Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News
“What you’re about to experience is Yellowstone as it’s rarely seen,” actor and Montana resident Bill Pullman says in the opening narration of a new documentary.
Smithsonian Channel’s Epic Yellowstone, a four-part series that airs this month and will be available via several streaming services, puts Yellowstone National Park’s recovering ecosystem into the limelight. The park went nearly half a century with few top predators, and efforts to restore the resulting imbalance are just now taking hold. Following the lives of Yellowstone’s birds, mammals and even insects as they strive to survive, each episode follows a common ecological theme: the intricate web of cause and effect that exists among predators, prey and the environment.That theme is especially apparent in the series’ second episode, “Return of the Predators,” which debuts March 17. It focuses on the return of the park’s top predators: gray wolves and grizzly bears. Gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, roughly 50 years after being eliminated from the area. And to turn around the loss of grizzly bears, which dropped to fewer than 150 individuals in the continuous United States, the bears gained protected status in 1975 by the Endangered Species Act. As of 2017, an estimated 700 grizzly bears and more than 100 gray wolves lived in Yellowstone.
The episode avoids the controversies, such as how the protection…
The post ‘Epic Yellowstone’ captures the thriving ecosystem of the world-famous park appeared first on FeedBox.