STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTOS BY JIM AND JAMIE DUTCHER AND KAREN BOSSICK
Jim and Jamie Dutcher spent six years in a tented camp on the edge of the Sawtooth Wilderness as they filmed a pack of wolves.
They’ve shared their love affair with the majestic creatures in book form and through a documentary that won two Emmys. And they shared it through a traveling exhibit that they took around the world, even to places like Jordan, which sports small desert wolves.
Now this traveling exhibit has come home to roost. The Dutchers will open a Living with Wolves Museum in the new building at 580 4th Street. The building contains Gold Mine Consign, Hank and Sylvie’s, Understory and the new Wood River Museum, as well.
The museum will have a soft opening on Tuesday, July 25. Thereafter, it will be open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and possibly during Gallery Walks with a grand opening tentatively planned for September.
“After we finished filming wolves, we couldn’t walk away from them—they needed so much help,” said Jamie Dutcher. “Most important in this museum are the captions that dispel the misconceptions that make people hate wolve. If they know the truth, we hope they will feel different.”
In the past several years, the exhibition appeared in the Rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., as well as venues in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, England, Scotland and Canada.
“We always thought that the exhibit needed a home and thought this was a great place, said Jim Dutcher. “So many come here for the wilderness that surrounds Sun Valley. We hope they will come here to learn more about wolves.”
Jim Dutcher started his filmmaking career filming underwater scenes near his Florida home at 14. Upon moving here, he shot a National Geographic film on the ecosystem of a beaver pond just outside his log home in Ketchum. He followed that up with a documentary on cougars titled “Ghost of the Rockies,” then decided to turn his lens on wolves in 1991.
He gathered a group of pups from the offspring of captive wolves, bottle feeding them as soon as they opened their eyes. Then he built a 10-foot fence around 25 acres of aspen and pine, grasses and sagebrush, marshes and ponds overshadowed by grey granite cliffs near Stanley.
He pitched his tent in the middle of the enclosure and erected a yurt for the film crew to work in.
The enclosure was eight times larger than the largest enclosure ever built to confine wild animals for research purposes. It offered the Sawtooth Pack a chance to chase prey and do the other things wolves do. It offered Dutcher the opportunity to film their social hierarchy as they began ignoring him.
It was the first time someone had ever actually lived with wolves, as opposed to following them with a radio.
“Some people criticized us, saying that you can’t really know what goes on in an enclosure,” Dutcher said. “But, without the enclosure, no one gets to see. Wolves are extremely wary about human presence. They’ll watch you and run away the moment you get close. And you don’t get a true depiction of their habits that way. To get any kind of natural behavior, we had to gain the wolf’s trust.”
Into this mix came Jamie, an employee of the National Zoo at Washington D.C., who had answered Jim’s calls for wolf-aid advice—say, when a wolf needed surgery for cataracts.
The wolves met her—huge mounds of fur whining in expectation, their big tongues licking every inch of her face. One even managed to stick his lower canine tooth up her nose.
Jamie had never camped a day in her life but she was willing to sacrifice the comforts of home to awaken to 30-below temperatures, the condensation of her breath frozen on her pillow, to become part of this special family.
The wolves caregiving and social bonding is second only to that of humans, said Jim. They’re the most social animals there are except for humans. They live in families, educating young and refusing to leave an injured wolf behind.
The Dutchers watched as the alpha female gave birth, all the wolves celebrating, milling around the den site whining and digging in the earth. Each brought food back from a hunt, regurgitating a pile of partially digested meat—wolf baby food--for the pups to eat.
After eating, the adults would coddle the pups, letting them gnaw on their ears and pounce on their backs in mock hunt behavior. If one had to be disciplined, they’d growl and roll the pup over on its back, pinning it down for a few seconds.
When a mountain lion came into the enclosure, killing one of the wolves, the others mourned its loss for six weeks. They stopped playing, tucked their ears back and their tails in and ceased howling. And they made sweeping figure eights as if searching for the lost wolf.
When one wolf was being picked on, another pushed the others out of the way.
“They will not decimate an elk population,” Jamie said. “They’ll keep the elk herds healthy by taking the old and some of very young animals. And this in turn helps other wildlife like birds, which feed on what the wolves leave behind.
The museum features many of photos the Dutchers have taken of the wolves, providing short factoids about them. It features educational panels and film clips. A parabolic speaker hanging from the ceiling emits a wolf howl when someone stands underneath it.
The museum also features one of the traps hunters are allowed to set out for wolves just 10 feet off a hiking trails.
“People here have heard about traps but they haven’t seen them. The only way you can open these is with bars. I can’t do it and I work out at the gym,” said Jamie. “Forty-seven percent of the animals trapped in caught in the traps are not wolves but, rather, pets, eagles, deer…”
While the Dutchers lament that wolves are still the subject of ferocious debate, they take comfort in knowing that their work has made a difference. Case in point: A 9-year-old who heard one of their presentations at the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch.
“Twenty year later, she wrote us and told us that she was studying wildlife management—that we’d changed her life. And we’ve had that happen over and over,” said Jamie. “A hunter told us he’d always wanted to kill a wolf but couldn’t do it after learning about them.”
They are opening the museum to dispel the myths, including the one that the wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 were giant supersized wolves, not the kind that originally populated the area.
“That’s not true. It was the same type of wolves that crossed back and forth over the Canadian border for centuries,” said Jamie.
As for killing livestock and people? Less than 1 percent of the livestock predation can be attributed to wolves—even domestic dogs are responsible for more, Jamie said. And there have only been two possible attacks on humans in North America the past 120 years.
“If you’re lucky enough to see a wolf, they’re allowing you to see them,” said Jamie.
Today the Dutchers’ nonprofit Living with Wolves sponsors wolf research in national parks. They themselves still thrill to the sighting of a wolf. But they do it the way others do it--by going to Yellowstone National Park, their grandchildren in tow, and watching the wolves through spotter scopes.
“We call it canis lupus miniscule because they’re so far off,” said Jim. “But it’s still a big thrill.”