Conservation Northwest

Conservation Northwest updates Coming this summer on film Land of the Lost Wolves "Land of the Lost Wolves," a new documentary film about Washington's returning wolves just came out in the UK and will screen in the US on Discovery Channel in early summer. Conservation Northwest's Jasmine Minbasian was one of three central characters in the film. Here she talks more about the film and what it means for Washington's recovering wolves. jasmine minbashian: I always tell people that the film is a wildlife documentary about making a wildlife documentary. It's about an expedition team that sets out into the Cascades to document what's happening with the Lookout Pack, the first wolf pack to return to the Cascades in 70 years. The team includes wildlife cameraman, Gordon Buchanan, a wolf tracker, Isaac Babcock, and me, the wildlife conservationist. We set up a base camp in the snowy Methow Valley in the middle of a winter that happened to be especially cold. Every night during the month-long filming was a real adventure. To make it even more exciting, I was five months pregnant! But I loved every minute of it. It's not very often that anyone gets to spend a month outside, not only in the field but working with a community. I'll never forget it. erin moore: Tell us about the first wolves you found. JM: At first, it was terribly disappointing, because we were searching hard but we were not finding wolves. One day Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Fitkin and I were out looking for deer as part of a University of Washington study trying to outfit deer with cameras to record their movements to help understand how having large carnivores coming back affects the movement of deer. Early on a gorgeous, frosty morning, we were checking one of the deer traps, when we heard coyotes across the valley yipping and howling. Just after they stopped, we heard a long, low, deep howl. We froze—instantly we knew it was a wolf. It kept going and going, this long mournful howl. It went on for so long that we panicked; we thought that maybe a wolf gotten caught in one of our deer traps. We crept quietly up the trail to check, but no wolf. We were still puzzled. The howl had sounded so close! It was our sound guy who pointed over our heads to say, but what are those blobs up on the ridge? We looked up and saw two amazing wolves. They had been watching us for quite a long time and we didn't even know! It was the older male of the Lookout Pack with a younger wolf. I've being working on wolf conservation in the Cascades for 15 years and had never before seen or heard a wolf or even a track. This was my first experience seeing wolves in the Cascades. It was magical. I had to pinch myself a couple times to say, no, you're not in Yellowstone, you are in the Cascades. 18 Spring-Summer 2012 This spring near the Methow Valley yielded several photos of two wolves traveling together that may be a mated pair. Biologists are watching closely over the next couple of months for any evidence of pups. Photo USFS remote camera EM: "Land of the Lost Wolves" has screened in UK on BBC but won't screen in the States till this summer. Of course, you've already seen it. Does the final film fulfill your expectations? JM: We're not Yellowstone.We don't have packs around every corner so the pressure was on to find these wolves. And knowing there had been poaching of most of the Lookout Pack, I knew that that finding these wolves was going to be a hard task. Also, I had never worked with this film crew before, and my experience with media covering wolf issues is that people really want to build the story around polarization and make it a black and white issue: either you love wolves or you hate them. But there's so much gray area, no pun intended, when it comes to wolves. They are complex animals, with complex social structures. Living near them is not easy—or necessarily all that hard—but it takes some understanding of who and what they are as a species. So I was worried that the crew might oversimplify the issue. But the final film surpassed all my expectations. The BBC team were able to capture the complexity of the issue and tell the story in dynamic way, the incredible story of wolves returning to Washington's Cascades. The story itself is a good one. and in this case the reality is stranger than fiction. I have a great deal of respect for the team, they are real professionals, and I never felt they were trying to make the story more than it really was. The whole film is about how wolves are having this natural return from Canada and the question the film asks is how far will it go? Is this the beginning of a dramatic return along the www.conservationnw.org

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