The wolves of Yellowstone National Park in the US state of Wyoming are without doubt the most famous wolves on the entire planet.
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Their lives have been documented in such microscopic detail that they we know as much about them as we do some celebrities. Their stories come across like something out of a tv soap opera.
Who’s in charge, who slept with who, who’s had a fall from grace. It’s all there.
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the lives of the wolves known simply as #8 and #21.
Much of what we know is down to a national parks officer called Rick McIntyre, who is reported to have spent 6,175 consecutive days – that’s almost 17 years – observing wolves in the wild and to have recorded 100,000 wolf sightings. Has anyone ever seen more wolves than Rick?
What Rick has learned has rewritten the wolf rulebook – it’s turned assumptions upside down and given us incredible insights into these amazing canids that resonate well beyond the wolf world.
Both #8 and #21 are males that became the alpha dogs of their respective packs – #8 within the Rose Creek pack from 1996 to 2000 and #21 in the Druid Peak pack from 1997 until 2004.
But how they got there, especially in the case of #8, was wholly unexpected.
As Rick told Psychology Today in 2019, #8 was part of the vanguard of newly released wolves in Yellowstone after the reintroduction programme went ahead in 1995. But he was small and not expected to meet with much success.
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Then as a yearling, he came across a female with eight pups who was on her own after the father had been illegally shot. He took over that role and helped her raise the family, even though they weren’t his. This is also confirmed in the journal Yellowstone Science.
This feels counterintuitive – why should #8 raise cubs that are not his own, it doesn’t help to propagate his DNA? Park scientists say in fact this has happened several times in Yellowstone since wolves were reintroduced, and it does make sense.
“This suggests the new male realises the value in raising unrelated pups,” they write on the Yellowstone website. “It ensures his pack size increases and remains competitive against neighboring packs. He can then breed with the female the next mating season – an incredibly long-vision for individuals that, in Yellowstone, only live an average of 4.6 years.”
The park service records that #8 did eventually become a father himself – after mating with both the original female (#9) and one of her daughters.
There’s one other story that Rick tells about #8 that is worth recounting – it’s about his encounter with a larger male who threatened the pack in which he triumphed.
“8 pinned the rival wolf and could have killed him but let him go,” he told Psychology Today. “21 was still with 8 at that time and witnessed the incident. When he grew up and became an alpha male, 21 was invincible in battle but followed the role modeling of 8 and never killed a defeated opponent.”
So, this leads us neatly to the other famous male, #21 – he was also one of the pups of the original family that #8 helped to raise.
In an article in International Wolf Magazine published in 2002, Rick and another park service employee Douglas Smith recount how Druid Peak became possibly the largest wolf pack ever documented, growing from just eight wolves in 1999 to 37 in 2001.
#21 was the leader of the pack for all this time.
Why it grew so large is not entirely clear, but the article explains that because wolves hunt prey, such as elk (a species very similar to the European red deer), moose and bison, that are much larger than they are, it is much better if they are doing it in groups.
The bigger the prey, the more individuals are theoretically necessary, while the more prey there is, the more mouths can be fed.
It also helped that Rose Creek – #21’s natal pack – was declining at the same time, so the Druid Peak was able to take over some of its territory.
So those are the stories of perhaps two of the most famous wolves that ever lived. As Rick himself says, they show that wolves are individuals, not programmed automatons – he’s known wolves that could have been diagnosed as psychopaths, and others that have risked their lives to save companions. They’re all different.
“It is not that I am saying that wolves are like us,” he says. “What I have learned from watching and studying wild wolves for over 40 years is that we are like each other."
