Transcript: Dr. Doug Smith on Wolves, Yellowstone, and the Power of Purpose

Good morning and welcome back to Late Start Show. We are here with University School alumnus, Dr. Doug Smith, class of 79, longtime leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project and former senior wildlife biologist at Yellowstone National Park. How are you, Dr.

Smith? Very well, thank you. Thanks for joining us. Everyone at U.S. knows you, knows your name because of the Yellowstone Project and the wolves, but I want to get to the story behind that.

So can you take us to the beginning, rewind all the way back and just tell us a little bit about how you were maybe as a kid? Yeah. So I grew up in Shaker Heights, very near the lower campus. I started at U.S. in sixth grade.

So it was an easy walk or bike ride to get to the lower school. Um, and, but I also often say I'm not from Cheshire Heights because my dad owned and operated a camp in, I guess you'd call it Russell Township, Novelty, Ohio, Chagrin Falls, that area. But my dad and mom are longtime Clevelanders. My dad was born in Cleveland, 1911.

And so they lived in the area when it wasn't like it was at all. now it was when my dad built his house in shaker 1935 i believe it was farmland it wasn't like it is now um very much far from the city center of cleveland cleveland was a thriving metropolis then none of that was going on when he settled there and built up what is a day camp an overnight camp and riding school called red raider camp and so that's a key part of my story because it wasn't far from the upper school at us but most importantly it was outdoor education that was my dad's life and so it introduced me to nature and i remember very well being at the lower school um them talking to us in what they called chapel i don't know what they still call it that um about the upper school opening and the big pitch was it was going to be an outdoor campus on 185 acres with a lake and forests and streams and birds and other animals, things of that nature. And that fit in well with my upbringing. And so that fit. I was big into sports.

I played football, basketball, track. But the outdoor programs became a significant part of my career at U.S., anchored by a guy who's unbelievably still there named Cherry Harmon. And, you know, sadly, my dad died when I was 15. So I was very much into the U.S. thing at 15.

I forget how old you are in sixth grade. That's when I started lower school, sixth, seventh, eighth at the lower school. I went there because my brothers went there in the 50s. And that was even weirder because they had teachers that I had.

Mr. DiBiasio, Carter Sanders, who was a Spanish teacher, he was my advisor. they had him uh richard peiser uh was the english teacher i they had him in the 50s i had him in the 70s so this was weird stuff um but the upper school was new that was unique uh and that really anchored my even though football i was captain of a football team that kind of thing uh it you know it that was my trajectory was the outdoor programs and terry still anchored it i'm worried about the future because terry's got to wind down his hill point and they got to keep that going because that was the pitch of why the upper school was special you know it's uh in the forest it's on the lake uh and then the the key break i got in my life that literally led to yellowstone and i don't know if you guys still do it is the senior project program i don't even know how they justified in how they did it. But while I was still a senior at U S I went to a captive wolf facility that was associated with Purdue university in Indiana. And I drove over there for what we called our senior project.

And I worked with captive wolves and it just so happened the lucky break for do university started arguably one of the most famous wolf studies in the world on an island in the middle of Lake Superior called Arroyo. And because of my us senior project at this place called Wolf Park connected to Purdue, Purdue is connected to this Wolf study that was my foot in the door. Literally as a us senior, 18 years old, that job led to a job working with wild wolves in our oil which led to nine summers and two winters working on our oil which led to a master's degree at michigan technological university in upper peninsula michigan the guy who ran the iowa study which led to a phd at the university of nevada reno which led to another wolf job in minnesota he was considered the top wolf biologist in the world named dave Meach. And then that led to Yellowstone.

So really, it all goes back to my senior project at US, got my foot in the door, and it was a chain of events all the way through. And I would say US, Terry Harmon, and my dad's camp, Red Raider, put me on that trajectory. So I don't know if it was hard work, luck, us, good mentors or all the above, but that's what happened. You know, you think of some of that, some of those classes for us that just are so pertinent that we w that we really will.

I hope remember forever. Did you have some of those classes that you could still think about and have some fun moment memories or even some times or some coaches that really stuck with you to this day? I, I did a ton, you know, I was well suited for us. um my brothers went there because they didn't do well in school they were borderline juvenile delinquents my dad was a widower he lost his first wife they were actually half brothers and he sent him to us to like god i gotta do something with them uh maybe you ask him straighten him out and help him and it was good for him it did help him and so he sent me there because he figured i was of the same cloth and I needed, you know, the beauty of U.S., small classes, personalized teaching. I remember many teachers, you know, they would come up to you and talk to you individually.

I think a public school setting, which was larger, you wouldn't have gotten that personalized attention. And then plus the campus. So the things that stood out for me were, you Terry Harmon, I took a few classes from him and loved it. And he'd take you outside.

No, Terry's not a conventional teacher. Excuse me, Mr. Harmon. He doesn't sit there and lecture.

He takes you out. And that was well before his time. That's what all the teaching is going towards now. Mr.

Harmon did that decades ago. We need to go out and experience, not just lecture. So that was key. I've always loved reading and writing.

And the person who stands out in that regard was Mr. Shabert, Ralph Shabert. I took English from him and he was phenomenal. And he was good with students and he would talk with you on Monkey Island.

I'm sure you don't have that anymore, Mark. But he was also my basketball coach. And he was hard on us, man. And he was the first guy who convinced me, I'm hard on you because I love you.

Like, give me a, I mean, the drills we did in practice sucked. uh i mean you're running all the time but he did it because he wanted to make you better he wanted to make you tougher and he wanted to prepare you for the games um carter sanders was my spanish teacher old guy at times seemed out of it no had a touch like no nobody ever had care deeply and that's what us gives it gives you that individualized personal touch that you don't get you know my kids went to public schools in bozeman montana they told me many times they felt like a number big school big classes never felt like that at us never felt like that i think that's the key so yeah reading writing mr chabert mr harman his his biology natural resources carter standard or excuse me mr sanders spanish teacher i wasn't good at spanish but he cared man he cared and you felt that so you straightened up and you did your best because he was with you and i'm just not sure you would get that any other place you know i'm just not sure and so So, U.S. straightened my brothers out. It kind of straightened me out. And then I had sports. I got to say Mr.

Callow. I went down to Florida right before he passed away. Big impact on me in football. He was the head.

The only three years he was head coach was my three years. It didn't work out great for him. Cliff Fouse came right after Tom Callow. He went on to have a legendary coaching career.

Mr. Kyle didn't have that. I loved him anyway. You know, I was captain of the team.

He believed in me. That's all you need in life is someone to believe in you. He did that. I visited him in Florida.

That was key because lifetime relationships matter. So that was a great thing, too. So I had the sports side of it. Plus, Mr.

Chabert ran my tail off, ran everybody's tail off. He was tricky in drills, so you'd work your hardest to win a drill so you could go to the locker room early. but if you lost then you were gassed and you would have to do the rest of the trail i mean he was oh man he was coy he did all that stuff miss those guys miss those guys yeah well one thing mr harman talked about when we had him on the podcast was how he can't seem to get athletes to also do outdoor projects you're someone who did both how were you able to do that i mean i know it was somewhat of a different time but how are you able to balance you know being an athlete and also still having time to enjoy the outdoors and spend time on that? That's a good question. I don't have a good answer to it.

I probably was less of an athlete and less of a student for Mr. Harmon than I could have been if I had just done one thing. In other words, specialized or focused harder. But I think, and I've talked about this a lot with Mr.

Harmon, I don't want to say too much. There's some things about the modern student he worries about, he tells me about and I worry it you know everyone's become more intense and more specialized you don't have the broader students anymore I played three sports you know um I understand now at least around here in Bozeman Montana where I live that's rare kids do one sport and they do a year round you know our football practice started in August it didn't start in June you weren't working out you worked out on your own but it wasn't a formalized program with the school you know we were more broad we were less specialized think it was more focused towards life rather than getting ahead I do remember something vividly you know Mr. Harmon used to go to Ontario and canoe and fish for brook trout he invited me on that trip I mean this is unheard of I'm a student hey Doug can you go on a canoe trip in August to Ontario canoeing fishing that was kind of thing i grew up doing i wanted to go uh i said i couldn because i was captain of the football team and we had summer practices so what did mr harman do he went and talked to Tom Callow Hey I want to take Doug on this canoe trip He says he can go because he got summer football practice Mr. Callow said he should go.

He should go on the trip. You know, it was that broad-mindedness. And you know what I did? I didn't go on the trip.

And I regret that. I can't remember a thing about football practice that week. but if I had gone in this canoetrip with Mr. Harmon to Ontario, it would probably be a lifelong memory. But I didn't think I could take a week off training or practice.

You know, as captain of the team, I felt like I would have let the team down if I didn't show up. But the point is, is Mr. Cowles said, go. Go.

You know, team captain, you get a pass for a week. I think those are the things I think about now when I hear about U.S. being specialized get into a good college that leads to a good high-paying job you know my job i worked for the government and i didn't make anybody um but you know i was after satisfaction making a difference i guess not just making a lot of money i worry my brother from us went to teach at a private school in new hampshire called philip sector academy he had me come several times there I ask students why they did what they did. I want to make a lot of money. That worries me nowadays.

That worries me. I think this is the broad approach to education is Terry Harmon, Tom Callow, Ralph Chabert, Carter Sanders. That's what I got at U.S. I'm worried if it's still there.

Now, if a current U.S. student came up to you and was like, well, I love nature, but I don't know what jobs exist in. It almost seems like more of a hobby than something I can make out of a job. What would you want them to understand about the possibilities that they have? Oh, that's a tough one.

It's a really tough one because I get that question all the time. And what I did, I'm not sure works anymore. But what I did is I never worried about a job. I went into nature and biology and ecology because I loved it.

It was a passion. It's what made me happy. It's what made me want to do. I never thought about what job would it get me?

How much money would I make? Where would I live? I literally took a year at a time doing it. You know, that's one reason I got a PhD.

That's one reason I got a master's degree. I went to school, University of Idaho. I was the first student from U.S. to go to University i went there because it was one of the top wildlife programs in the country but it wasn't a prestigious school like the us kids go to nowadays you know it wasn't ivy league or any of that kind of stuff i went there because i had a good wildlife program well when i got there i went to grad school because i just wanted to prolong this existence i loved about learning about nature and then i finished my master's degree and i'm like i want to push this out further so i'm going to do a phd and I started my PhD with no job in mind at all. And I lucked out.

I lucked out because as I said a couple of minutes ago, US started a chain of events that got me lucky. And you could make arguments, people have written books with the title, the harder I work, the luckier I get. Maybe I worked hard, but I think US gave me a great start. So that's my answer is, and it's sappy and it's every day, but do what you love and everything else will fall into place.

And the other thing is, and I don't want to act like I'm going to get on a grandstand here or a pedestal, but nature and the environment is not doing well. If you're a sentient being, you see that. The earth is crying out for help. It's bad.

We're squeezing every bit of profit we can get out of it. The private sector has one goal, make money. The rest of life is diffuse. you know, biology, ecology, the world, nature, the environment. What's the goal there?

You know, save it. I don't know. Is that a goal really? That's not as pointed as just make money, make life easier through material possessions.

You know, we're in trouble. That is coming to a head now. You know, Adam Smith's, you know, the selfish idea and everything else falls into place. I'm not sure that works anymore.

That's what our economy is built on. I think we have to have a broader approach and that's about how we treat the environment that sustains us and geez oh man you know i was the speaker for graduation one year i think my talk fell completely flat no one listened to it because i said there's more to the world than making money and i'm you know you guys are probably going to suppress the podcast here after i say something like that but you know there's so many things we need u.s grads to help with and in my world a lot of it deals with nature and the environment and biology, ecology and conservation. And I hope at least one or two students went off and did something like that. But we're in trouble.

I mean, plain and simple, we're in trouble. And so, yeah, that's the approach I took. Now, I didn't know I was taking that approach when I did it. I just ended up trying to restore the world's first national park.

I fell into that. You go to the University of Idaho studying wildlife biology, then mission tech where you study the winter body temperature fluctuations in beavers. And then your PhD work also talks about dispersal strategies and cooperative breeding in beavers. But then you work in Iowa Royale or Iowa Royale working with wolves.

What was kind of that switch where it seemed like for the for the first kind of three education degrees, they were a lot focusing on beavers and wildlife biology. But then you have that switch to Aureal and Wolfs. What was that switch and what was that time like for you? I should have known I was going to get in trouble with two U.S. students who are on top of their game, did their homework and ask great questions.

Thanks, Charlie. So since I was a young student at U.S., I was passionate about Wolfs. I started writing Wolf Biologist at age 15. when i was at us handwritten letters cursive i wrote them all again for my senior project so wolves were my first love and i got hired on our royal after my senior project at us so senior project us i think was april may i graduated and went to our royal june 1979 and so for the next four or five years i went to university idaho summers i worked in our rail so i wanted to be a wolf biologist however the guy who was running the hour wolf study offered me a grad project fully paid for wholly funded on beavers i didn't want to do it i was in love with wolves beavers who cares about beavers but this is related to the previous answer i just gave You got to take the opportunities that come your way. You know, this was a paid for graduate opportunity.

I didn't really want to do it, but I loved working outdoors. I liked the guy who was offering me the position. I took it to push that lifestyle out and it ended up being good. Beavers are interesting.

Wolves are hard to catch. Beavers aren't. You can catch a lot of them. So I got a lot of wildlife handling experience.

And I know this will be a little bit esoteric and maybe too detailed, but very few mammals live in family groups. They're called cooperative breeders. Three to five percent of mammals live like that. Beavers and wolves both live in family groups. so learning about wolves then beavers increased my knowledge and it led again you know opportunities come knocking i got a full ride fellowship to do my phd and this was a wildlife foundation out of senton texas near houston i had to go down there and man it was god awful you know august it was you know 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity but they funded my PhD.

And so I just kept that beaver thing going. And in the summers, I would work with wolves because, you know, you had time in between your studies. So I was going back and forth with wolves and beavers. And then I got my lucky break.

The Yellowstone job opened up. They're reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. I threw my hat in the ring. I applied for the job.

And having all that experience at Wolf Park, Iowa World, Northeast Minnesota, those are all wolf jobs. but I had a master's and a PhD and in a way science doesn't care what your species is science cares about how you learn how to do science you know do you know the scientific method do you have analytical techniques are you well read do you know about natural history that's what they care about not that you did wolves or beavers and so I got the job at Yellowstone and that's what I've been doing ever since although I retired three years ago so yeah that a great question charlie uh i didn't yeah a lot of people asked that how'd you end up with wolves when you did this grad work on beavers well that's how and then moving to that yellowstone job um the reintroduction itself obviously involved the capturing the wolves holding them in acclimation pens then a soft release but for people who only know kind of the headline of it what was the on the ground reality those first weeks was there any uncertainty what was that really like well first and foremost you know this is the mother park and what i mean by that is uh this is the world's first national park and i realize you know the bible says pride cometh before the fall so you shouldn't be proud of anything but as an american being a former national park service employee i'm really proud of that i mean this is america's best idea there's a documentary done on that you know america's best ideas established the national park system which which is worldwide now. And so, yeah, it's a very famous part. Very famous. And wolves, arguably the most controversial mammal in North America, if not the world.

They have what's called a whole Arctic distribution. That means they ring the top of the globe. So they're all over Eurasia as well. And wherever they live, people either love them or hate them.

And historically, they hated them. And so they were wiped out from this region. They used to be in Ohio. They were wiped out in Ohio.

And we're bringing them back. I mean, it was a firestorm of controversy. and so the first thing we're worried about is how is this going to go down and you know everybody in the western united states hates the federal government you know you could win elections just on the anti-government platform and so we're the government reintroducing this controversial species that's what we were thinking about you know and so you're right we we caught them in canada where they're still that's the mother load of wolves worldwide canada's got 50 to 60 000 wolves you it's a back of the envelope estimate alaska's probably seven to nine thousand russias they're mostly in siberia but roughly forty thousand but they're not really protected rural russia's got a very kind of uh lawlessness to it where they just take whatever they can to survive very hard living there um so we we went to alberta and british columbia and caught 31 wolves we got 10 from northwest montana so for a total of 41 we put them in pens which is you know acclimation period that's essentially to break their homing response so they don't go back to canada central idaho did not do that we had a sister project in idaho they just chucked them out that's called a hard release they wander more and try and go back home but they had more room central idaho wilderness is a larger area in Yellowstone National Park. Colorado just released wolves two years ago, hard release. So what we did has been kind of being there wolves in New Mexico and Arizona the Mexican Wolf Project that more of a soft release so wolf recovery has been going on Now it come to a screeching halt mostly because of politics But you know what we did is you know wolves just need half a chance, man.

They're a very adaptable, tough critter. People just need to stop killing them, basically, is what they need. So they did most of the work and we caught wild wolves in Canada. They knew how to live in the wild.

We just detained them for 10 weeks just to kind of make them not immediately go back, released them. They found elk right away. The elk population of Yellowstone was overpopulated. They made a few trills close to their acclimation pens.

Here we are 30 years into it. We have a fully restored population. Was there a moment And what kept you pushing on anyway? And also kind of to that last point, what were some of those early big misconceptions you heard from the public that you just had to keep on correcting?

The main one is they're going to kill all the elk. So, you know, the ranchers were the first prong of anti-wolf recovery because it's an age old thing. Wolves kill cows and sheep. And so they were the first group to be, you know, the first group to be group to be anti-wolf and they're very well politically connected you know a friend of mine studies tigers in india and he visited me in yellowstone and he said wolves in yellowstone are more controversial than tigers in india and his name is jala and i said how can that be man tigers kill people and they do and they don't kill the tiger for killing that person in india and he says well in the U.S. a rancher can pick up the phone call U.S. senator and the next day there's an airstrike down on that wolf pack and that is true he said no one in India can make a phone call like that you know so the ranchers were against the wolves cursed but a wolf that kills a cow or sheep will get killed they're a dead wolf and they don't do it much but when they do their debt.

So the next group that was against it was the hunters, primarily elk and deer. And they claimed that wolves were going to ruin hunting as they know it. Well, interestingly, right now in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, there's more elk now than there was 30 years ago when we reintroduced wolves. And that's kind of a thorn in my side because I live in Montana.

I have since in 1994 when I was hired to do the wolf reproduction, you hear and read every day wolves are wiping out the elk and deer herd. And right now the state of Montana is 50,000 elk over their target population size. So roughly 150,000 elk in the state of Montana and they won 100,000. and we just had the mildest winter on record warm and lack of snow and that'll help i mean winter is always a survival test for elk and deer and we basically had no winter at all so they're going to survive at the highest rate ever so uh the idea that wolves are going to wipe out hunting as we know it has been really ill-founded based on kind of facts and science And that's my biggest worry, Charlie, because misinformation fuels neotide wolf attitudes. We can live with them.

When they kill livestock, we kill them. When they kill elk and deer, they don't wipe out their herds. This is not as bad a problem as people make it out to be. Well, you know, obviously a lot of people in the story just think the wolves and the elk. what are some other things that change when the wolves are reintroduced to yellowstone that people might not think about whether that's vegetation or other aspects of the park you guys really do prepare for this well it's a great question jack um i guess you know my answers are long i'll try and keep this as shorter it's like you know kill our lakes right out the door there i assume if you're at the upper school maybe you're not but it's like throwing a pebble in the pond and watching the riffles grow out.

That's kind of what wolves do to an ecosystem. So, you know, wolves were eliminated from Yellowstone, uh, in the early part of the 20th century. Uh, the date we use for the last wolf killed 1926. And so the elk populate, you know, cruvers were killed off too.

Grizzly bears and black bears were much reduced. And so that caused the elk population to grow to overpopulation. And so what they did is they ate themselves out of house and home. They ate all the vegetation down.

They became the dominant animal in the ecosystem because they didn't have predators to check them. And so you had things like, and this is, I'm only listing the things that were studied. There's a plethora of things that were studied. But you had things like beavers and songbirds that used the vegetation that the elk were all eating up to climb to really low levels.

Fish, too. Terry's, you know, gosh, his middle name is Trout. You know, cutthroat trout are basically the western version of brook trout. Terry's fish is what he loves the most is brook trout.

Cutthroat trout, the streams, you know, they lost the stream-centered vegetation. So insects didn't fall into the water so the trout could feed on them. It also warmed the water because it wasn't shaded anymore. It was out in the sunlight.

There are all kinds of what we call downstream impacts of losing the predators. You know, some people refer to them as a keystone species. You know, when you have an arch, it's that middle stone in the middle of the arch that holds the arch together. So it's just one rock, but everything hinges on them.

And that's kind of how wolves are viewed in most North American ecosystems. Ohio too. But I'm the first to admit, you can't bring wolves back to Ohio because there's too many people, there's too much agriculture. So we've got to step in and make up for that.

It's a human-dominated landscape, so it's not exactly the same story. But, you know, there's a lot of places. I don't mind trying to Wyoming where I live now. some places, Washington, Oregon, California, you've actually got Arizona, Colorado, you know, that you can kind of piece together that original ecosystem, but you can't do that everywhere. You know, one of the things, we both have taken bio classes, and one of the things that we talk about is the trophic cascade.

Obviously, over the years, you've done a huge amount of outreach and interviews. So what have you learned about storytelling used as a tool of conservation, and then bringing in these biology topics that, I mean, we're even learning about in AP Bio. Yeah, wow. Okay.

Yeah, I don't have a ready answer for that one. I would say storytelling, you know, because the Tropa Cascade story in Yellowstone has been a war zone. It's a battlefield. So scientists have been duking it out over how Tropa Cascades work.

What happened when the ecosystem wasn't tampered with free wolf removal? What's happened since wolves have been back and what that's done is confused the public and a a very famous i don't know what you call it video went out 10 years ago by an englishman named george monabit and it was called wolves change rivers and it got 50 million hits and you know friends of mine who i went to school with from u.s emailed me about it and i hadn't heard from them in 30 years and they're looking up on it and so it made a huge impression most scientists hated it because the details were wrong they exaggerated they didn't get every aspect of it right and i led a field trip from with biologists from europe they came to yellowstone to hear about this and their very first question is what do i think about the video and i gave the pat answer it's a It's a great example of thinking for yourself. Park staff hated it. They were like, really?

We loved it. And I was like, well, why did you love it? When's the last time an ecology video went viral? They just don't.

The guy said, you know, you're competing with Kim Kardashian. And here is an ecology video that's getting millions of hits. Who cares if some of the details are wrong? We want to communicate the bigger pictures to the public.

And I agree with that. So storytelling. I think the trophic cascade messaging, I get calls still to this day from journalists asking me, are trophic cascades real? They're a fundamental aspect of all ecosystems, terrestrial, marine, and fresh water. ask Terry to define it for your audience.

Cops, carnivores, wolves, bears, cougars. Go to Asia. That might be tigers, bears, wolves. Go to Africa.

That might be lions, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs. But your top-level carnivores eat the next thing below. In North America, that's elk, deer, moose, caribou, sheep, buffalo. They eat those critters.

Those critters eat vegetation, whether it's woody or grasses or forbs. It's all one, two, three. Take off the top level, nothing's eating that next level. There get to be too many of them.

They impact the vegetation by eating it down to almost nothing. That happened in Yellowstone. And then all the other animals, the little ones that I mentioned, trout, birds, beavers that can't control these things lose habitat. So, so your ecosystem becomes the technical term is to pop for it or less diverse is another way of viewing it all because this fundamental top down approach, predators, prey, vegetation got modified because we kill all the predators.

I get journalists calling me, is that real? Because the scientists blew it. They started arguing about mechanisms. They started arguing about, well, did it really restore the ecosystem the way it used to be 125 years ago?

Some said yes, some said no. It confused the public. Take a filmmaker who just got the big things right, not the little things, and 50 million people clicked, you know, clickbait, hit on it. I'll take it.

Storytelling. In the Yellowstone project, it developed this kind of wolf watching community and it's become a thing around the park. When did you realize that wolf watching was becoming kind of its own culture? Yeah, good question.

Really good question. I would say, you know, for one, no one knew the wolves were going to be that visible. You know, we got wolves that were hunted and trapped in Canada. We thought they'd be wary of people.

There were wolves biologists said they wouldn't even come out from the trees because they would be worried someone was going to shoot at them. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. Now keep in mind the Northern part of Yellowstone is mostly open, but it would be hard to stay in the trees all the time.

But either way they didn and they started to appear and it became a sensation I mean really i learned this at u shrieker heights the world is is carking lots and clauses you know it it an artificial existence that humans have created for ourselves and when you have something real like you know wolves are hardly anywhere man we wiped them out we tried to wipe them out from all north america The only thing that saved them in Canada, Alaska was remoteness. But we wiped them out from the lower 48. And you got the mother park, Yellowstone. We released wolves.

And Yellowstone's easy to get to. It ain't Alaska and it ain't Northern Canada. Take a plane flight to Jackson or Bozeman, Cody, you're here. Drive into the park, boom, you can see grizzly bears and wolves.

And it's one of the few places in the world you could do that. People craved it. they loved it and so i kept waiting for it to like go away and didn't it got bigger and now it's this cult maybe i shouldn't say that the people here that would be upset but a lot of people describe it as a soap opera because the people watch the wolf families and they compare the human faces you know it's you know the sopranos or whatever you want to do i mean because the you know love hate he she conflicts between packs territorial battles it's all planned on fernia but what makes a difference is it's real it's not human control and it represents the wilderness you know the wild and you know the united states is is taken over by people i mean what do you guys do in cleveland man you know you go to cat house game brown's game indians or i mean guardians She rolls in chrysalid bears, you know, and so people can't get enough of it. So we had to adapt and manage it. And really, you know, the U S national park service, a big part of our mission and the catchphrase we use is visitor enjoyment.

And this really strikes at the heart of that. People will love it. Where I think it is, is they just crave something real. Everything I just rattle off about your life in Crete, like no offense.

Um, you know, just seeing wolves and grizzly bears killing something out in front of you, man, that's real. Yeah. And you talked about how rare it is that these wolves live in families and they also live in packs. So I guess an interesting question is what's one thing that you think wolves get right about teamwork that humans might consistently get wrong?

Well, one thing we learned about wolf packs and wolf families, those are synonymous, is it's their matriarchies. So they used to think the ultimate leader of the pack was the alpha male. It's the alpha female. If it boils down to who's in charge, so it's those, she's the matriarch and she's kind of running everything.

I think the other thing about wolves is they do have a society, but it's all voluntary. There is a pecking order or a hierarchy, a dominance hierarchy that we call it, but you can leave the pack anytime you want. It used to be thought that the low-ranking wolves are when food got tight, they drove certain wolves out of the pack. No, it's more up to the individual. wolf.

And tox size does fluctuate based on food availability, but it's up to that individual if they want to come or go. And if you've ever watched wolves travel, I call it lackadaisical. It's not a regimented, you know, military boom, boom, boom. It's come if you want, lag behind if you don't want to.

So there's some wolves that can be miles behind the leading front of the pack. So a male wolf, I've seen many times, you know, wolf goes out at night to hunt. It carries food back to the den site in its stomach. Sounds kind of gross.

And then it regurgitates it. They just would vomit it up for the pups. So when a male wolf comes back from a night hunting in the summer, the pups mob it. And he'll upchuck all the contents of his stomach for the pups.

And you'd think the pups would leave him alone after that. Oh, no, they don't do that. They bother the dude incessantly. Or more.

He ain't got it anymore. What does he do? He doesn't. You know, and I learned this about parenting for my own kids.

He doesn't reprimand the pups. He goes lays down someplace they can't get because they're little pups. You know, great parenting tests. Not negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement.

So wolves have helped my life. They're full of stories like that. You know, free will stay in the package. You want, we're leaving.

Well, if you feel like keeping everybody in line, I'll just go someplace else. So there's all solution charge. Well, you know, there's all kinds of little markets for both Wolf life that has helped my life. I hope that answers your question.

Maybe it didn't. No, for sure. You know, you've been featuring BigMe, including the 60-minute segment that took viewers behind the scenes. You were even in one of our AP Poe Tests this year.

What's something that you're kind of excited to do when it comes to the level of attention on your conservation efforts? And maybe what are you looking to do even more in the future to just only advance the field of wildlife studies even further? Oh man, you know, I've been interviewed a ton. You guys just keep asking tough questions.

You know, believe in what you do is, is the answer that I think pervades everything you just said I always have. And that's hard to do. Being honest with yourself, self-criticism, you know, everyone's got a selfish interest in the world. That's basically animals.

You know, if you study biology, you learn that every creature's out for itself. It's just a selfish interest. So you have to get past that. Why do I do what I do?

And I think, you know, I did have throughout my whole life, I have dedicated my life to wolves because they needed help. And I think that I always thought non-human life needed a voice. So I have always believed in what I did. I think to answer your question, Charlie, it was hard working for the federal government.

The federal government gave me big opportunities. They did. I am where I am today because of them, but they also controlled you. You know, my, especially in my later years, interviews weren't free form.

They wanted to know what the questions were and they wanted to know what the answers to my questions are going to be. And so you're early on in one like that. And the public sniffs out inauthenticity faster than you can imagine. The character people spot the most is authenticity. or trustworthiness to telling the truth.

It's just kind of part of our evolutionary history. We spot a fraud and a phony quick. And so the government got to be more kind of worried about risk aversion and wolves are controversial. We don't want to get in trouble.

So we better, you know, nip Doug in the heels before he gets us some hot water. so uh since retiring that's been kind of my focus i i no longer have uncle sam on my back um so you know when i got a call from a journalist when i worked for the parks first thing i had to do is refer them to the gatekeepers you know call public affairs and see if they give me the green lights talk now i just talk boom i'm on the phone i'll tell you what i think i just got i wrote a book, not that great of a book. It's just about basic wolf biologist, but you know, it didn't have to get approved by the government because it's coming out in June. It's just a book. It's basically on wolves.

I might write another that tells the story of Yellowstone wolf re-deduction in a less censored way. You know, get at the keys to the wolves and get at the keys to the people and the keys to the controversy of what happened in a way that will help. You know, I'm not gonna like take down the federal government. I'm not anti-government.

It's easy to criticize because they're a huge bureaucracy, but what huge bureaucracy isn't criticizable, if that's a word. You guys are probably intellectuals and you know that that's not a word. But what I mean to say is, in a constructive way that isn't, you know, inhibiting, which is what I really felt. You know, wolves are, in terms of wildlife, the most controversial species you can find.

Speak your mind, man. Speak your mind, because people will know that you're being curtailed and now ain't like that now uh and so that's that's the answer to that question charlie well dr smith we always end with some version of this when you zoom up beyond wolves and beyond career tiles what is your why what is the deeper reason you've done all this and the reason you still care to this day uh because nature needs help and they they need a voice from you know you're at us i thought a lot about this when i was there in your position you know what are you good at that's kind of a lifelong pursuit so that's a lifelong question and i still don't know uh but what happened was is going to yellowstone gave me a platform it gave me a podium too you know you work in yellowstone people want to know They want to hear what you have to say. And then you throw in wolves. And those two things were just explosive.

Boom. Wolves first national park, killed off all the wolves. The government did. And now the government's bringing them back.

And so what was I good at? What do I want to do? I want to be a voice for nature. And it wasn't just wolves.

It was for nature. It's like, what did we do? It was wrong. And we can fix it. we can bring it back.

And so I wanted to point that out. And I used, it took me a while because I grew up in Ohio, which is Midwestern state. You're never supposed to, you know, tell about yourself. My parents raised me to be, you know, never make a big deal of yourself.

Be quiet, sit in the back. Don't shoot your own horn. My mother told me that all the time. And midway through my career in Yellowstone, I was like, no, man, I'm going to toot the wolf's horn.

I'm going to use this podium they're giving me to talk about them. So I had to overcome a high upbringing, applied to a Westerner, don't make a big deal out of yourself. Mother tell me, you know, you're not that great, just sit in the back. I would pound on the podium and go, this is important.

Nature's important. Wolves are important. We did it wrong. We got to fix it.

I still believe that. We got a lot more to go. nature's on the run. Somebody needs to speak out for him. You guys do Mr.

Harvard does us does. We all have a part of that. It's all part of just the only goal life ain't just making money. If that's a battle cry, I'll say it again.

I said it 15 minutes ago. Nature's on the run. I can get behind speaking on its behalf. Well, Dr.

Smith, it's been an amazing episode and thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your stories, insights and experiences with us and to our listeners as always thank you so much for tuning in we hope you'll join us next wednesday for another episode of late star show thank you dr smith