We heard the eerie bugle of the elk before we saw him. The sound seized the attention of the five point bull we were watching; he was nervous and eyeing the building while also trying to sidle up to the cows. Then the huge dominant bull walked around from behind the hotel and, glaring at the younger animal, began to pace toward it. The junior bull, after a brief sham show of hesitation, wisely retreated behind other buildings in the small community. But there were other possible targets for the remaining rutting bull’s hormone-driven aggression. Close to a hundred people, including ourselves, must have been gathered on the streets, building steps, and between parked cars watching, waiting to see what would happen. As the bull proudly and arrogantly walked down the main street, looking for competitors, rivals, sparring partners, the more foolish of the people trying to get a little closer for that social media picture. The park rangers with the bullhorns yelled at people to back off, to retreat to within their cars and buildings. One haughty man even walked directly toward the animal. The wiser of us did retreat to safer settings, to watch the proceedings in security. The animal was deep in the rut, controlled by the primal drives of mating and defending his harem. With the young challenger departed he was looking to take out his aggression on something else, anything else. Some of the bystanders, containing that deadly mixture of obliviousness and ignorance, had no idea of the danger they were putting themselves in.
The scene described was witnessed a few weeks ago by myself and Darren Hebert at Mammoth Springs, Yellowstone National Park. Having little direct experience with wapiti (I have lived most of my life in areas absent of these animals) I was in awe at the size and grace and, if truth be told, shaken at the power and aggression of the bull. Those sharp antler and hooves, powered by four hundred kilograms of muscle and sinew supercharged by adrenaline and testosterone, would brook absolutely no defence from a two legged person that was too close. The confidence of the animal and its determination to battle with something, anything, told the wiser of us to stay well out of his path. This encounter between the aggression of nature and the lack of respect by humans, fortunately, ended with no one injured. But it could so easily have ended badly, particularly for that one arrogant and ignorant man who refused to betray the slightest respect to the animal. The park rangers did what they could, but how does a young employee with a bullhorn stand up to a prime bull fuelled with aggression and a human equally powered by stupidity?
Yellowstone National Park is unlike anywhere I have ever seen. It is an intersection of nature behaving, largely, unmolested yet paradoxically jammed up with people. In August alone almost nine hundred thousand people passed through its gates. Here you can, with some effort, witness animals behaving in ways that you have previously only read of or watched on YouTube. While there Darren and I witnessed rutting interactions between rival elk, between dominant and sub-dominant moose, and buck antelope defending their harem from intruders. We watched fox hunting and pouncing on prey from only five or six metres away. And of course, the bison. At the same time we noticed some rarely seen human behaviour that was equally fascinating as the wildlife.
The ignorant and disrespectful behaviour of some people to wildlife is well documented on social media and was emphasized in our observation of the rutting elk at Mammoth Springs. But, curiously, we also saw people behaving most unusual in positive ways. In the park, bison jams are not unusual. A bison jam is caused by a single or small number of bison walking lazily down the middle of the highway, blocking traffic in both directions. Long lines of cars develop ahead and behind of the animal as it slowly idles along; the vehicles inch forward (if following the bison) or stop and pull off to shoulder to let the animals pass (if ahead). All wait for the huge bovids to tire of the pavement and move off the road. We were in several of these and, most surprisingly, not once was a horn honked. Contrast this with the result in the city when you don’t accelerate the microsecond a red light turns green. In the park there is patience for the bison-induced traffic jam among people that in an urban setting maintain one hand always centimetres away from the horn.
This particular park can also show us a further unusual human behaviour: tolerance and cooperation. Wildlife viewing here is not the classic watching long sightlines from a high bluff or walking a trail slowly and quietly trying to catch a glimpse of an animal. Here it is looking for the massive congregation of vehicles pulled over on the side of the highway; not unusually there may be more than sixty vehicles pulled over, each disgorging two or three passengers. Yes it is wildlife viewing among a crowd but, surprisingly, it is a welcoming crowd. People chat with each other sharing information of what they have seen and where, they give up their spotting scope to their neighbor so they can get a good view. It is communal. It is also self-regulating. One can see the effects of peer pressure on controlling the more unpleasant of human behaviour. When in the crowd, very few watchers attempt to get any closer to the animal than that of everyone else. In some respects the crowd behaviour is of greater intrigue than the wildlife being watched.
The park itself appears to take advantage of this amity among visitors to help manage the heavy traffic flow. Rather than explicitly and authoritatively commanding where visitors may and may not park or stop, they instead use subtle messaging combined with this group mentality. One day we noticed at a distance a congregation of cars stopped on the highway but before we arrived we encountered a sign, clearly one hastily put together, beside the road stating “Elk carcass park at Mud Volcano” (don’t get me started on the lack of punctuation in the message). There is no better way to get two biologists to stop than to advertise a carcass! It became clear as we joined the throng watching five wolves feeding on an elk carcass away in the distance that the park was advertising – it was promoting people stop here – as it was a safe place from which a large group of people could observes the wolves and there was safe parking nearby. The canids and the carcass, a big bull elk likely injured in rutting combat and dying on the opposite side of a small river, were about nine hundred metres away across open country so approach was out of the question. From a visitor management perspective, focussing the people here fulfils their desire to see wolves (which appears to be the greatest draw of the park) but also in safe surroundings.
One of the things the driver of a vehicle notes upon entering the park is the narrowness of the highway; it is two lane with only very narrow shoulders. Very frequently however, are wide spots to pull off the road. Thinking about the conflict between safety (narrow road, often winding, very high volume vehicle traffic) and visitor experience, I can only conclude the highways are intentionally designed this way in order to focus visitors into specific areas to pull off the road. In intervening stretches pulling off is discouraged, not by signs and fiat, but by simply lack of safe place to pull aside. We found this largely controlled the large groups. In some locations some people would pull off into questionable areas, but for the most part we noticed people were aggregating at the same places, where the road accommodated it, day after day. This may not have been a function of planning, but I prefer to perceive it as such: intelligent crowd control by park administration, done in a very subtle way and taking advantage of visitor behaviour to stop when they see one or two vehicles (or forty) pulled over.
We also saw indirectly the less flattering side of human behaviour in nature. One day we pulled over for emergency vehicles with sirens and flashing lights, two park ranger trucks and an ambulance. We would not know what it was for but I later learned that it had been a news story. Someone had, not believing the geysers actually were hot, had stuck their hand into one to see how hot it truly was. Most of them (and there are more than ten thousand in the park) are near or at boiling though some are more like hot bathwater. They were scalded. This is an annual occurrence in the park, with several visitors doing this each summer. All of the signage and warnings given, and there is definitely sufficient and frequent warnings of this, is not enough to protect all those who go into nature.
I went to Yellowstone in anticipation of seeing wildlife I had not seen before, or at least not regularly. And we did. It is one of the most unusual places on the continent and an astounding legacy to the foresight and purpose of the American National Park System. But it is more than this. There are lessons here about human interaction with nature, the good, the bad, and the ugly. These are lessons most evident and front and centre here where the features and natural nature abound, transposed with extremely heavy human traffic. But these lessons are applicable to all parks and protected areas. Yellowstone shows us in many way show to protect both nature and people, while also ensuring a visitor experience without parallel in North America.
Final note: A fascinating read of the interactions of humans and nature in this location is “Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and foolhardiness in the first National Park” by Lee Whittlesey. Basically the author provides description of all known deaths in the park (there have been more than three hundred) but also explores the parks mandate to keep Yellowstone wilderness and so balancing safety with humans entering not the wild. He deals with the subject sensitively yet also critically. A great read after you have visited the park so you are familiar with the locations he discusses.
Sean Mitchell
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