Photographing the Wild Wolves of Yellowstone | Exposure

In Rogard Kipling's The Jungle Book, he has a quote that says, "For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack." Yellowstone lives and breathes wolves. In the last 20 years, I wanted to photograph them and bring that to light. This was my first project with National Geographic. I'd been in Yellowstone for several months. My role was solely as Nick Nichols' assistant. He suggested I pick up the wolf issue in Yellowstone and pick up wild wolves inside the park.

Up until the mid-80s, biologists thought that ecosystems were built from the bottom up, from the vegetation all the way up through the insects and all the way up through the layers, and that the top predators just kind of fed off of the extras. Yellowstone has given the world an opportunity to see that it's very much on both sides; that an apex predator is a key part of the landscape.

We were able to partner with the park's biologist to have this mutual relationship with them where we could get images for them that they had never seen before and try to capture behaviors that they had never seen before. My favorite photograph from this project is definitely three wolves feeding on a bison carcass along the Yellowstone River. This was a scene that we were able to kind of pull the curtain back on Yellowstone and the wolves. You know, the situation just came together.

One of the primary tools in wildlife photography that I use is camera traps. The goal of camera traps is fairly simple; it's to give the viewer an intimate experience with an animal that you can't get any other way. Oftentimes, when you put a camera on a carcass, you know, you can't be there. You have to put the camera, set it up, and leave, and walk away and hope for the best.

And the bears are probably going to wreck your camera; that's pretty much a given on this project. But you could get a couple of images that allow you to open up this world of the wolves that people had never seen before. If there's one thing that people could take away from the photographs that I've created of wolves in Yellowstone, I'd say it's that the wolves have an integral part of the ecosystem in Yellowstone.

All throughout their home range, they control the big grazers; they control the elk and the bison and the deer. The animals are healthier throughout, and the wolf has just given balance to the entire ecosystem. Political boundaries mean nothing to nature; it's a permeable boundary, and they just move back and forth as their biology dictates.