Since the beginning of wolf reintroduction in the Northern Rockies, Idaho and its more than 20 million acres of wildlands has taken a back seat in the debate to Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone simply had more star power for wolf advocates who were seeking a remarkably ambitious program to restore wolves into a region where wolves were hated, poisoned and eliminated. The 2.2 million-acre national park at the core of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, along with nearby Grand Teton, also offered wolf advocates a place of government control like few places on earth.

As more than one of my friends who have lived in Yellowstone repeated regularly, Yellowstone is the closest thing to a police state in the United States. I could add military bases to the competition, but Congress gave the National Park Service unusual powers, especially to control wildlife in its first national park.

When wolves were finally released in 1995, all the national hoopla went to Yellowstone. The releases in Idaho were almost a footnote. Some environmentalists, seeking to challenge the eased rules under which wolves were released, only sued to stop reintroduction into Idaho, not the park, so they wouldn’t confuse all the people nationwide who were celebrating the return of wolves to Yellowstone.

The Yellowstone wolves were carefully pampered. The Canadian packs were kept together for the first two months in big kennels to allow them to stay together and acclimate to their new home. The wolves in Idaho were taken to the end of the Salmon River road and dumped unceremoniously into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness like trapped bears.

But the wolves themselves never read the press releases. They didn’t know they were supposed to thrive in the place where their supporters had the most control.

The Idaho wolves quickly found each other, along with the few native wolves that hadn’t been illegally shot or poisoned. They formed their own packs and flourished in the wild backcountry of the Salmon-Selway ecosystem, which has ample supply of elk.

With managers balancing protection with the needs of livestock owners, the Idaho wolves also found homes on the edges of the ideal habitat. Wolf numbers grew in Idaho at rates far higher than either Yellowstone or Northwest Montana, where they had been repopulating on their own since the 1970s.

When they were delisted back in March, there were as many wolves in Idaho – more than 700 – as there were everywhere else in the northern Rockies. Even in the face of relatively high mortality due to official killings to protect livestock, Idaho was the place where wolves grew old.

Since delisting and the subsequent decision that forced the federal government to place them back on the endangered species list, state and federal officials and ranchers have killed a lot more wolves in Idaho, following through on their commitments to the ranching community when they sought the reintroductions more than 15 years ago.

But the wolf numbers are in no tailspin here.

However, wolves in Yellowstone, which are protected from killing by man, are killing each other at a significant rate, biologists report. At the same time the pups are suffering an outbreak of distemper.

These deaths could mean a crash in the Yellowstone wolf population, according to wolf biologist Doug Smith, interviewed by the Billings Gazette. Since reintroduction, wolf numbers in Yellowstone have peaked at 175 and then dropped several times.

Smith believes this is sign that wolves are self-regulating their own population. But they aren’t doing it because of how much prey is available. Instead they seem to react to crowding.

In other words, wolves are naturally setting their limit in Yellowstone at about 170.

Smith and his team get to spend a lot more time and money studying their population than the Nez Perce Tribe and Idaho Fish and Game get for Idaho’s population.

We don’t know Idaho's wolf population “social maximum,” as Smith calls it. All we know for sure is that wolves have done a lot better in central Idaho than they did in Yellowstone.

My guess is that before the wolves hit their carrying capacity in Idaho, the human tolerance level for them will have long been exceeded and we will have killed enough to keep them from feeling crowded. Many argue the population already has reached the human limit.

All of this is going to have an impact on the expected decision of the Bush Administration November 28 to remove Rocky Mountain gray wolves from the endangered species list again and return management to the states, at least the states of Idaho, Montana, Utah, Oregon and Washington.

Which way it goes in court, I’m too cautious to predict.