For the wolves, it has meant not achieving full recovery, a requirement for delisting. The lack of a national recovery plan has been a problem for both the wolves and the USFWS. However, despite the significant strides, including a successful reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, gray wolves are still endangered or nonexistent throughout most of their historic range. There are about 4,200 wolves in the Great Lakes region and 2,000 to 3000 in the Northern Rockies. Since then, populations have steadily increased in a few areas. Once there was a better understanding of the wolf’s value and the importance of biodiversity, attitudes toward the animal slowly began to change, and in 1974, the gray wolf received federal protections under the ESA. Wolves are also culturally significant to many Indigenous groups and sacred to some. In the boreal forest of Canada, which is a critically important carbon sink, gray wolves directly influence the behavior and abundance of moose, thereby indirectly shaping the forest’s composition and increasing its carbon storage. Research has also suggested that the presence of wolves could help mitigate the impacts of climate change. A sudden decline in wolf populations can trigger an ecological collapse, as it did in Yellowstone National Park in the 1920s. As a top predator and a keystone species, gray wolves play an essential role in maintaining the health of their ecosystems.
The consequences of such a wide-scale eradication, of course, go beyond one species. A government-sanctioned extermination plan-fueled by a broader push to domesticate the landscape and expand grazing ranges-was largely to blame. Gray wolves went from roaming nearly all of the contiguous United States in the 19th century to being hunted to the edge of extinction by the middle of the 20th century. The Unfortunate History of Wolves in America The victory represents a critical moment for conservation and is the most recent in a series of important steps meant to ensure the gray wolf truly recovers. Department of the Interior to court and, this past February, a judge restored protections for gray wolves across 44 states.
In response to the delisting, NRDC and its partners took the USFWS and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) finalized a rule that stripped the species of federal ESA protections, citing its “successful recovery.” In actuality, these animals remain absent from much of their historic range across the country. But that’s not how it has gone for the gray wolf. Typically, a species remains on the Endangered Species Act list until the population is no longer in danger of going extinct. When the iconic gray wolf first appeared under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) nearly 50 years ago, it had all but disappeared from the nation’s landscape, due to aggressive hunting, trapping, and habitat loss.
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