Charting Yellowstone’s Wolves

New Book Review

By Ralph Maughan On June 18, 2012

Jim Halfpenny puts together all his past wolf charts, making a valuable insider’s wolf guide-

In 1996 Dr. James Halfpenny and Diann Thompson wrote Discovering Yellowstone Wolves. It described the original wolves brought from Canada and released in Yellowstone National Park.  The wolves’ first travels and adventures were chronicled. Discovering Yellowstone Wolves was a must have book for the first Yellowstone Park wolf watchers. The book also included a chart of the first wolf packs and the wolves in it.

After the reintroduction years were past, Dr. Halfpenny and Diane Thompson continued to make annually updated wolf charts. Many laminated copies of these were for sale in the gateway towns around the Park.  The charts were a plain-to see essential carried by many wolf watchers, myself included.  For a number of years I memorized every detail the charts provided. Over time the wolf population grew and so charting them became quite complicated.  Sometimes more than one version a year was made available. At others, only some parts of the Park were covered, such as the wolves on the Park’s Northern Range.

Now, 16 years later, all of these charts have been bound into a 108-page volume, with 46 charts.  This book, Charting Yellowstone’s Wolves provides additional details about the wolves’ genealogies and territories. Those have closely followed the Park’s wolves will be interested.

Here is one of Halfpenny’s original charts, now included with the others in Charting Yellowstone’s Wolves.

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