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

by Haber, Gordon

  For fifteen dollars, anyone with an Alaska driver's license can purchase a trapping license and then legally kill an unlimited number of wolves, of any age or sex, in most areas of the state from October or November through April—over a month after wolf pelts commonly become worthless for commercial or subsistence uses due to warm-weather shedding, rubbing, etc. The “trapper” is not required to own or use a trap or snare; with a trapping license it is also legal to kill wolves simply by shooting them, even from their car or truck beside the road. With a hunting license, it is legal to shoot several wolves of any age or sex. In many areas there is no bag limit at all.

  Few if any people eat wolf meat, wolf pelts seldom if ever have any established subsistence or commercial value prior to October or November (pup pelts usually later than that), and sport hunters are rarely interested in trophy mounts of more than a couple of wolves. This alone, together with regulations against “wanton waste” of trapped and hunted animals, should leave little doubt that the primary intent of these regulations is to suppress wolf numbers.

  Even more illustrative is what a hunting license allows during the wolf homesite period. Across most of Alaska, wolf pups are born inside a den in early to mid-May but do not fully open their eyes and emerge for the first time until late May to early June. They are usually not completely weaned until late June at the earliest. They are dependent on the older wolves for provisioning and protection at dens and rendezvous sites until at least October, and they normally remain dependent well beyond the homesite period.

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  June 26, 2009

  The killing is far worse than the 100–200 wolves aerial-hunted each winter. Total of 1200–1500+ killed most years. Must address all of it.

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  Yet it is legal for a hunter to shoot any older wolves foraging away from the homesite, which means that the pups can be legally orphaned and left to die a slow death—in May, before they have even emerged from the den, and in August, while they are still being attended at the den or a rendezvous site. It is legal to shoot the pups themselves (and any adults) right at a rendezvous site, near a den, and while the older wolves are moving the pups between dens or rendezvous sites. Killing one- to three-week-old or three-month-old wolf pups would not be justified even if there were subsistence or trophy uses for the dead pups. The fact that there are no such uses should make even clearer the intent to subvert the public process with hidden control.

  Bad Science

  The formal wolf control programs usually begin with claims about alleged low, declining, or “stagnating” moose or caribou populations and/or moose-hunting or caribou-hunting problems. ADF&G biologists eventually expand upon these claims in “predation control implementation plans” that they write for the Board of Game. To show there is a moose, caribou, or related hunting problem for which predator control is needed as a solution among other things requires good population data and data sufficient to identify a “predator pit” condition. ADF&G biologists have yet to meet these requirements for any of the control areas.

  Since the 1970s, biologists have developed moose censusing procedures that, when applied properly, produce reliable estimates of moose numbers and trends with accompanying measures of their accuracy and precision. The value of these censusing procedures in producing high-quality moose population estimates has been apparent for decades in Game Management Unit 20A (south of Fairbanks and east of Denali National Park), for example. However, the moose estimates for the five formal wolf control areas are not reliable, for at least two major reasons: (1) ADF&G biologists use the improved procedures to census moose in a small portion of each area but then extrapolate the resulting estimates, meaninglessly, to the entire area; (2) few if any of the censused areas include the entirety, most, or even a known portion of the annual range of the target moose population or subpopulation.

  Wolf population estimates are even less reliable. Information on wolf abundance is long on extrapolations, calculations, second-hand observations, and anecdotal information, and short on actual survey data. For example, a late fall 2005 wolf estimate for the GMU 13 wolf control area, southeast of Denali National Park, gave no details about methods other than that it was “based on wolf and track sightings gathered from staff biologists, hunters, trappers, and pilots, adjusted for documented harvest.” Fall observations are of an incidental nature. They involve staff biologists who happen to see wolves while conducting moose trend counts.

  As well, some estimates fail to take into account the migratory nature of some wolf populations. In the Fortymile wolf control area, wolves are more heavily dependent on caribou, thus many more migrate seasonally in response to caribou migrations. My year-round wolf research throughout the Upper Tanana–Fortymile–Yukon–Charley region via aerial tracking indicates that wolf numbers can increase substantially in this area as wolves from as far as 150 miles away arrive to hunt caribou. Unless they are killed, migrant family groups and breeding pairs return to their natal territories by April or early May. At least some nonbreeding migrants follow Fortymile caribou to their spring calving areas, which often coincide with the wolves' natal territories.

  The first six Fortymile wolves shot by aerial control permittees in winter 2005–2006 were from an established, radio-collared family group of fourteen wolves that had migrated more than 120 miles to the control area from its natal territory in Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve. This group was an extension of a resident Yukon–Charley Rivers group that I began studying in 1993; it migrated to the control area in previous winters as well. (See Plate 19.)

  Hunter Hardship?

  In at least three of the five areas, the board and ADF&G promoted and began aerial wolf killing based on unsubstantiated claims about hunter hardships as well as low and/or declining moose populations. The most striking example is from the McGrath (GMU 19D east) wolf control area, where annual moosehunter success rates have remained high for at least fifteen years, with a stable or increasing trend. After conducting a follow-up moose census, the state found that their earlier estimate of moose numbers were much lower than the number actually in the area. In fact, the McGrath hunter success rates are as high as or higher than in the state's best moose-hunting area, which ADF&G regularly touts as one of the most successful moose management stories in North America.

  This flies in the face of the claims about a severe 1990s areawide moose decline and related subsistence hardships in the McGrath area. Biologists and board members say that McGrath hunters must now spend more time and money traveling farther afield to get a moose. There are no data to support this claim, but even if there were, the bottom line is that the local hunters continue to enjoy high success within the overall management area. It is nonsensical to argue that they should forever be able to get their moose right off the back porch.

  Killing Wolves Isn't Cost-Free

  In Alaska, wolf and bear control are viewed as a way to alleviate competition between urban and rural moose and caribou hunters when there are shortages, whether real or imagined. The state is focused on killing wolves and bears to produce and maintain such high numbers of moose and caribou simultaneously across all the major hunting areas of the state that there will never be a need to apply the subsistence hunting priorities, where rural subsistence hunters would have priority over urban sport and personal use hunters, as dictated by statute.

  For these predator control programs, biologists and policymakers have proceeded with the shallow, one-dimensional assumption that killing wolves is cost-free: there are no potential negatives because wolves will always “repopulate” the control areas. But as we've seen in the killing of Denali wolves, there are nondollar costs of much importance to Alaskans and many others in today's world: biological, scientific, ethical, aesthetic, educational, and viewing costs.

  What drives wolf and bear control perhaps more than anything is reliance on “maximum sustained yield” as a guiding principle. In Alaska, this thinking is expressed in several
intensive management (IM) statutes, which many advocates now refer to as “managing for abundance.” These statutes were enacted by the state legislature primarily at the behest of the Alaska Outdoor Council, the state's most powerful hunting-trapping lobbying organization, whose wildlife positions have long been ideologically guided by retired and active ADF&G biologists. This is the same “maximum sustained yield” (MSY) thinking that scientists have had for thirty years, since publication of a famous paper in 1977, now widely discredited. Maximum sustained yield is anything but good science, and it is certainly unlikely to generate the advertised long-term hunter benefits.

  Hunters who attempt to thin a wolf population might do well to consider that the more they shoot wolves in a given area (short of almost wiping out the population), the more socially fragmented the population becomes, resulting in more matings, more young, and often more wolves. Data from exploited wolf populations in many areas of North America and elsewhere show this to be the case, particularly with regard to the rapid increase in the proportion of young. It is no wonder that bountied wolf carcasses from the past in Alaska showed an exceptionally high percentage of pregnant adult females. Nor is it surprising that wolves seem to be increasing in many areas that have been subjected to substantial aerial hunting pressure. Well-meaning but naive “game protectors” defeat their own purpose.

  A wolf hunter whom I once explained this to said that if I liked wolves, then his wolf hunting, which may well produce more wolves, should make me happy. But I don't want more wolves. Too many wolves are as bad as too few. There is an optimum number of wolves in terms of what is best for the entire ecological community of an area, and it is the health of the community, not merely of this or that species, with which we should be most concerned. As my research and other studies of natural animal communities have shown, the optimum number of wolves is best reached and maintained by the wolves and prey themselves.

  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 disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic. We often get more wolves in this manner, but at the diminishment of the very quality of the species that so sets it apart. Wolves are vastly different in their behavior from other game animals and cannot be managed on a sustained-yield basis as a “crop” like most of the others.

  Command-and-Control versus Systems Management

  Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists talk about moose and caribou within fixed game management areas as if these were single populations or other meaningful ecological units. They establish, often arbitrarily, objectives for the numbers and annual yields they would like to maintain within these areas complete with “desired” sex, age, and predator-prey ratios. Almost always this means attempting to keep numbers and yields at relatively high, constant levels within each area. When the numbers and/or yields fall below the specified objectives or certain ratios deviate, the thinking turns largely to killing predators to bring them back up. If the numbers and ratios increase well above the specified objectives, such as at present in Game Management Unit 20A, the emphasis shifts to heavier moose and caribou hunting—with longer seasons, more permits, or larger bag limits—to bring them back down.

  It is an old cornerstone of wildlife management: trying to “smooth out the peaks and troughs” of population change primarily to maintain high, ongoing yields for hunters. Anything beyond what is needed to keep the population stable is a harvestable “surplus” for providing these yields. However, to a large and growing body of science, this represents just the opposite of true sustained yield thinking. It is instead a classic “command-and-control” resource management that in the long run seldom succeeds, and in the process does harm on many fronts, including sometimes to the very consumptive users, such as hunters, who are supposed to benefit the most.

  Things in the natural and man-made worlds don't usually work at single scales. They operate as systems at multiple interacting scales and across scales, such as what goes on annually between wolves, moose, and sheep within established wolf territories, between these units and other groups of wolves that migrate seasonally across territories, bears that prey seasonally on moose in some of the territories, and between all of the foregoing and the caribou subpopulations that migrate seasonally across the region for decades and then shift to other regions. And like all dynamic ecosystems, these and other ecological systems behave with patterns of change over time that, underneath all the external influences, amount to only a handful of potential major phases, albeit with variations and special cases for each. A key combination of “slow” variables—for example, relating to predation, habitat quality, and ungulate harvest rates in a predator-prey system—“tuned” one-way results in long periods during which system components (such as predator and prey populations) fluctuate mildly within one stable state or occasionally flip into a higher or lower state. The tuning changes and the same system oscillates periodically. It changes further and the system oscillates aperiodically. It changes enough and the fluctuations are likely to become chaotic (“deterministic chaos” rather than complete disorder).

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  26 June 2009

  This issue has been dumbed down to meaninglessness. The level of detail here is vital. Force yourself to understand it—you can!

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  The bottom line is that there is almost nothing in the way ecosystems behave that resembles the steady-state population objectives that go hand-in-hand with the wishful thinking of command-and-control management, aka maximum sustained yield, intensive management, or management for abundance. The highly unnatural attempts to dampen as much variability as possible and hold ratios within narrow tolerances virtually guarantee that in the long run the managed systems and their component populations will be less able to absorb the natural and human-caused disruptions that are both inevitable and unpredictable in the real world. This means a higher potential for sudden, unnatural shifts to system states with even lower yields and unforeseen consequences for other valued natural features and ecosystem services.

  A more scientific view of sustainability would seek to retain as much of the natural, multiscale spatial and temporal population variability and related behavior as possible because of its importance to system resiliency. There would be more emphasis on adapting to rather than trying to control natural changes. Moose and caribou harvesting strategies would feature much more spatial and temporal variation at broader scales, such as along the lines of the “rotating pulse harvest” approach described for caribou by myself and Walters in 1980. In short, the proximate emphasis would switch from maximizing population yields to maximizing system capacities so as to absorb surprises.

  Many complex controls operate between predators and prey when they are left to themselves. The result is an animal community characterized by a high degree of vigor, genetic diversity, great variety, and the ability to withstand major natural disturbances such as severe winters. Claims that wolves destroy the very food source upon which they depend are absurd. Nothing of the sort has ever been witnessed in any study of a natural animal community where wolves are the major predators. In short, there is no reason for us to think we must control a natural wolf population. The optimum size is reached by leaving the control solely to the wolves, as research in many areas of North America has demonstrated.

  Alaska Peninsula Killings

  A recent example of a predator control plan based on this erroneous command-and-control thinking involves a so-called emergency to try to halt a caribou decline on the Alaska Peninsula—a “decline” that, according to historical population data, put the current population well within normal population fluctuations. In late May and early June 2008, ADF&G area wildlife biologists shot twenty-eight wolves near an area where caribou were calving, including fourteen newborn pups at dens they accessed in a helicopter. The area is some 615 miles southwest of Anchorag
e, near the eastern end of the Aleutian Islands.33

  I don't know much about the southwest Alaska Peninsula wolves, nor do the biologists who did the killing, for they told me there has not been any significant wolf research in that area. However, I am confident there were also important biological and scientific costs to consider before killing these wolves, at multiple interacting scales. The biologists did indicate that southwest Alaska Peninsula wolves probably rely on salmon and marine mammals as well as caribou, which by itself would have made the control-area wolves interesting and valuable subjects of scientific study.

  Research in the Denali area indicates that killing wolves stands to disrupt behavior, patterns, and processes of high biological and scientific value related, for example, to social interactions within family groups at one scale, foraging, social, and longevity differences among large areas at another scale, and regional kinship links at even larger scales.

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  June 14, 2009

  Was going to Toklat natal den today but not much to see on a rainy day. Adults put pups this age inside burrows and hunker down in the brush.

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  Each of the fourteen pups was caught on foot and “euthanized humanely” with a bullet through the head, shot by state employees. Pups of this age (a month or less old) are still nursing and relatively immobile at the den. The biologists think the fourteen adults and fourteen pups were from two family groups, and that possibly there are still a half dozen surviving adults that were away at the time.

  It is difficult to understand how biologists could be responsible for such a thing, how state employees could helicopter to a couple of natal dens and, after killing the adult wolves, grab fourteen frightened young pups and one by one blow their brains out with a pistol.