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

by Haber, Gordon

  Meanwhile the two pups had awakened from their nap and were sitting together at the burrow entrance, staring incredulously at the strange monster standing in the willows less than a hundred feet away. It took them only thirty seconds to decide that they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with this huge creature, and they darted right back into the burrow. Then the cow walked within thirty feet of the burrow; she was acting quite uncertain, as if she could smell the fresh wolf scent all around. Then she resumed browsing.

  At this point, the high-ranking male wolf, who was resting on an open willow bench thirty-five feet away, sat up and looked toward, but not directly at, the moose, as if he didn't wish to acknowledge her presence, although he appeared to be looking at the burrow area to satisfy himself that there was no imminent danger for the pups. Then he dropped back down, his head flopping off to the side. The moose, meanwhile, kept looking in the opposite direction and acting as if she hadn't seen him—even though he was clearly visible at such close range—or any of his family members. She continued to browse with wolves all around her. The male raised his head for one more brief, sleepy-eyed glance, then lowered it and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Field notes #133

  June 2006

  5:05 pm—I see a grizzly w/3 yearlings rooting directly below eroded bluffs below S side of den area. Casual behavior.

  5:20—same. still no wolves—bears rooting same area.

  5:30—same—bears still in same area but working slowly upstream.

  6:55—still don't see wolves—the bears have just climbed up the S gulley and are now in the trees at top of bluff, at S end of den area. It looks like they are foraging in a grassy area there—no indication they are after the wolf pups or even know this is a wolf area.

  7:07—I hear 840 in den area, probably toward S end, in bear area. A raven flies from my side of valley and drops down into the trees behind the bluff.

  * * *

  Shortly thereafter, the cow ambled back up the ridge and disappeared over the top. A few minutes later the male wolf rose, walked to the main burrow, looked it over for a few seconds, then returned to the bench for more sleep. The two pups poked their heads barely out of the burrow entrance for another apprehensive look toward the willow patch where they'd last seen the moose, then pulled back abruptly.

  But there can be exceptions, regardless of the heat. On a hot morning in August 1966, a yearling cow moose wandered right into the midst of at least ten resting wolves at the den and promptly got herself killed and eaten. And on another hot day in June 1973, at least a dozen older wolves were

  asleep at the Toklat den. Since not much else appeared to be happening in the area, I reclined for some midday sleep myself, at my campsite on the opposite side of the valley. I had been sleeping soundly for about an hour when I awoke to the clickety-click of caribou hoofs running along the gravel bar, only seventy-five feet away. No sooner had I raised my head for a fleeting tail-end glance at the large bull caribou than I heard the duller thuds of wolf paws hitting the gravel at a full lope. Neither the wolf nor the caribou saw me. The wolf—a large adult male—chased with his tongue hanging almost to the ground but with his eyes fixed on the caribou like the infrared detectors of a heat-seeking missile. The chase disappeared quickly around a brushy bend, preventing me from watching the outcome, although my later searches of the area failed to find any evidence of a kill.

  Social Travel

  Winter, when wolves don't stay at a homesite, is a different story. The Savage River and Toklat family groups traveled in winter on average fourteen and a half miles per day, and as much as twenty-five miles per day. Wolves clearly like to travel—there is an obvious joy in their distinctive and poetic loose-gaited trot.

  In winter they hunt throughout their territory, visiting most prey areas at least once every few weeks. On these far-flung winter travels, it became obvious to me that the adults know their huge, rugged territories intimately. They use the same routes regularly, moving deliberately to strategic passes and negotiating long, complicated sequences of high, interconnected knife ridges without the slightest hint of uncertainty or trial and error. There is no doubt in my mind that these established family groups traveled their territories largely on the basis of an exceptionally detailed knowledge and memory of the terrain and its plant and animal life. This kind of spatial acumen develops as a family group tradition and enables successive generations to become increasingly tuned to their territory and its specific resources.

  During this more nomadic time, some two- to three-year-olds will decide to leave the family and disperse to other areas. This occurs mainly when the family group is large and prey is scarce. Family groups of seven members can have just as good hunting success as family groups of twenty members, and I've never observed any aggression or feeding order at kills, even with twenty wolves. Instead, this dispersal happens without animosity or aggression and is rather a two-way slackening of bonds, along with a tendency of subordinates approaching sexual maturity to show a desire to wander off on their own for varying periods of time.

  * * *

  Tweet

  June 11, 2009

  Love the hike in and out. Attack goshawk waiting for me again tonite at 10 pm on hike out as I dropped down from the subalpine into forest.

  * * *

  Seasonal food supplies can also affect the family group structure. Before the Denali caribou herd's last decline in the 1970s, the Toklat family group had an abundance of food in summer and a dearth in winter when the caribou migrated away. So in winter, they often split into two or three groups. This winter splitting was temporary, however; in spring, as pupping time grew close, the groups rejoined into one large family again. As the caribou herd declined and the difference between summer and winter food supplies was less, winter splitting was less frequent.

  Winter travel along the borders of their territory also includes intergroup strife. The Savage River and Toklat groups sparred regularly, with hostilities sometimes beginning as a series of short tit-for-tat trespasses along the same segment of the territorial divide. Occasionally this was preceded or accompanied by some back-and-forth howling, and not uncommonly there was considerable reciprocal scent marking over the other's marks. Sometimes these probes escalated into deeper raids, hot pursuit, and fatal fights. In fact, deaths from intergroup fighting probably constitute 10 to 20 percent of a family group's total natural (non-human-caused) winter losses from death and dispersal.

  While these two well-established groups clearly did not accept trespassing strangers, groups will adopt newcomers at times, particularly when they've suffered hunting and trapping losses. The Toklats, after the collaring death of the alpha male, allowed two new males to join their group, and one became the new alpha male. And in 1989, a two-year-old male from a small, unstable group west of the Toklat territory was accepted into the Headquarters group. At the time, the Headquarters consisted of only two adults and their five pups of 1988 and was in the process of colonizing a large vacancy created when the Savage River family was decimated six years earlier. Headquarters had a long history of exploitation and unusual losses; in 1986 it had been reduced to only two wolves.

  The 1989 newcomer seemed to enjoy good odds of mixing into that group the day he was accepted; he instantly became the second-ranking male. However, after only a year he left and tried to raise pups with a young female at a den just northeast of the Headquarters territory. Apparently this was unsuccessful, and by March 1991 he was associating with four wolves twenty miles farther northeastward, where there was even more hunting and trapping activity. He was accidently killed at that time by a drug overdose during attempts to replace his radio collar.15

  In the following photos from March 2009, the Toklats are starting out after a period of sleep. It is late morning and they have just started out in the typical single-file travel formation. But it often takes at least a couple of starts for the wolves to really get going.

  Crossing a River

  W
olves are characteristically mellow in their demeanor, much more easy-going than most of the dogs I've known. One of the ways this behavior serves them well is in crossing raging glacial rivers. They don't struggle and paddle furiously as a dog is likely to do but instead relax and play the angles and currents intelligently, easing across while riding the flow somewhat downstream, often appearing even to enjoy the task. Two hundred miles northeast of Denali, I have documented summer wolf crossings of the mighty, muddy Yukon River where it was almost a half mile wide. At least twice, radio-collared wolves that were denning on the north side of the Yukon crossed to the south side to hunt and were back at the den within a day or two.

  Wolves can swim deep, swift, broad rivers during the warmer months—I've observed this at the Yukon and the Nenana, among others. But they avoid getting soaked when it's cold enough for their fur to freeze, and for other cold-related reasons. And in fall and spring, especially at lesser rivers and creeks, they use ice bridges and narrow gaps between frozen areas that they can jump.

  In my wilderness travels, I've had my share of accidental close encounters with assertive grizzly bears and irate mother moose with young calves. But my most apprehensive moments have come during river crossings—including a couple where I lost to the current and almost didn't make it out. So it is with particular interest that I observe the masters.

  My pilot and I watched a demonstration of the skillful, relaxed way they do it during an August 2008 research flight in Denali, when the Stampede alpha pair crossed the Toklat River in flood stage. Normally a glacial river flows as a series of braided channels on a wide gravel bar, with a lot more gravel showing than water. But after many days of rain, sections of the gravel bar had turned into broad, fast-flowing sheets of water, deepest where the main channels had been.

  As we came upon the radio-collared Stampede male and female on a hunt fifteen miles north of their den, they were already partly across the river and about to take on the worst of it. We watched in awe, while circling above, as the wolves made their way downstream on a shallow portion of the flooded gravel river bar, with deep channels on either side.

  The female was leading and seemed to be making most of the decisions. As they continued along the shallows toward the convergence of the main two channels, they appeared to be studying the right-side channel and anticipating a helpful deflection partly across the left channel by the force of the current from the right channel where it veered into the left channel at a downstream narrowing of the river. Their pace was deliberate, without any indication of wanting to cross upstream.

  First the female plunged in and was quickly submerged, with only her head above the current. A few seconds later the male followed, and we watched as their heads were barely above water in the dangerous standing waves. There was no indication of panic or struggling. They seemed remarkably relaxed, crossing at an angle and riding the current. We took note of the angle of intersection of the two channels and the more concentrated current of the channel originally on the wolves' right side, and realized that they had correctly anticipated an advantage in crossing here.

  They were safely across within a couple of minutes, less than two hundred feet downstream from the convergence of the channels. The female looked back briefly, but they did not stop to rest. There was one more easier channel, and she led across that one, too. On the west side of the Toklat they rolled around in some gravel, shook themselves off, and then continued on their way as if it had not been any big deal.

  * * *

  Snapshot: Just One More Turn

  Troy Dunn

  When it came to wolves, Gordon was like a kid. It didn't matter what the wolves were doing, even if they were just lying around, lounging on a hot day (“flaked out,” as Gordon called it). He always was excited to see them. And we did see some pretty amazing things.

  Once we saw a group of wolves coming up one side of a mountain, and a different family group coming up the other side. They hadn't seen each other yet, and Gordon said to me, “Oh, geez, we can't leave, we just gotta stay here.”

  Well, there are only so many hours you can stay airborne. I'd configured our Cessna 180 specifically for Gordon's work so we could stay airborne for eight hours (we planned for seven). But there's still a finite amount of fuel, so when the propeller is turning, it's like a football game with the clock ticking.

  “OK,” I told him, “all I ask is that, if we're gonna spend the time here, don't ask me if we can go out to McGrath, too.”

  “OK,” he said, “just one more turn.”

  So many times, he'd say, just one more turn, again and again, sometimes literally twenty times. He had such a difficult time pulling himself away from those wolves. I have to admit I had a hard time leaving as well, but we always had many more family groups to observe. Many times we would return to a particular location on the way back in to check on the progress of a particular activity the wolves were doing.

  One time we watched wolves trying to cross a section of open water when it was thirty-five below. None of the wolves wanted to jump in that water at that temperature, so they were going up and down the stream. Then one found a tree-fall across the water, and howled to the other wolves. They all came running, and all crossed over the fallen tree. It was problem solving, working together, using the tree as a bridge.

  Gordon just never lost his sense of wonder. He was always curious about why things are the way they are. Not just wolves, but whales, old trees, forest fires, everything. He'd see some lenticular clouds over Denali and say, “That's really neat, why don't we take a shot of that?”

  One thing that really got his goat was naming something after a person. He said no natural feature should ever be named for a person. He had a name for anything that didn't have a name, based on his experiences there: Ass-kicker Canyon, Mudslump Valley. Once I said we should name a particular pass “Haber Pass.” He said, “No way. I call it Misery Pass,” and then he explained how he'd spent a few wet months there back in the late 1960s.

  My last flight with him was one of the standouts; that's when we saw the Toklat pups crossing the Sanctuary River. It was the yearling with the bad front leg—she had been limping all winter long—who went in after those pups, especially the one bobbing downstream. To see that wolf go in that water and act like a block, using her body as a barricade so the pup could get footing on the bank, to see those wolves working together and coaxing the pups across that water for the first time in their lives—it was amazing.

  Gordon never tired of these things. When the pups were crossing the stream, he was excited and wanted to keep them in sight, so he kept saying “turn, turn, don't lose them.”

  “Gordon,” I said, “I can only fly this aircraft within the laws of physics.”

  “Oh, OK,” he said. “Just do the best you can.”

  “No, Gordon,” I said, “I'm going to do the worst.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  He didn't get sarcasm. At least not when he was watching wolves.

  * * *

  15 See chapter 10 for more on the effects of these accidental collaring deaths.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHY WOLVES HOWL: THE MANY SOCIAL VALUES

  THE EARLY 1990S WERE A BUSY TIME FOR DR. HABER. HE WAS APPOINTED TO THE National Park Service's Scientific Advisory Panel for the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, as well as the Technical Advisory Group for Alaska's Wolf Management Planning Team. In 1993, he spoke at the Alaska Wolf Summit and there met Priscilla Feral, whose group, Friends of Animals, funded most of his research for the rest of his life. But no matter how busy, he continued to reach out to broader audiences with his insights about wolves. He appeared on TV and radio shows; he gave lectures worldwide; his photographs appeared in many National Geographic books and films. He didn't, however, confine his audience to adults. He created an educational program for use in grade schools and gave slide shows to schoolchildren in Alaska and British Columbia. In 1993, after another of his New York Times op-eds, chil
dren from New York sent a petition to Alaska governor Walter Hickel, asking for an end to predator control.

  After the Savage River wolves disappeared, Haber recorded first the Headquarters, then the Sanctuary, then the Mount Margaret, and then the Toklat East family groups of wolves establishing in the Savage River territory, only to be trapped and hunted out of existence in the Wolf Townships. He continued to learn from these wolf groups, as well as the Toklats, and continued to describe the intricacies of their societies through exploring such things as why wolves howl. It's not, he concluded, anything to be fearful of but rather a way for wolves to greet each other, find each other, wake each other up, and grieve for their losses, especially of a trapped mate.

  They howled, as well, with the circling of his airplane, but never did they run away. Troy Dunn, after years observing how the wolves reacted to their plane as opposed to other aircraft, began to wonder if the wolves had learned to distinguish Haber's plane from the others. When Gordon Haber crashed to his death, two people were hiking from their cabin near the park boundary, where they'd lived for twenty-five years. They couldn't see but could hear a plane circling. Then it stopped, and wolves began to howl. The couple was as yet unaware that Haber's plane had gone down but were struck by how the wolves continued howling longer than they had ever before heard.

  WHAT LINGERS WITH ME MOST VIVIDLY FROM MY EXPERIENCES observing wolves in Denali is the singing of the wolves. For more than a quarter century, I have listened to wolves howl across these mountains, valleys, and tundra expanses, summer and winter, under almost every condition imaginable, and yet each time I hear another of their wilderness serenades it thrills and delights me just as much as it did the first time. To me, a chorus of wolf howls is one of the most beautiful sounds in nature.