When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature's Balance in Yellowstone by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

We often think of our nation's national parks as one of the few places protected from human interference.  National parks today have strict no-trash policies, allow for little development, and are havens away from the hustle and bustle of our modern lives.

Yellowstone is one of the national parks we have come to treasure.  In 1872, Congress declared Yellowstone a national park in an attempt to protect, as author Dorothy Hinshaw Patent of When the Wolves Returned writes, the place that "contains more natural geologic wonders than any other place on Earth."  When the park opened, hundreds of people came to visit and camp.  Many came to hunt the wildlife such as elk and deer.  The hunters, however, had a competitor: the wolves.  The park thus hired hunters to kill the wolves to leave more elk and deer for visitors to shoot.  By 1926, all the wolves were gone and elk and deer ran in their largest numbers.  Little did anyone know how crucial the wolves were to the ecosystem of the park's habitat.  In When the Wolves Returned, Patent shares the story of the fall of Yellowstone's precious balance of life and how it was finally restored.

Patent tells a somber story with a subdued narrative stating just the facts.  The reader needs no help to read between the lines.  When the Wolves Returned includes photographs from its first years of Yellowstone's opening contrasted against photographs taken in the 21st century by Dan and Cassie Hartman.  The older photographs, property of the National Park Service, give the reader a look at its first visitors who came in suits and dresses as people once dressed when they took the day for a vacation.  The black-and-white photographs contrast sharply against Dan and Cassie's high-definition, color photographs that enable the reader to grasp the vastness of the beauty Yellowstone contains.

When the Wolves Returned would work wonderfully as a read aloud in a classroom on a unit on ecosystems.  The book concludes with a flow chart tracing the "wolf effect" created in Yellowstone by wiping out the wolves.  The book and concluding chart allow children to being to grasp how much change one alteration in a natural cycle can cause.