Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal

by Haber, Gordon

  Haber also recognized the great value of long-term research on continuous family groups—and the Toklat wolves he studied, along with the community of chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall, are the world's two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups in the wild. In this chapter, Haber introduces us to his work in Alaska, to his study areas, which he calls “some of the most beautiful wilderness areas on Earth,” to his methodologies, and to his observations of the wolves themselves, animals that, he says, “enliven the landscape.” As some of his experiences remind him, however, it's not always clear who's observing whom.

  My Good Fortune

  AN OLD-TIMER ONCE SAID THAT WHEN YOU SEE A WOLF, HE HAS already seen you twice. With few exceptions, when I was observing wolf homesites in summer, I think the wolves eventually knew I was in the area. However, in most cases, I observed them with a spotting scope from far enough away that they showed no concern.

  But in the summer of 1991, the Toklat wolves didn't just ignore me.5 The first time they checked me out that summer, I was sleeping soundly at 5:00 a.m. About ten of them, including the alpha male and female, surrounded my tent only fifty feet away and proceeded to wake me abruptly with their gruff barks and accompanying howls. They had discovered me as they were returning home from the night hunt, and after a few minutes of expressing some displeasure through their barking and howling, they headed off to the den. Throughout the rest of the summer they continued to ignore my presence while they were at the den but checked me out fairly often on their travels to and from.

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  June 26, 2009

  The forest+subalpine route that I hike to/from den full of old+new wolf, bear, lynx droppings, esp in forest. Nice to share with them.

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  I consider it my good fortune to be able to spend my “work” days as a scientist observing many kinds of wild creatures primarily in what is unquestionably one of the crown jewels of the planet: Denali National Park and Preserve. All wild animals interest me, each in their own way and for their own important ecological role. But years ago it became obvious from thousands of hours of direct observation that wolves stand above the rest in their unusual intelligence, emotional depth, expressiveness, sensory abilities, physical prowess, and especially their family-based social systems.

  My interest in wolves, wilderness, and northern ecology began during three years I spent in Isle Royale National Park, an island wilderness in Lake Superior, Michigan, famous for its moose-wolf relationships. To most young outdoorsmen, however, the ultimate call of the wild is in Alaska. In 1966 I found my opportunity to answer this call, working during the summer months as a ranger in Mount McKinley National Park. At the same time I began a long-range wolf study, one I intend to continue indefinitely.

  Since then, I've been studying up to eighteen different groups of wolves, all in some of the most beautiful wilderness areas on Earth. The fieldwork takes place primarily in two areas of Interior Alaska that add up to the combined sizes of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. One of these areas, about eight thousand square miles, is centered on the northern half of Denali National Park and Preserve. The other, about fifteen thousand square miles, is two hundred miles northeastward, in the Upper Tanana–Fortymile–Yukon–Charley region of east-central Alaska.

  Denali has been a study area since 1966, Fortymile since 1993; I observe twelve to fourteen groups in the Denali study area and four in the Fortymile. I chose these two study areas because of their importance in generating a range of information about wolves and prey, and because of Denali's longstanding world class biological and visitor-viewing values, and Fortymile's use by state and federal officials as a proving ground for major new forms of wolf control, including agency-facilitated public hunting and trapping. Other areas, such as Game Management Units 20A and 13 just east and southeast of Denali and near the village of McGrath to the west, are added temporarily from time to time, usually when wolf control is proposed and/or carried out, and there are opportunities to meet conservation objectives. This research provides the only major nongovernmental source of scientific information on wolves, prey, and related human activities in these areas.

  These groups of wolves (including singles and pairs) are under observation via aerial radio tracking, snow tracking, ground observation, and other means. During the summer months, I do much of the fieldwork on foot, observing the wolves at their dens and other homesites and carrying out various surveys of their prey. In the winter, however, the wolves use no fixed homesite and move almost continuously through the rugged terrain of their large territories. Consequently during this part of the year it is necessary to observe them from a small ski-equipped plane, a Super Cub, circling low overhead for three to ten hours a day.

  I am able to stay very close, circling fifty to one hundred feet away for hours at a time, day after day. The wolves habituate to my small aircraft as if it were a large raven, and either ignore it or sometimes howl along with the engine sound. Flying amidst Denali's majestic white peaks and along river bottoms, often only five to ten feet above the ground, looking up at the adjacent treetops, or landing on skis in winter, is exhilarating and dangerous, especially being out at forty to fifty below zero in winter. But it is the best way to observe these wolves over such a huge area.

  Thousands of hours of scientific observations later, I remain in awe at what I see in Alaska's wilderness: Wolves enliven the northern mountains, forests, and tundra like no other creature, helping to enrich our own stay on the planet simply by their presence as other highly advanced societies in our midst. Equally fascinating are the underlying patterns of complexity in the way they interact with other wildlife at broader scales, and the functional similarity between these systems and many other kinds of systems throughout the biological and physical worlds.

  Long-lived Denali Groups

  Wolves occupy virtually all areas of suitable habitat under natural conditions, with their territories abutting each other in a tight mosaic much like the rocks of a well-masoned stone wall. In the Denali region, group territories range in size from two hundred square miles, where there is good habitat and prey abundance is relatively high year-round, to two thousand square miles, where prey abundance is relatively low.

  For the first seventeen years, most of my research in Denali was on two family groups: the Savage River family, with a home range of about six hundred square miles, and the Toklat family, with a home range of about a thousand square miles. These two territories provided a good contrast in terms of habitat and prey characteristics.

  The Toklat wolves have occupied most of the central thirty to forty miles of Denali's ninety-mile road corridor for well over half a century and have been under scientific study since about 1939. This is the group that Adolph Murie made famous in his 1944 classic, The Wolves of Mount McKinley, based on his 1939–1944 observations, the first scientific study of wolves in the wild.

  When I arrived in Denali in 1966, Ade, as friends knew him, told me he had observed Toklat regularly enough subsequent to his 1939–1941 observations to be confident that the wolves present in the same area in 1966 were a later generation of the extended family he had observed and written about. He also felt this group had occupied the area for at least the previous decade. Given this, my research of this long-lived family group now represents one of the most intensive studies ever undertaken in the wild of the same known groups of a large predator and its prey.

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  July 5, 2009

  Checked 14 Denali wolf study groups on research flight yesterday—poor vis in W+N areas of park/preserve due to smoke from 2 lightning fires.

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  And yet, throughout the years I've often wondered who, really, was studying whom. On one trip to observe the Toklat wolves at their den in the summer of 1991, I was sitting dutifully at my spotting scope when suddenly I felt like I was being watched and turned to see the alpha male standing in the open only seventy-fi
ve feet away, quietly and calmly studying me. Almost immediately after my eyes met his, he circled to my downwind side, still maintaining a distance of about seventy-five feet, and scented the light breezes for a minute or so. Then he circled a quarter mile away through some trees and trotted off to the den without a hint of concern.

  On my second trip that summer, I noticed that a two-foot-diameter spot near my campsite, where I had urinated regularly, was all scratched up. The wolves had visited after I departed from my first stay and responded in kind to my “scent post” by one-upping it with a scent mark of their own. Naturally, I urinated profusely over the same spot again, and sure enough when I returned for my third visit the site was scratched up even more violently than the last time. My nearby presence as a spy on their intimate affairs may have been difficult enough for them to swallow, but evidently it was just too much for them to ignore my scent marking as well.

  Understanding Unexploited Wolf Populations

  There is no shortage of information about the biology of exploited wolf populations and unnaturally disrupted and reformulated family lineages. There is pitifully little information about what happens under natural circumstances, especially over long periods of time, despite the fundamental importance of this kind of information from both basic and applied standpoints.

  A better understanding of longevity among family lineages—beginning with the areawide patterns of persistent and shorter-lived groups that can be expected under natural conditions—requires observing individual groups until they end, and then distinguishing between the possible natural and human causes. It also involves information about the durability of key social relations (for example, how long certain individuals maintain alpha and beta ranks and roles, related divisions of labor, and pair bonds) and other aspects of stability (for example, how group sizes respond to prey changes).

  The high value of long-term observational field studies such as this is that they can describe a broad range of interacting variables in a complex systems context. That is, by doing field work for an extended number of years, we can learn not just about wolves but about the entire ecosystem of which they are a part.

  How do wolves and their prey get along without interference from humans? Are there major differences in the degree and sophistication of cooperation in well-established, nonmigratory versus exploited, migratory wolf populations? These questions must be answered before we can gauge the effects of our influence on the natural processes and hope to solve many of the complex wildlife management problems we face.

  In many ways the social organization of wolves is surprisingly similar to what anthropologists have pieced together as the social organization of early man. The well-defined dominance order and disciplined manner in which duties are assigned and carried out, the presence of different generations of the same family living together, the prolonged dependency of the young, the group effort in raising and training them, the cooperative effort of many individuals in hunting large prey—in these and other respects, wolves, like our own human ancestors, have developed a highly effective means of coping with a wide variety of ecological conditions. Perhaps by more intensively studying—not persecuting—a species so similar in behavior to that of our ancestors, we can learn much more about ourselves.

  Wolves are fascinating as individuals, but what I find unique is the beautiful, interesting, and advanced social structure of an intact family group. Fragmentation of a wolf group through hunting and trapping disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic.

  In a wolf family, as in other advanced societies, the basic social framework is programmed in the genes, but important details are “tuned” via learning to fit available resources, differences from area to area, and changes over time, thus providing the society with much flexibility and adaptability. These details are so adaptive that they last for generations—families thereby develop traditions. Learning never stops; hence these traditions can be updated and enriched as local conditions dictate. The result of this collection of traditions can be viewed as culture. This is one of the primary reasons why wolves once successfully colonized such a large portion of the earth—the entire northern hemisphere and the subcontinent of India.

  The behavior of all social vertebrates and many other animals is shaped to varying extents by learning and tradition across generations, as a supplement to inherited behavior or behavioral predispositions. But learning and tradition are of special importance in wolf society. One need only consider the length of time young wolves remain dependent on older family members—25 percent of normal life expectancy in Denali's family groups—which is as long as or longer than even in most human societies.

  This is one of the hallmarks of an advanced society: prolonged dependency (or “neotony”) of the young enables the society to transfer large stores of accumulated past learning to each new generation. This capability together with their highly developed divisions of labor and other forms of cooperation places wolves and a few other species at the pinnacle of vertebrate social development.

  Longlasting Traditions

  Wolf populations in Interior Alaska may have enjoyed some of the longest-lasting traditions and richest cultures for wolves anywhere—at least until the onset of major human interference in the 1900s—because this region escaped the Pleistocene glaciations that virtually wiped the fauna clean in other regions.

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  Field notes #71

  September 1999

  4:25—801 crosses the road right in front of me,6 30 ft away, at E Polychrome right at the “cave” above the road. I had stopped there and was struck by the marmots whistling back and forth to each other all across the area—obviously in response to 801, who was just coming down from those rocks. As she crossed the road 30 ft away, she seemed to slightly favor one of her front legs or paws—ie, a very slight limp. She ignored me—looked rather tired in the 60° sunshine.

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  Modern wolves probably have a continuous history of at least a million years in Interior Alaska—far longer than humans anywhere in the New World. They, along with their much larger, more powerful, less social cousin, the dire wolf, were likely a part of the everyday scene when this region escaped the great Ice Age glaciations that repeatedly descended across most of North America for tens of thousands of years at a time—when Interior Alaska was a refuge from the ice, a land of cold, grassy steppes and tundra with herds of woolly mammoths, giant bison, mastodons, horses, caribou, musk oxen, antelope, elk, sheep, and even camels. This remarkably diverse fare of grazers provided well for the wolves, and for the huge lions, saber-toothed cats, giant short-faced bears, grizzly bears, and wolverines.

  Then, about fourteen thousand years ago, the surrounding ice sheets retreated and the Alaska climate turned warmer and wetter. Over the next few thousand years the steppes gave way to tundra and boreal forest. Humans had already arrived from Asia via the now submerged plains of Beringia and were spreading their deadly new spear point technologies across the land. The combined impacts of these habitat and hunting changes were severe, and by about nine thousand years ago most of the great Ice Age creatures had disappeared from Alaska. But the wolves remained, subsisting on moose, caribou, and mountain sheep, which continue today as their major prey.

  I often wonder for how many decades and centuries, indeed millennia, some wolf groups were able to persist in Interior Alaska, where the species as a whole has survived for so long. It is questionable as to whether the Savage River and Toklat groups existed before the early decades of this century, which leaves the distinct possibility that it took fewer than four to five generations to develop the impressive hunting techniques and other traditions I began observing in the 1960s.

  Wolf populations crashed throughout most of Interior Alaska from about 1906 to 1925, owing to a combination of diseases spread by sled dogs and poisoning by market hunters. Most wolves inhabiting the eastern half of Denali as of the mid-1920s were likely first or second generation of the Savage River and Toklat, whic
h then persisted until the winter of 1982–1983 and through the present, respectively, despite periodic hunting, trapping, poaching, and other losses.

  Doubtless wolf groups were eliminated now and then by humans well before our impacts of the twentieth century. But few other regions of the Earth have provided so many lengthy intervals for wolf groups to develop in such an exacting environment with such diverse, largely nonmigratory prey and so many other large predators, including some of the most formidable prey and competing predators that wolves have faced anywhere. This has presented the species with an ideal stage for high orders of cultural evolution, and for extreme forms of kin-selected altruism.

  If the sophisticated traditions of the Savage River and Toklat developed in only four to five generations, what fascinating twists did groups that grew to be much older in earlier times develop? We can only guess at the incredibly rich traditions these marvelous learners could have developed.

  I feel privileged and enlightened to have witnessed the ways of the Savage River and Toklat families so intimately. Still, I can't help but wish I could have conducted my study a hundred years earlier, on wolf groups that had enjoyed much longer histories. I do not lament for the wolves that began succumbing when modern man arrived here in force near the turn of the century, any more than those early miners, hunters, and trappers did—or, I would guess, than did the humans who hunted this region eight to twelve thousand years ago. But I do feel a sense of loss when I think about the exquisite cultural adaptations some of these older groups must have developed. We deserve more sympathy than the wolves do, for unwittingly erasing such quality from the land and dulling our surroundings that much further, thus diminishing what is so vital as nourishment for our creativity and humaneness.