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

by Haber, Gordon

  Never mind that not a single instance of any such aggressive wolf behavior has been reported in Denali. Forget the permanent damage that could be done to a wolf by a blow to the head with a rock or from using pepper spray on highly tuned sensory organs. Is this a prelude to even more serious measures, especially for the well-known Toklat family, whose use of a traditional denning area near the Teklanika Campground has been the focus of NPS's concerns? What about the devastating impacts on this decades-old family and the world-class viewing and research opportunities it provides if NPS decides to relocate “problem” wolves or deter the use of traditional dens to put more distance between these hubs of summertime wolf activity and certain campgrounds?

  These NPS policies assume that fearless behavior by Denali wolves around people is unnatural (not “wild”), that it has emerged only recently, and that without NPS intervention it will progress to a more aggressive, dangerous form. The Denali wolves are now described as “habituated,” a scientific term that for the most part is being used as another way to imply unnatural behavior. None of this thinking holds up to scrutiny.

  Unnatural?

  There is widespread carelessness by biologists and others in the use of “habituated” to characterize fearless wolves, and I have been as careless as anyone. Supposedly, scientists continue to improve their thinking, however. Events surrounding the arrival of the two Toklat newcomer males in 2001 and recent group turnovers in the eastern park were especially valuable as eye-openers for me. This and a better job of integrating behavioral observations from the past and from other areas prompted me to reconsider some of my assumptions about habituation and to recognize that its common usage does not do a very good job of explaining the people-related behavior of Denali wolves.

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  June 11, 2009

  Obs at Toklat natal den in Denali N.P. - studying this wolf family since 1966. Seeing 8+ pups so far this season, nursed by 2 females.

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  Free-ranging adult wolves generally show little fear of other nonhuman species. They typically approach other creatures closely in a markedly bold, inquisitive, investigative way, although for species like bears, moose, and porcupines, they attempt to kill in only a low percentage of the encounters. There is little reason to assume that, absent some highly unusual, unnatural, and powerful incentive, such as persecution, they should behave in an entirely different way around people. It is also apparent from historical literature and accounts from frontier areas, at least where open terrain predominates, that wolves generally show little fear or wariness of people at initial contact, unless and until there is persecution or harassment.

  With few exceptions in Denali (e.g., certain high-ranking adults attending pups), recolonizing wolves act indifferently around people very soon after they begin encountering them in the absence of harassment. This happened after the human-caused turnovers from the Savage River to Headquarters and Sanctuary to Mount Margaret family groups in the eastern area of Denali in 1983 and 2001. The Savage River family was largely fearless when I began my studies in 1966, well before park visitation increased dramatically. It is much easier to reconcile these and other observations by recognizing fearless behavior toward people as mostly natural rather than a product of habituation.

  Perhaps the most striking illustration of this point was when two newcomer adult males joined the Toklat family (just west of the Savage-Headquarters-Sanctuary-Margaret area) and took it over in spring and summer 2001, shortly after the Toklat alpha male died while being radio-collared.18 These two ear-tagged wolves had lived two hundred miles away until April 5, 2001, in the Fortymile area, a wolf control area with a long history of hunting and trapping. Within a month they were residing in the protected Teklanika-Igloo area of Denali.

  They began interacting closely with people almost immediately, mostly on and near the park road, prior to the onset of the regular summer visitor season and prior to much if any interaction with the established Toklat wolves. Their behavior was predominantly if not exclusively fearless. Essentially they exhibited the same behavior toward people, vehicles, roads, and structures within two or three weeks that Toklat and other groups had exhibited for decades.

  How could wolves with nothing but an adversarial history with people so suddenly and dramatically reverse their behavior? It would be a strain, to say the least, to explain this as a habituation-related shift away from natural, wild behavior. A simpler explanation is that highly intelligent creatures such as these quickly recognize when they are no longer in danger or not being harassed, and thus return easily to behavior that is inherent.19

  Being fearful, not fearless, is the aberration for this species. The former, not the latter, is what probably requires the most difficult learning. In short, NPS emphasizes that it must “keep Denali's wolves wild,” but the conventional wisdom it is adopting is more likely to move them further from rather than closer to their natural, wild behavior. It is a realized fear, not a natural fear. It is questionable as to whether “habituation” even applies here.

  A key issue is whether the interactions with people are of a passing nature or seemingly the wolf's objective. Most, if not all, cases appear to be interactions in a passing way: as an aside to some other hunting or related travel objective, or in response to an intrusion at a den or rendezvous site with pups present. Wolves pass through a campground, stopping briefly to check something out and perhaps carry off a small camp item for a short distance. Wolves trot past people within five or ten feet of the park road or continue down the center of the road at a normal pace while ignoring a string of shuttle buses and other vehicles following just behind for a half hour or more. These are routine examples of fearless wolf behavior around people in Denali, none of which involves the prolonged fixation on them that habituation usually implies.

  Food conditioning—when an animal associates people with handouts or other ways of obtaining food (such as at a campground)—is the most likely way that habituation could become a problem. There has not yet been any evidence of food conditioning of Denali wolves, thanks to NPS's ongoing efforts to prevent this for bears as well as wolves.

  Menacing or Curious?

  Two examples of “menacing” wolf behavior toward people in Denali that prompted these policy changes bear closer examination.

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  Field notes #1

  Summer 1979

  May 25—clear, beautiful morning, but largely overcast by early afternoon and into the evening

  left Tek campground at 6:15 am

  6:25 am—encountered the “fearsome foursome” at E end of Tek bridge, rooting—it should be emphasized that these bears have been spending much time rooting, in addition to their moose hunting.

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  On August 9–12, 2000, seven Toklat adults and subadults and their four pups provided thousands of park visitors with an extraordinary wolf-viewing opportunity from within a few hundred feet of the Teklanika bridge as they killed a moose, confronted bears intent on taking it from them, and interacted with each other. They, the moose, and bears went about these activities in a mostly natural way, virtually ignoring the dozens if not hundreds of visitors as well as buses and other vehicles that were present almost constantly during daylight hours. Many thousands of pictures and untold hours of video were taken of this natural behavior, such as in the photographic essay, “Dance of Death,” published in the May 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine.

  At one point a Toklat yearling timidly approached the small pack that a photographer had set down on the road. An NPS employee snapped a picture as the wolf sniffed the pack briefly, and this has become NPS's primary icon of the entire, rich, mostly natural four-day event. This unrepresentative scene of a wolf sniffing a pack—rather than a selection from the thousands of pictures that show the prevailing natural wolf-moose-bear interactions—now appears regularly in slide shows and other material that NPS and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game disseminate in trying to chara
cterize this event and fearless wolf behavior in general as unnatural and ominous.

  The second event happened late on May 31, 2001, when six Toklat wolves departed the natal den on a hunt along one of their routine travel routes, downriver and then northward along the park road past the Teklanika Campground. At the campground entrance, three of the six wolves diverted 150 yards or so into the campground and began circling a tent from only a few feet away. Inside were a Norwegian couple and their baby. They saw the wolves through the tent window but did not come outside. Within about ten minutes the wolves left, having done nothing more than circle the tent repeatedly, chew briefly on a toy truck, and carry off a sandal.

  NPS staff cites this incident as a good example of menacing, worrisome, unnatural wolf behavior. It was just the opposite. The baby was screaming loudly at the time, as it had done for much of the previous day because of a stomach ailment. Its screaming could be heard from almost a half mile away and sounded much like a wounded animal or a bawling bear cub. It is surprising that only three of the six wolves investigated such a seemingly obvious prey possibility. At no time did they show the slightest hint of aggressive behavior while circling the tent—only intense curiosity as they evaluated the loud distress calling inside. It would have been easy for them to jump on the tent in an aggressive fury but they did not, clearly because they figured out that there were people inside. Chewing the toy truck and carrying off the sandal probably amounted to displacement activities, the kind of behavior that one sees commonly, especially on the part of juveniles, just after wolves are frustrated by a capable moose or something else.

  And there are many more examples of wolf-human encounters where the wolves were clearly just passing by. In June 2002, I watched from overhead as two Toklat wolves traveling the road met two oncoming hikers and overtook a shuttle bus. The black alpha male paused briefly to watch as the first hiker photographed his mate. The wolves continued toward the bus and second hiker. The bus moved on as the wolves trotted casually past the second hiker. The wolves overtook the bus and continued at a normal pace for the next half hour with the bus following only fifty feet behind.

  Is Fearless New?

  Denali wolves have exhibited much the same fearless behavior around people for the entire forty-three years I have been studying them. It did not emerge prominently, as NPS claims, in 1999 with Toklat's latest round of five or so summers using a natal den near the Teklanika and Igloo Campgrounds. There are many accounts of this behavior in my 1977 PhD dissertation. In one of these, from June 1967 near the Savage River family's natal den, eight Savage River wolves approached me from four hundred yards away. They displayed a range of fearless behavior, from the acceptance and indifference of one of the males while lying down calmly ten feet away, looking the other way, to the subsequent highly assertive barking, growling, and other defensive bluffs of the alpha male—all typical pup-protection behavior.

  Nor is denning near campgrounds, frequenting these areas, and interacting with campers anything new for Denali wolves, especially at Teklanika. It is arrogant for NPS to advise current Teklanika campers to “make the wolves feel unwelcome,” given the evidence for an ancient history and prehistory of occupancy of this site by wolves as well as humans. In fact, it is contrary to the park mandate to maintain the Denali ecosystem, a designated wilderness area, in its natural form. Carbon dating indicates that humans began using this location at least ten to twelve thousand years ago, originally as a campsite for hunting activities. Wolves used the same site for a major natal den beginning at least centuries and probably millennia ago, judging, for example, from the size of the debris cone below the main burrow complex. The last known wolf use of this den was in 1961.

  The site is an obvious choice for any intelligent hunter, and subsequent use of the area by people for other purposes beginning in the early 1900s is almost certainly a consequence of the earlier activity. The wolf den appears to have been the anchor site in a cluster of homesites that includes an upriver natal den now used by the Toklat wolves, probably with much the same alternating within and between-summer occupancy patterns that I have observed since 1966 throughout the park.

  The Teklanika dens were within the Savage family's territory when I arrived in 1966 and up until this group was eliminated, almost certainly illegally by hunters, in the winter of 1982–1983. Savage used the upriver Teklanika den during all or portions of the summers of 1971, 1972, 1978, 1979, and 1980. Toklat annexed this area shortly after Savage River was eliminated and used the upriver den during all or portions of ten summers between 1988 and 2003. Throughout these decades of observations and during at least fifteen years of wolves using the Teklanika upriver dens, both Savage River and Toklat groups acted the same fearless way around people in the nearby campground areas and on the road as Toklat does today. The same was true for Toklats at and near a campground twenty miles westward during much of the 1960s and 1970s, while this family occupied another traditional cluster of dens in that area.

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  June 21, 2009

  Raw, gusty wind during den obs tonite, 55 F—watching wolves not always fun and games. Sitting in those conditions for hours builds character.

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  Aggressive?

  From my first days in Denali, I wondered if the fearless behavior of these wolves would progress into anything more serious and have watched closely for even the subtlest indications. My interest was fueled by encounters such as the one in June 1967, where an outright attack by an angry alpha male certainly seemed possible, but did not happen. I have not seen the slightest hint of any such escalation.

  One of the first ways it would be expected to show up is when high-ranking wolves protect their young pups. Threat displays such as in the 1967 encounter almost always involve an alpha male with pups present and amount to defensive, bluffing actions. This behavior was common in the 1960s and 1970s. But I have seen much less of it over the last couple of decades, even though high-ranking wolves remain sensitive to human presence near the pups and are still likely to move them from disturbed sites.

  Any progression from fearless to aggressive should also become obvious during extreme hunger, especially for a high-ranking adult wolf still in the prime of life. The former Toklat alpha female died of starvation in July 2002 at only seven years of age. Her death was one of the lingering consequences of the radio-collaring death of her mate, the alpha male, in 2001, via her separation from the Toklat family less than a year after the two newcomer males took over.20 She did not do well on her own. By sometime in May 2002, her status as a loner was seriously affecting her ability to obtain enough to eat, even though she remained primarily within Toklat's established territory. She was in an advanced stage of starvation in June (as determined during necropsy). By that time, the summer increase in park visitors was under way, and as usual her travels on and near the park road brought her into close contact with people.

  On June 22, I circled overhead in an airplane and watched intently as she passed within fifty feet of several surprised hikers in open alpine tundra atop Polychrome Mountain. She had been almost completely at ease around people since at least 1998, exhibiting calm, trusting, nonaggressive behavior, though always as an indifferent aside to a hunting, travel, or other nonpeople objective. In none of the 2002 incidents was there any detectable change in this behavior, and certainly no hints of any aggression, even though she was well on her way toward starving to death. The Polychrome Mountain encounter happened only because she was following the easiest and most direct route toward a moose below the next ridge (she ended up looking the moose over a little more closely but not descending the ridge). She virtually ignored the hikers, who were on her route by coincidence, while calmly continuing toward and remaining focused on the moose.

  Other than some responses to intruders at dens and rendezvous sites, the fearless behavior I have observed in Denali over the decades continues to feature about the same often-curious, typically relaxed, and tru
sting demeanor (much more laid back than typical dog behavior) for the most part, as if the wolves are viewing people neither as a threat nor as prey.

  Wolves can be highly selective as hunters, not even attempting to take certain large classes of potential prey—most of the moose, bears, and porcupines they check out, for example. They are intelligent enough to avoid these classes of prey upon examining them “fearlessly” at close range because of the danger of getting killed or injured. I can only guess why they do not attempt to kill in most of their close encounters with people. The point is simply that selectivity is nothing unusual in the hunting repertoire of these highly intelligent creatures and, for whatever reason, people are almost always on their excluded list even where there is no persecution.

  Better Guidelines

  Any wolf-people problems in Denali are most likely to originate from avoidable people mistakes, not unnatural, dangerous wolf behavior. That is where NPS's preemptive efforts should focus—controlling people in a way that allows the wolves to continue their status quo, rather than vice versa. If a problem seems imminent, an emergency visitor use closure should be the first course of action, including the closing of the Teklanika Campground for one or more entire summers if necessary.