Dan Stahler: Yellowstone Wolf Project's New Alpha

For biologist Dan Stahler, flying over Yellowstone National Park in search of wildlife never gets old. Recently, as he helicoptered over a land painted with aspen yellows and whortleberry reds, he spied an animal moving through the trees: cougar.

With a start, Stahler realized he knew the big cat. A car had struck her in the park a few months earlier, and after seeing the scene, Stahler had given her up for dead. Yet there she was, on the prowl. She reminded him of another animal, a wolf from the Junction Butte Pack, who had somehow suffered a severe lower-jaw injury over the summer. He doubted she would survive but had seen her continuing to lope along with the pack.

“If you follow a cougar or wolf for 10 years of their lives, they teach you a lot of life lessons,” Stahler said. “These animals are so tough, so resilient. I just continue to be inspired by their stories, so it makes me work harder to find ways to protect and preserve. As a biologist, you try to remain objective and think about populations. But the one thing that’s inspired us working in Yellowstone is the individual animals.”

Stahler, 48, has studied wildlife in Yellowstone for more than two decades, so he’s had plenty of time to internalize the lesson of resilience. Having recently been selected as leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, a role that can carry some controversy, he’s going to need it.

But Stahler is no stranger to the Yellowstone wolf issue, which began in 1995. That’s when Wolf Project biologist Doug Smith and Project lead Mike Phillips worked with eight volunteers to transport the first 14 wolves from Canada to the park. A Vermont native, Stahler arrived in Yellowstone about the same time as the wolves, lucking into a volunteer position with the Yellowstone Wolf Project in 1997, shortly after the last 17 wolves were released.

“I really … got in at the very beginning stages of Doug Smith and Mike Phillips creating the vision for long-term research and monitoring. So, it was just a very fortunate time to get in,” Stahler said. “And that was at a time when we weren’t sure about what Yellowstone wolves could teach us and how visible they were going to be. There was just such excitement about wolves coming back, and I was right there at the beginning of that excitement and got caught up in it myself.”

That excitement prompted Stahler to return to the University of Vermont for a master’s degree based on his studies of the interaction between wolves and ravens that he observed while continuing to work the summer field season in Yellowstone.

After graduation, Stahler took a job in 2000 with the Wildlife Conservation Society studying another apex predator: cougars. But wolves weren’t completely out of the picture, because the Yellowstone Cougar Project was created to study how cougars were responding to wolves on the landscape.

“People rarely see cougars, and I got to be out there, tracking and collaring them and seeing them in a way that the general public usually doesn’t get to,” Stahler said. “That really shaped my interest in understanding the community of large carnivores. Yellowstone had cougars recolonize on their own, wolves were introduced and grizzlies were on the rise, so it became one of the best places to study multiple carnivore species in the ecosystem.”

But it wasn’t long before Stahler jumped back into the Wolf Project in 2002 as a project biologist, and he’s been there ever since, learning the ropes from Smith and finishing a Ph.D. with a focus on genetics in his spare time. So, when Smith retired at the end of 2022 after leading the Wolf Project for 25 years, Stahler was an obvious choice to replace him.

Having watched Smith for years, Stahler knows his new role will make wolf opponents more suspicious of him. But he has also learned the aikido of handling public hostility, using patience to take it down a notch. First, he points out he’s set down in Gardiner, so he’s not just locked away in the park headquarters. He knows the locals and the culture.

“We go into those challenging situations with an open mind, and try to understand other people’s perspectives and to share stories,” Stahler said. “Then you make relationships. Whether it’s meeting with an outfitter in their backcountry camp to talk about wolves, which Doug did a lot and I did some of that with him. It can be kind of intimidating. But when you sit down, have a cup of coffee and ask people what they’ve seen and maybe counter with what we’ve seen, those one-on-one relationships go a long way. You cut through a lot of the challenges that maybe others would perceive about talking about these controversial, stubborn, nagging, difficult-to-live-with large predators.”

People on the other side of the wolf equation are watching him too. The wolf watchers want a strong advocate but don’t know if Stahler will morph into the spokesman that Smith ultimately became.

“He’s no Doug Smith,” said Wolves of the Rockies spokesman Marc Cooke. “He is, as far wolves go, but issue-wise, he doesn’t break trail like Doug did. He’s just new, that’s all. When he gets to the point where he sees retirement coming up, he’ll become more vocal. He really loves those animals.”

Ultimately, the Yellowstone Wolf Project—like the Yellowstone Cougar Project, which Stahler has revived—isn’t as much about a species as it is about research. Biologists now have 28 years of observations and data regarding a host of predators and prey that couldn’t exist without the park’s vibrant petri dish. Behavior and interspecies interactions; migration patterns and home territories; genetics showing family trees and mate choice. These studies have added to scientists’ knowledge of an ecosystem that is only now recovering after being decimated by settlers in the early 20th century.

In November, for example, Stahler and his team will conduct their 59th winter predation study, where they determine how many and what type of animals end up as wolf dinners over a 30-day period.

“That was a vision that Mike and Doug set out at the beginning,” Stahler said. “We have now become one of the most world renowned large-carnivore studies because of the long-term nature of our data. If there’s anything we’ve learned from our monitoring, the story changes with time and the more data you have, the more questions you find.”

But like wolves and biologists, research also needs to be resilient. Now serving as director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund on Ted Turner’s Flying D Ranch north of Yellowstone, Phillips has watched the evolution of the Yellowstone Wolf Project since he left in 1997. He appreciated Smith’s oversight of the project in the intervening years but thinks Stahler will face different challenges.

“At the beginning, everything was new and fresh. But 25, 26, 27 years later, things aren’t quite so new and they’re not quite so fresh,” Phillips said. “That’s where imagination comes in. You can’t keep asking the same old questions year after year and expect to excite. I recall, when I was doing graduate work in the 1980s, that President Carter was for a time trained as a scientist, and he observed that the mark of progress for a scientist, a researcher, was beginning with questions and ending with questions that were different. It’s the difference between the two that’s a mark of progress.”

Stahler has been thinking about that too and says he is coming up with several different questions. For example, some people have questioned the practice of collaring animals, so Stahler is looking into using less invasive techniques to study species, such as remote camera grids, hair traps—animals brush against wires that snag a hair sample—and scat samples. Some groups, such as the MPG Ranch in the Bitterroot Valley and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear researchers, have developed techniques and modeling that can use such noninvasive data to estimate population size and area occupancy. And now with artificial intelligence, biologists can sort through millions of game camera photographs in a fraction of the time required a decade ago.

However, the amount and type of research the team can do always comes down to funding, and the Wolf Project has to rely mostly on private funds collected by Yellowstone Forever. That means Stahler constantly has the future to consider: “What are you going to have this year or five years from now to keep that going?”

But in Yellowstone, inspiration can always be found somewhere in a valley or along a mountain ridge. Stahler remembers one specific elk that biologists had monitored since 1994, a year before wolves were reintroduced. She lived more than two dozen years before age and wolves caught up to her.

“Can you imagine living 26 years in Yellowstone, day in, day out, surviving the gauntlet of predation and probably producing many calves?” Stahler said. “It’s those stories that continue to reveal just how special this place is and how important wildlife is, considering the storied history of this place. Because we almost lost it.”