With the Toklats now the only remaining long-lived family group in Denali National Park, he watched with special attention the effects of the string of 2005 losses that orphaned the six remaining young Toklats. His research showed that, lacking the continuity and knowledge of older wolves, entire traditions and even the family group itself is at risk. And yet he also had observed the tenacity and resourcefulness of wolves. The small band of young Toklats lost their sheep-hunting skills entirely, allowed their territory boundaries to shrink, and focused all their attention on what was for them a lucky break, although not a long-term solution: hunting the peaking population of snowshoe hares. In keeping with his systems approach, Haber recorded every hare he saw, noting such abundance that “the ground moved with hares.”
THE HISTORY OF THE TOKLAT WOLF FAMILY, A FAMILY GROUP that has persisted for more than seventy years, including the entire forty-three years of my research in Denali, has taken a twist that represents a sad loss even as it showcases their high intelligence. Above all, it illustrates clearly the importance of continuity in wolf family traditions and what happens to those traditions when the family group is fragmented by hunting and trapping.
In early 2005 the Toklat alpha female and two younger wolves were trapped, the alpha male was shot, and a young female became separated during these events and dispersed. This left only the six one-year-old and two-year-old Toklat siblings. Toklat was suddenly converted from a group with eight years of experience (the age of the adults) to yearlings and two-year-olds. The Toklat survivors were orphaned before completing the several years of learning normally required for hunting proficiency in this area. Not surprisingly, as discussed in the previous chapter, Toklat's spectacular, decades-old sheep-hunting skills and routines disappeared.
The survivors reproduced well with impressive cooperation and high natural survival, but in winter there was less group cohesion—the wolves split into small subgroups and singles more often. Also, apparently the young survivors had not fully learned the established territory at the time the adults were killed. They used less than a third to a half of the established territory, lounging around much of the time without a regular travel routine inside the territory and without the usual forays outside—although they strongly defended this core area from intrusions by neighboring groups. Meanwhile, the neighboring group to the west began expanding its territory into the unused portion.
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Tweet
July 10, 2009
Vegetation at peak lushness now. Luv the rich greens, many new flowers, and great aromas along the trail, forest and subalpine segments.
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Instead of hunting and scavenging moose, sheep, and caribou, the young survivors focused on a much easier food source, snowshoe hares, during a coincidental peak in hare abundance. In their normal eight- to eleven-year cycle of abundance, hare numbers decline more steeply from the highs and virtually disappear for a number of years. This high in 2005 was stronger and more prolonged than any I'd seen since 1966—a lucky break for the young wolves, providing them with an easy prey alternative.
The young wolves' adjustments to the hare peak were fascinating, illustrating high intelligence and resilience, and enabled them to survive and reproduce successfully. However, this heavy use of hares by the young Toklats was the result of unusual circumstances brought about by the 2005 losses of all the adults. There's no evidence of any comparable reliance on hares—neither a switch from ungulates by Toklat or any family groups during earlier hare highs nor a switch by groups other than Toklat during the latest high. This seems like a necessary rather than an optional switch from their normal foraging behavior.
Still, their hare hunting was impressive, to say the least. The Toklat wolves adapted their tactics to changes in hare tactics as hare abundance declined, and they taught their pups how to hunt hares when the pups were only a few months old. But none of it was destined to be of much value for more than a few years. And by withdrawing to only a portion of the established territory during the feast, they risked losing other areas—and a long-term supply of ungulates—to neighboring groups.
During the first two winters of high hare densities, the ground literally moved with hares. It was not unusual to see several dozen or more hares hopping around in a patch of willow brush a hundred yards or so in diameter. The Toklat wolves would fan out as they entered a willow patch or spruce-willow area and then stop at short intervals to look and listen ahead intently. As they flushed the hares, the closest wolf or wolves immediately began leaping after any fleeing hares, zigging and zagging with them through the brush with impressive quickness, agility, and skill. Sometimes a willow patch exploded with ten or more wolves zigging and zagging in different directions in pursuit of a dozen or more fleeing hares. Ravens and red blotches in the snow from hares already eaten commonly followed the wolves among willow patches even at the locations where I did not directly observe the hunting.
By the third winter, hares became much less abundant. As hare numbers declined, hares seemed to rely less on flight and more on their camouflage while remaining motionless in the willow thickets, even when wolves approached to within a few feet. (Sometimes they would not flee at all—and promptly get eaten.) The Toklat wolves changed their tactics accordingly, with less emphasis on finding hares by driving and flushing them from the willow thickets, and more emphasis on closely examining the thickets to find and catch them individually before they had much chance to flee. (See Plate 12.)
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Field notes #140
March 10, 200717
10:13—S East
• hare—W of Hogan Creek
• hare”
• ptarmigan”
• 2 hares—Hogan Cr
• 4 hares—”
• 2 hares—E of Hogan Cr
• 3 hares—switchback
• 1 hare—E of”
10:20—E of Sanctuary
• hare—18.5
• hare—18.4
• ptarmigan—18
• hare—16.8
• hare—16
• hare—15.8
• hare—15.7
10:30—Savage E
• hare—12.8
• 3 hares—11
• 3 hares—10
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For the first time in August and September 2008, I also observed several-month-old Toklat pups participating alongside the adults in hare hunts and learning the necessary skills within a few weeks. In the previous two summers, pups of this age seemed to participate in hare hunts only incidentally, if at all. In August 25 observations, the pups' participation consisted mainly of watching the adult hunters closely and then taking hares from successful hunters. By the September 19 observations, the pups were catching hares themselves, alongside the adults, and with as much success. Within a thirty-minute interval on September 19, for example, sixteen Toklat wolves, including nine pups, found nine hares in a two-hundred-yard area and caught five of these; two of the five were caught by pups.
By 2008 the wolves began some scattered caribou, moose, and sheep hunting, in addition to continuing heavy use of hares. As pointed out in the previous chapter, emphasis on caribou in the summer and moose and sheep in the winter is the traditional pattern for this wolf group. The alpha pair and two others killed one of three calves accompanying a cow moose, an unusual, relatively easy opportunity for the wolves. Twice they also killed a single sheep they caught in relatively low terrain. This is a far cry from the past sheep-hunting skills and routines. Nonetheless, it is reason for optimism that their sheep-hunting skills may yet recover.
However, the Toklat wolves have not yet shown much expertise in scavenging their winter meals, a possible artifact of their incomplete early learning. Scavenging contributed about half of the ungulate winter meals for Savage and Toklat in the past, and the younger Savage and Toklat wolves did not show much ability to find these carcasses on their own. Wolves commonly dig to frozen carcasses buried under the snow,
as deep as ten feet or more into hard-packed drifts and avalanches. Without experienced adults finding the carcasses, the inexperienced Toklats have had much less scavenged food.
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Field notes Denali #132
May 2006
4:22—The collared tan female sticks just her head & shoulders in, obviously checking pups. Within 10 secs I see one tan pup beside her head at entrance—it is the usual size and in the vacuum cleaner stage—has eyes open but seems to shy away from the daylight & goes back inside, out of view.
4:29—the large charcoal black with whitish chest and lower legs/feet appears atop bluff, stretching & yawning. It is the largest of the 5—much heavier body and all others are submissive to it.
4:32—female leaves the pups inside den & joins the others along the grassy face N of burrows—much nose-pushing & play, esp. centered on large charcoal.
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After the first few winters, they did begin ranging much more widely across the traditional territory and outside in northward and eastward directions, and were remaining together more as a group. Their basic routine picked up as well, to a more continuous travel schedule—something closer to the routine observed previously for wolves in this area under a wide range of winter conditions, when they averaged ten to twenty miles per day. So far, however, most of this searching appears to be for better hare-hunting opportunities. Ultimately this is an exercise in futility because of the synchronous way hare numbers rise and fall across large regions.
Human causes—the continuing series of eastern vacancies and a failure of the young Toklat wolves to fully learn the established Toklat territory before the experienced adults were killed—are the leading candidates in explaining the Toklat's eastward shift. And unfortunately, this eastward shift puts the wolves in even greater danger from hunting and trapping deaths. Toklat consisted of seventeen wolves at the beginning of the 2007–2008 winter and nine at the end, with a high likelihood that most of the missing wolves were trapped during an extraterritorial foray into the northeast park boundary trapping area in February 2008.
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Snapshot: Toklat's Hare Hunting
Troy Dunn
At the tail end of my time flying Gordon, the Toklat wolves were just starting to get back into hunting larger prey. When the alpha female was trapped and then the alpha male was shot, once we lost both of them, all the Toklats had were yearlings and pups. And they didn't have the patterns of hunting or of the territory down yet.
At first they were all over the place, in hazardous places, crossing over big ridges to the south side of the Alaska Range, going south of Cantwell. They just couldn't find themselves. They were staying together but just wandering. They didn't know how to hunt sheep and caribou, and the Toklats were previously big sheep hunters. So for a few years they stuck to smaller prey; their main diet appeared to be hares.
It was amazing watching that family hunt hares. Gordon documented their tactics, and whether they would share such small kills with each other. About 90 percent of the time when a wolf caught a hare it would eat it right up, but we did witness adults giving hares to yearlings and pups. This really showed a diet shift when the adults were lost.
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17 In keeping with his systems approach to research, Haber noted every animal he saw, including, in this sequence from his field notes, every hare along the park road.
CHAPTER 9
COMPANIONS AND COMPETITORS: RAVENS, BEARS, AND OTHER WILDLIFE
WITH SUCH A RECORD OF UNIQUE RESEARCH AND DECADES OF ON-THE-GROUND experiences, Haber's life work was a natural for a wider audience. In fact, during the 1990s, National Geographic approached him about making a documentary film about his work. Haber was interested but concerned that his research be accurately reported, so he requested complete editorial control—something they couldn't agree to, so the film was never made. Haber did have plans to write a book based on his experiences and research, and he wrote a proposal and several chapters from which some of the material in these chapters comes.
A consummate systems researcher and inherent naturalist, Haber recorded the wolves', and his own, encounters with all of Denali's wildlife. He noted that ravens constantly followed the wolves to scavenge on their kill remains, and with their mischievous nature often tempted the wolves, especially pups, into a game of chase. Bears and wolves, on the other hand, usually kept their distance—except when it came to stealing kills from each other. In fact, Haber theorized that this “standoff” between the two actually reduced the amount of bear predation on such prey as moose calves, and that reducing wolves through predator control might instead increase predation by bears. Chance encounters between the ecosystem's two top predators rarely caused harm, and sometimes they even appeared to tolerate one another. For the most part, Haber concluded, bears and wolves—the two animals that visitors to Denali most hope to see—appear to share a deep dislike for each other. (See Plate 13.)
Raven Tales
MY EXPERIENCES AT WOLF HOMESITE BLINDS WITH WOLVES, bears, caribou, and other large creatures do not continue nonstop. There are long periods of inaction, sometimes as much as twenty hours, with miserable spells of wind, cold, rain, or excessive summer heat, and—curse the little bastards—the hellish black hoards of mosquitoes. But other performers help these wolfless and otherwise uncomfortable hours to pass more easily. And adding spice to these performances are the raucous little dust devils that spin their way across the gravel bars now and then, and other sounds of the landscape. At one favorite den site, always there is the soft background music of the little freshwater spring, gurgling right out of moss-covered rocks barely fifty feet from my tent.
A family of ravens—as many as twenty of them—has nested a few hundred yards from one of my campsites almost every year. Inevitably one or two of their scouts check me out each time I visit, at least until they leave in late August or so, as does a friendly family of gray jays. The two families have entertained me for many hours over the years with their aerial antics, and just by alighting nearby to see what I was up to.
At least one pair of mew gulls nested 450 yards west of another den. My route to and from the area forced me to pass within two hundred feet of their nest, and they dive-bombed me relentlessly every time—with a vengeance, it seemed, and once even splattered on me as well. One moose cow, whom I could identify by light markings on her side, helped me keep these gull attacks in perspective. She produced a calf in almost exactly the same spot between one homesite and another homesite in three consecutive summers. Her extremely aggressive behavior—including chasing me up a tree twice—strongly suggested she was harassed regularly by the wolves.
Once, in July 1968, a mother least weasel and her three young appeared out of nowhere. Their heads popped up and down at varying locations in the surrounding brush as they chittered away and studied me carefully for about five minutes, then disappeared. Almost the same thing happened again in June 1991, leaving me to wonder if this was a later generation of the 1968 family. Also on that June 1991 visit, a young porcupine calmly nibbled willow leaves twenty feet from where I sat with my spotting scope, as if he felt I belonged there as much as he did. And on an August 1990 evening, a wolverine bounded across a high slope about a half mile away, thoroughly spooking a nearby band of ewes and lambs.
Not only do many other animals pass near wolf homesites, but virtually all of the homesites and dens are also used by many other animals, including foxes, ground squirrels, porcupines, wolverines, and even humans in the distant past, during intervening summer and winter periods. Burrows at some sites were probably excavated originally by ground squirrels, were later enlarged and extended by foxes, and then by wolves.
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Tweet
June 15, 2009
Moose or bear crashed off thru the brush just ahead of me as I dropped down from the subalpine hills into the forest 9:30 pm, on hike out.
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I suspect this is one of the ways sites can persi
st for so long despite the occasional collapse of underground structures due to heavy rains, bear digging, vegetation changes, and other agents, especially over the time interval between the disappearance of one established wolf family and recolonization of the area by another family: a thoroughly collapsed site is most likely to revert back to ground squirrel occupancy, and the predator tradition then returns again as foxes and ultimately wolves decide to expand upon their work.
At one of the Savage River den sites, located in predominantly open terrain, with only scattered patches of heavy willows and small pockets of spruce forest, a pair of red foxes raised their young during the summer of 1971. I observed a single porcupine there several times during the winters; tracks in the snow, a few quills inside the burrows, and a girdled spruce tree nearby indicated extended winter use. Tracks showed that a wolverine investigated the burrow now and then during the winter as well. There was at least one ground squirrel colony nearby, and I regularly saw golden eagles, ravens, magpies, jays, marsh hawks, and a variety of smaller birds at or near this site when the wolves were occupying it.
But of all the birds and other smaller animals sharing wolf territory, the raven is the most conspicuous and persistent companion to the wolves. Year-round, ravens are part of the wolves' daily lives. Ravens typically follow wolves to pick whatever they can from the remains of their kills and scavenged carcasses, even when hares are the only prey.
They also seem to delight in teasing wolves, trying to get them to chase. Usually older wolves simply ignore them, but often younger wolves will take the bait, so ravens often go out of their way to taunt the younger, more gullible wolves in particular.
Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal Page 13