was still out there, still in control, and still smarter than me.”
The Woman Who Runs with the Wolves: Biologist Diane Boyd has spent 14 years studying the animals in the far reaches of the Rockies (Perri Knize, Sports Illustrated)
The first few times I don’t meet Diane Boyd, I become convinced she must be every inch the misanthrope that she is reputed to be. In the 56 days it took me to track down the held biologist, who is documenting the return of the wolf to the northern Rocky Mountains for the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project, I found phone calls and letters to be useless. Tips from her acquaintances and associates led to dead ends. Vague plans to meet were scrapped abruptly and without warning when she suddenly disappeared. “This is Diane. Don’t come up. I won’t be available” became a mantra my answering machine intoned almost every time I checked in. The woman was as elusive and difficult as the subjects of her research. “Finding Diane Boyd is a project unto itself,” Jim Cole, a local cougar tracker warned me. “Sometimes the only way is to just go up there and find her.”
