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For his leadership in the restoration of the gray wolf in the northern Rocky Mountains, Dr. Doug Smith received the Director’s Award for Natural Resource Management. As Wolf Project leader, Doug has played a major role in the success of this venture. (See Natural Resource Year in Review—2001) This project serves as a model for how to restore, manage, monitor, and live with a large predator, and has far-reaching implications for the restoration of wildlife worldwide.
When the wolves were first brought from Canada in 1995 and 1996, Doug managed their care in the acclimation pens and has continued to do so since their release, developing procedures to restrict human use around active wolf dens, managing nuisance wolves outside the park, and investigating wolf fatalities. Monitoring wolves is difficult but crucial to this project. Doug devised innovative long-term wolf monitoring and research procedures. His winter study strategy has allowed investigators to closely observe wolves making kills and interacting among themselves and with other species. These data have led to the development of statistical methods for estimating how often wolves kill large prey.
Armed with this kind of information, Doug and fellow project advocates can rebut charges from angry opponents of the project that the wolves are decimating the elk herds, and that their population is exploding. His many outreach activities are important for winning support and raising funds. He is an educator about wolves, making presentations to lay audiences, teaching wildlife education courses, mentoring graduate students, and contributing articles to journals and books. He has integrated more than 150 volunteer scientists into the park’s management and research programs, and through the Yellowstone Visiting Scholars Program has welcomed wildlife biologists from around the country and abroad.
Growing up in rural Ohio, Doug says, “My interest in nature and remote places was nurtured by my father and then focused on wolves when my brother bought me the classic book The Wolf by L. David Mech,” prompting him, at age 16, to write Mech asking for a job. Now, a few decades later, young people are contacting Doug with aspirations of working with wildlife in remote places.
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