It is not a matter of what is to come. It is a matter of the Climate Crisis mitigation to prevent it from becoming worse.

Normally, the herds, packs and flocks of Yellowstone National Park are reduced by population stress. This year is proving to be very different. There is a good chance the species in Yellowstone will leave the park for safety. The hunters in the areas are not to kill them, they still have to have a chance to return to safety.

This year some of the behaviors of the top predators of Yellowstone National Park are suspect to their ability to find food. Primarily, the Grizzlies have had trouble because of the fish populations. There have been interventions north of Yellowstone to establish a native population of fish so Grizzlies would have normal populations for their consumption. Those interventions take time and there is a good chance that the intervention could have been washed away, hence, not making the progress this year.

The wolf population of Yellowstone has seen migration out of the park and many wolves were killed by hunters this year. That cannot be allowed to continue until the Park Service knows there is a sustainable population within the boundaries of the Park. The wolves probably migrated to find food because of the competition with the Grizzlies. Wolves do travel in packs, so the idea an entire pack was wiped out by hunters is a very real possibility.

At any rate, the National Park Service as well as NOAA and USFW have their hands full trying to track endangered and threatened species under the climate crisis. Old rules allow hunters to take national park species when found outside the park boundaries. That will have to be suspended this year until the species status is assessed.

June 15, 2022

By Jim Robbins, Thomas Fuller and Christine Chung

...The floodwaters (click here) that raged through Yellowstone this week changed the course of rivers, tore out bridges, poured through homes and forced the evacuation of thousands of visitors from the nation’s oldest national park.

It is difficult to directly connect the damage in Yellowstone to a rapidly warming climate — rivers have flooded for millenniums — but scientists are raising the alarm that in the coming years destruction related to climate change will reach nearly all 423 national parks, which are particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.

The litany of threats read like a biblical reckoning: fire and flood, melting ice sheets, rising seas and heat waves.

Rangers in Glacier National Park in Montana are counting down the years to when the park will have no glaciers left....