Dan Flores
speaker
4,468 appearances
23 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Aug
Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The only places in the lower 48 that still had sizable wolf populations were the upper Great Lakes country and the mid-south.
By the mid-20th century, the upper Midwest still had 1,400 gray wolves and the mid-south 450 red wolves.
But those numbers were all quickly falling.
For Americans born after World War II, living in a country without wolves now became normal.
That was certainly the case for me.
From a generation born in an America with no wild buffalo on the prairies, no passenger pigeon in the skies, no wolves in the forest, the wolf warriors were finally succeeding in making America over in the image of England or France.
centuries of unquestioned wolf hatred had worked.
So-called civilization was now at hand.
There was one exception to this sad tale of wolf disappearance in the lower 48.
Back in 1959, inspired by Adolph Murie's The Wolves of Mount McKinley, a young graduate student from working-class roots named David Meck
conducted the first of three winters of field trips to a 210 square mile island in Lake Superior.
Isle Royale had become a national park in 1940, and Meck's project was to study an ongoing natural history experiment there.
In the early 1900s, moose had swum from lake shorelines out to the island.
Lacking predators,
their numbers predictably underwent two massive eruptions and then die-offs.
Then in 1949, gray wolves somehow got to Isle Royale from the mainland, probably by crossing the winter frozen lake.
Like Adolph Murie, Meck did the kind of wolf study others dreamed of, getting to see firsthand and evolving ecological interactions.
At the time, a few hundred wolves remained in the upper Midwest, most of them in Minnesota.
The Fish and Wildlife Service would declare this Midwestern wolf population officially threatened by 1978.
When Meck's The Wolves of Isle Royale appeared as a National Parks publication in 1966, his insights spread through the scientific community.
Showing 1721–1740 of 4,468 · page 87 of 224
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