A Life With Wolves

Fifteen years before their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park captured worldwide attention in 1995, wolves were quietly settling back into the Northern Rockies under their own volition. Diane Boyd was there in the North Fork of the Flathead to document their expanse across the Canadian border, and shares the experience in her riveting memoir, A Woman Among Wolves.

Boyd writes in lyrical detail of the challenges she faced trapping the elusive canids through four decades in one of the most remote corners of the Lower 48. Skiing across frozen rivers with icy torrents looming beneath; encountering grizzly bears and mountain lions alone on her trap lines; and staring into the yellow eyes of a wolf waking from sedation in the back of her pickup are just a few of the pulse-quickening stories from her pioneering work.  

Yet these weren’t the gravest dangers for a young female biologist in this isolated ecosystem, and much like the wolves she studied, humans were often the greatest menace. She had to chase drunken intruders off her cabin porch with a rifle, contend with angry trappers, and dodge the heavily laden log trucks barreling down narrow North Fork roads.

Boyd discovered a passion for wildlife growing up in Minnesota, exploring the swamp near her childhood home and, as she writes, “mucking around in decaying vegetation on the trail of water bugs, ducks, salamanders, butterflies, and frogs.”

Her father taught her to handle a Winchester rifle at nine years old, and she soon discovered a passion for bird hunting that endures today. A week before Thanksgiving, she was packing up at her Kalispell home to take her bird dogs Benny and Sky on a sharp-tailed grouse hunt. 

After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a bachelors in wildlife biology, she landed her dream job as a wolf technician for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the northern reaches of her home state. Due to the remote and roadless nature of northern Minnesota, it was one of the few places viable wolf populations hadn’t been completely extirpated from the Lower 48. She was soon tapped to investigate the first radio-collared wolf from Canada establishing new territory in Montana’s Flathead drainage. 

Unlike the open country of Yellowstone, where biologists can dart animals from helicopters to collar them, the thick forests of the North Fork necessitated leghold traps. They’re also called foothold traps because wolves have such large feet that the traps typically clamp onto the more flexible bones in the feet, rather than the leg or ankle. Boyd said that they would occasionally break bones, but she redesigned the traps to minimize injury, and checking them up to three times a day limited the time the animals spent struggling to escape. 

Describing the great lengths she went to in order to remove human scent from her traps illustrates the depth of intelligence that wolves exhibit. She would boil the traps in a “witches’ brew” of alder boughs and bark, hang them in the spruce and fir trees surrounding her cabin to weather for weeks, and bury her gloves in the ground for days before handling them. She spent innumerable hours on skis discovering where the wolves traveled and how they used the landscape before placing her traps. 

“Matching wits with wolves was an exciting part of my professional life,” Boyd writes. “When I was learning how to think like a wolf and trying to lure the cunning animal to step on an Oreo cookie-sized trigger, I made a lot of mistakes.” The depictions of those mistakes, and the resulting revelations, enrich this portrait of a skilled biologist.   

Boyd makes the case that wolves could have recolonized the western U.S. without the help of reintroduction to Yellowstone and central Idaho. Protected by the Endangered Species Act as of 1974, wolves range long distances in search of territory and are highly successful at dispersing into new habitat when left unencumbered. 

She points to the remnant wolf populations in Europe, which endured despite the dense human population of the continent. There she was invited to conduct research during the 1980s, trapping the first wolf to ever be radio collared in Romania and chasing signs of elusive individuals up and down the steep mountains of northern Italy. 

When asked on a late-November phone call about the myth of the “super wolf” that some argue make up the Yellowstone population—that they’re larger than the original individuals, more successful at killing elk—she asked rhetorically why there are still Holocaust deniers spouting misinformation. 

“There’s a lot of data to the contrary about the cruelty of World War [II], as well as the reality of what wolves are, and what wolves are not,” Boyd said. “So, it’s just human culture and we are wanting to believe our parents’ generations or ideas. There’s a lot of peer pressure in small rural communities to carry on those traditions.” 

After four decades living a mostly solitary existence at her cabin in the North Fork, Boyd has found herself on tour supporting her first book, interviewed by reporters and podcasters, including an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Oct. 15. During the podcast, she not only dispelled the idea of the “super wolf,” but also Rogan’s claim of “super packs”: wolves roaming in groups of hundreds of animals, preying on the dead and dying in Russia during World War I. She calmly explained to Rogan that his sources were more than a century old, and wolves would have no competitive advantage to hunt in packs so large. “I’m skeptical,” she told him.  

In addition to her newfound public persona, Boyd says the second act of her career will find her returning to international research. She turns 70 in February and after living a life focused in large part on her career, she wants to begin this next decade giving back to the world. She’ll be in Nepal this winter assisting a biologist studying rhinos, elephants and other large mammals, as well as working with communities experiencing carnivore depredation of their livestock. She hopes to publish future books, but says a sequel to her memoir isn’t in the cards.  

Despite a career writing scientific papers, conducting public outreach and tracking wolf populations, Boyd believes her greatest contribution to the species is publishing A Woman Among Wolves. When it was finished, she thought she’d be lucky to offload 500 or 1,000 copies. As of mid-December, the book is already in its third printing.

Having met U.S. Fish and Wildlife recovery goals, gray wolves were delisted from the Endangered Species Act in Idaho and Montana in 2011, and their populations have since been under the greatest threat since the coordinated extirpation efforts of early last century. During the wolf harvest season from September to March, Montana trappers can now use neck snares and leghold traps, Boyd writes. Hunters can lure their kill with bait and electronic calls, and chase wolves at night with thermal imaging and night-vision scopes. There is no limit to the number of licences sold in the state, and each license holder can kill up to 20 wolves. 

One of the country’s greatest wildlife conservation success stories is being methodically unwritten by hunters and trappers, abetted by state legislatures hostile to wolves. Boyd has hope because the species is resilient. Yet human sentiment and tolerance for large carnivores is capricious. Perhaps when enough wolves have been hunted and trapped off the landscape and public opinion shifts the balance back to conservation, the remaining individuals will be there to recolonize the land. 

Just as they did in the North Fork over 40 years ago.