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Snapshot: Savage River Wolves
Gary Baker
After coming to Alaska in 1966, Gary Baker always called it home, though as an airline pilot he traveled the world, from the Canadian High Arctic to South America's Amazon. Two retirements later, he resides in Moose Pass, and misses reminiscing with Gordon Haber
I met Gordon when we were working in the park in 1966. For a long time, I lost track of him, but then I bumped into him in Anchorage at Café del Mundo. We instantly recognized each other and began reminiscing about the park. We had hiked all over that park; we'd covered it from stem to stern.
One time I said to him, “Do you remember, Gordon, when I told you about the wolves at Savage River?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
And then the next time he saw me, he said, “I checked my notes. It was July 1966 you told me about the Savage River wolves.”
He really became attached to that Savage River pack. The whole park, what's happened to the wolves, it's a real sad story.
In 1966, I got out of the army and headed to Alaska for adventure, and landed a job working as the only bartender at the old McKinley Hotel. I'd close the bar at midnight, and the hotel concessionaire would solicit me to drive one of the three old Bluebird buses as a fill-in driver for the 4:00 a.m. departure into the park. Gordon was a seasonal ranger, and he'd give a seminar in the basement of the hotel right across the hall from my four-table bar.
He was always so enthusiastic; you had to hear one of his seminars. Just picture this young guy straight out of college, full of life about what he was pursuing, and delivering it with both barrels. One woman in the crowd was so impressed with his presentation that she offered to fund his graduate education. He never lost that enthusiasm.
Everyone knew Gordon wanted to see wolves. Bill Ruth, another ranger who was a friend of Gordon's, was involved in trying to find wolves for Gordon. So was Charlie Ott, Joe Hankins, Adolph Murie, Louise Murie—all these people who had been in the park a long time were looking for wolves for Gordon. It was a real changing of the guard, that summer, and they all worked with Gordon.
Joe Hankins lived at Igloo Creek every summer, and he'd take his Leica camera and bring young people out with him into the park, but only if their boots were properly oiled. They had to have good footwear. Hankins spent so much time around wildlife that they got to know him. I remember seeing him standing in the middle of a herd of rams. And he spent lots of time showing Gordon around.
After one of my early morning bus trips, I searched out Gordon. I told him I'd seen wolves at the Savage River, right in the middle of the valley near the rock formation that looks like an Indian head—that's why they called it Savage.
Well, Gordon almost ran me over getting out the door, saying, “I gotta get out there, do you think they're still there?” I'm not sure how he got out there, vehicles were so hard to come by; he must have commandeered an old Park Service truck.
But Gordon found those wolves. And that was the first time he saw wolves in the park.
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Snapshot: Flying Gordon
Troy Dunn
Troy Dunn retired from the U.S. Air Force after a twenty-three-year flying career. The desire to both learn about Alaska's wolf ecology and help Gordon's field work brought the two together in 1999, and a close friendship resulted. Troy logged more flying time with Gordon than any previous pilots. Since they routinely flew on holidays, Gordon spent many holidays and Super Bowl Sundays with Troy, his wife, Jackie, and their three dogs at their North Pole home.
I flew an A10 in the air force, one of Gordon's favorite planes. Gordon liked that I was a military pilot, because we're highly trained aviators and are the best at low-altitude work. We're comfortable looking for things while we're flying, employing the airplane as a tool, so that the actual flying of the aircraft is second nature. We look at the total environment—wind, sun angles, shadows—all to figure out if we stick our aircraft into a particular location, to ensure we can make it back out.
Gordon and I used a Cessna 180 and Piper Super Cub. Some might say that the Cub is best for this type of work, but the 180 was Gordon's mount of choice while flying with me as we operated much more efficiently with it. The 180 handles the turbulence better, and ours is equipped with safety-and performance-enhancing modifications. Gordon sat in the back, and we took the right front seat out. This gave Gordon more room, and it also gave me a better view out the right side as that is the direction we usually orbited.
On a rare occasion we took a friend or family member out with us, and they could take maybe one or two turns before getting sick. Gordon could take it all. He needed to know who the individuals were, their colorations, whether they were male or female; he could tell during mating season which wolves were mating by the spot of blood on the female wolves' backsides. This is the level of detail for which Gordon strived.
Often we'd come in on the telemetry location and not have a visual of the wolves. I would fly a box pattern around the signal, and then keep cutting that box in half, until we knew the signal was coming from a fairly small location. Gordon kept turning the gain down on the receiver making the signal quieter and quieter; this way we could hear the signal peak. Then finally one of us would see something; sometimes we couldn't see anything more than a leg sticking out from under a bush, but we'd find them. I'd come home and tell my wife, “You wouldn't believe where we found wolves today.”
Once we were flying in the upper east branch of the Teklanika River, and it was snowing pretty well. The Toklat family was up there just sleeping, but Gordon wanted to stay there as this was his main study group. The wolves were sleeping just off a big rock wall, just sheer gray rock, but it was snowing hard enough that it would disappear as we flew away from it and it would slowly reappear as we turned back upstream toward it. We weren't in any danger of hitting it, but there were some eerie moments because every time we turned upstream, it was just white, then this gray just starts appearing, like a ship emerging out of fog. I said to Gordon, “This is eerie, this snow and these rock walls.” And Gordon was like, “Yeah, yeah.” But he wasn't paying attention; he was just looking through his camera at the wolves.
Gordon had no limit. It could be forty below zero and he would still want to go check on the wolves. “Oh, let's just go,” he would say, and he'd tell me the old-timers did it back in the day. But I'd needle him, tell him how fuel doesn't atomize very well at those temperatures. I knew we would be OK if we had to spend a few nights out in the wilds as I'd been through all of the air force survival schools, and I knew Gordon was more than up to it as he already spent more time sleeping out at minus forty than most others, but my concern was the aircraft itself. Although our aircraft is highly modified to operate safely in these extreme conditions, there still must be limits and a time to wait for better conditions.
Gordon was a stickler for keeping his gear in good shape—his sleeping bag and foam mat, his backpack and camera. Once he had to hike back into the park road and ended up spending the night in fifty below temperatures, so he knew his bag was important. He was meticulous with his telemetry equipment; on really cold days, he would tuck the receiver inside his many layers under his jacket until we got in the plane. He never wanted to leave the telemetry cables in the aircraft until I convinced him that we were doing more damage by removing them after every flight than if we just left them in place in the aircraft.
But he always wanted to go out. We spent half the year on straight skis which made maneuvering the 180 in tight places on the ground a challenge. Gordon always jumped out with me to help me pull the tail of the 180 around. At thirty below that frigid prop-blast from the running engine made the end of my nose numb in seconds. True to form, Gordon, however, would jump back in the 180 and exclaim, “Damn, that was refreshing, wasn't it?”
Another time, we let down into Fortymile on a beautiful clear day. Even before I looked at the thermometer, I noticed the in
side windows frosting up. So I said to Gordon, “This is too damn cold. We don't need to be playing around down here.”
“Yeah,” said Gordon, “I think you're right.”
It was one of the few times he agreed that it was too cold, and it was forty-five below zero.
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5 The Toklats are called East Fork by the National Park Service; as well, the Toklat West group is called Grant Creek by the National Park Service.
6 Haber used number or letter combinations to refer to individual wolves.
CHAPTER 2
THE HEART OF WOLF SOCIETY: WOLF FAMILY BONDS
HABER CAME NORTH TO ALASKA AS SOON AS HE FINISHED HIS UNDERGRADUATE work, and never left. He started as a seasonal interpretive ranger in Denali National Park and then began his graduate work on predator-prey relations with Denali's wolves. Haber's long-term research on continuous family groups allowed him to observe many alpha pair bonds from beginning to end. He found the closeness of these bonds, and of all the family bonds, to be central to the group's survival in the demanding environment of the far north. In fact, said Karen Deatherage, Haber was so convinced of the significance of the group that he avoided taking and didn't like photographs of single wolves. “He said that wasn't who they were,” she recalled. “They weren't just individual animals, but a highly social, efficiently coordinated group.”
Over the years he came to know and admire the roles of many individual wolves within family groups, such as LT, the beta male of the Savage River family group, and the Toklat female who, having lost her mate to a darting accident, showed Haber just how deep and irrevocable pair bonding can be. Haber concluded that not only are wolves highly social, but that wolf family social ties are unsurpassed. As Haber realized how trapping and hunting along the park's eastern boundary in the Wolf Townships was destroying these intimate long-term bonds and thus also destroying the entire family group structures and traditions, he stepped up his own advocacy, with both the state and federal governments, for a protective buffer. And he continued observing each succeeding generation of Denali's wolves.
WOLVES ARE PERHAPS THE MOST SOCIAL OF ALL NONHUMAN vertebrates. A group of wolves is not a snarling aggregation of fighting beasts, each bent on fending only for itself, but a highly organized, well-disciplined group of related individuals or family units, all working together in a remarkably amiable, efficient manner. Their elaborate, highly advanced social behaviors may be the most advanced of all animals besides humans.
Wolf social organization is based on two unusual evolutionary strategies among vertebrates: cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting. There is also strong evidence for a third evolutionary strategy—prudent predation—in the way nonmigratory wolves exploit moose, at least in many subarctic areas. Decades of field research indicate these strategies operate primarily through sophisticated interactions and interdependencies within family-based groups, especially longlasting multiple extended families. The end result is the formation of longlasting traditions, passed from one generation to the next.
The intimacy between wolves in a family group, which enables them to cooperate closely, also means that each is keenly aware of the identity and presence or absence of others. From what I have seen, the intimacy of a family group is often comparable to, and sometimes exceeds, the degree of intimacy found within a typical human family. Wolves will go to great effort to remain with their families.
In 1992, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced it wanted to kill wolves via helicopter shooting over a more than ten-thousand-square-mile area within the range of the Fortymile caribou herd, public outcry was so strong that the idea was dropped. Instead, three years later, ADF&G announced a relocation and sterilization plan to reduce wolf numbers in that area. Wolves were darted from the air, stuffed into undersized crates, and flown off to unfamiliar territory hundreds of miles away. Some showed tremendous family affinity by struggling all the way back home over weeks and months, only to be chased down by the ADF&G helicopters again and hauled off to more distant locations.
One such returnee, a male of the Granite family group, finally gave up and died alone in a dark crate, after again being chased to exhaustion, snatched from family members, and transported hundreds of miles away. ADF&G promised a necropsy, but nothing was said about the ordeal involved in such captures, or that this wolf had already struggled back home from an earlier relocation, which to many Alaskans would have been reason enough to let him be.
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Tweet
June 17, 2009
Raw, wild beauty at the den tonite with the wolves howling a great chorus for me as rolling thunder from a passing storm shakes the valley.
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Life within a family group, which in most cases is an extended family of pups, parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins, is replete with rituals, divisions of labor, and other variations in behavior that adapt them to a variety of changing conditions. Each wolf has its own personality, and the ability of each to express many humanlike emotions becomes obvious after one watches the same individuals for even a short time. The Toklat alpha female in the photographs on page 40 and Plate 2 from 2008, for example, was often more assertive, even toward her mate, than many alpha females I've observed.
Although there is considerable freedom for individual expression, the group adheres to a well-defined framework of a dominance hierarchy—a kind of pecking order—in which each wolf knows its position, and there are few if any instances of pronounced strife. The result is an exceptionally harmonious way of life. In more than forty years of watching wolves in the wild, only once have I seen fighting among adults of an established group, and even in that case, none of the wolves were wounded.
Most important, however, this highly developed social organization seems to result in an efficient division of labor, with top-ranking adults assuming the most important responsibilities. The alpha male, for example, takes the lead for hunting and mating, but the beta male will lead in other group activities, including the care and raising of pups. Usually, so long as the family remains intact as a single unit, the only matings permitted are between the alpha male and female.
It is when a family group fragments, such as in areas where wolves are subjected to shooting and trapping pressures, that one expects to see an increase in the number of matings and thus an increase in the number of young produced. With such fragmentation, other pairs are able to get away with mating—something that wouldn't have been permitted in the presence of the original alpha pair. This means that the hunting, trapping, and aerial killings by which humans have tried to reduce wolf numbers are instead most likely to increase them.
Wolf Pair Bonds
Wolves are monogamous, something that is relatively rare in the animal world—and their reproductive bonds are at the heart of wolf social organization. These bonds easily rival or exceed typical human marital bonds in their strength, and the bond between primary alpha breeders is the most important relationship in a group.
Courtship and mating, which lasts ten to fourteen days beginning in late February to early March, may well be the most significant wolf social event each year. Courting wolves commonly “snuggle” while walking and lying together. This behavior probably has the same adaptive value as the snuggling, hand-holding, arms-around, and related contact of human courtship.
These close emotional ties and physical contact are not unique to sexual activities, however. The Toklat male and female from the 2008–2009 observations shown in the photographs on page 40 and Plate 2 maintained similar high levels of emotional attachment and physical closeness year-round, and so have most of the other alpha and lower-ranking pairs I've observed.
Family activities turn somewhat erratic as the top echelon becomes wrapped up in sex. The previous year's pups are clearly bewildered at this strange behavior of the top adults. Though a beta male may show interest in the alpha female, producing a triangle, the alpha male shows strong, clear authority over all others and is extr
emely assertive toward the beta male in particular, whom he keeps in almost constant submission, even though the two otherwise work together closely.
For just as often, the beta male can be a helpmate. Virtually all family members help the parents, but the most noteworthy of the reproductive altruists I have followed over the years was LT, the beta male of the Savage River group. Although he probably never fathered a litter, LT performed most of the major duties of fatherhood. He involved himself in reproduction beginning almost with the twinkle in the alpha male's eye by staying close to the alpha pair during their courtship and mating. During mating, the male mounts, thrusts, and then slides off locked, standing back to back and/or side by side with the female. Most ties last for ten to fifteen minutes, and during this time there is commonly much mutual face licking and other affection. LT's presence afforded a measure of protection to the alpha pair during their copulatory locks, when they could have been vulnerable to attack by trespassing wolves.
My 2008–2009 observations of the Toklat family of Denali National Park during the annual sexual activities in late February and early to mid-March illustrate the close bond between the alpha male and female. They also provide an indication of the intensity of courtship behavior and some of its ritualism.
The light tan female and charcoal gray male were the parents of most if not all others in the Toklat group by this time. Both were in their prime at five years of age. Courting wolves also largely keep to themselves during courtship but usually do not separate very far from the other family members. During my observations, all the others—mostly their one- to three-year-old offspring—are within a hundred yards or so. (See next page and Plate 2.)
Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal Page 4