In her talk, Boyd discussed her hope that conflicts among interest groups will decrease. She outlined the incredible trajectory of wolf recovery in Montana, and she shared her suspicion that human harvest is having an impact on the wolf population.

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Ream was Boyd's mentor starting in 1979, she said. She was a misanthrope who spent most of her time in the field with wolves, and some time sleeping on the couch upstairs.

"This is home for me," she said of the forestry building.

She kicked off the seminar with a brief review, or "wolf ecology 101." They're social carnivores, obligated to hunt as a pack, "terrific" at dispersing, highly territorial, and "breed like rabbits if conditions are right."

Most importantly, though, they're highly adaptable, Boyd said. At one point, wolves had the largest distribution of any mammal on the planet with the exception of humans.

By the 1930s, though, wolves were mostly wiped out in North America, and the last of the loners was gone by maybe 1950, she said. Then, in 1973, the Endangered Species Act passed and granted them protection, and with it came Ream's vision for the Wolf Ecology Project to track the animals' recovery.