Biologists often equate the well-known 30 to 40 percent or higher average annual areawide natural losses that wolves sustain to losses from hunting, trapping, and agency killing programs in terms of their impacts. As noted in the previous chapter, they commonly argue that hunting, trapping, and other killing merely replace the natural losses and are therefore of little biological consequence. A common variant of the argument is that wolves should be able to sustain higher harvest rates than ungulates (e.g., elk, moose, caribou) because they have higher reproductive rates. This thinking overlooks two important points: (1) the natural losses consist largely of pups and subadults, who die and disperse; (2) the natural losses, including of key adults, typically vary in ways that are related to social and food variables, such that they may compensate for changes in group sizes and prey availability and thereby enhance the ability of groups to persist.
In contrast, hunting, trapping, and other human-caused losses across large areas are more likely to include adults with key roles in maintaining the integrity of groups and determining how they function but are unlikely to vary in adaptive ways (spatially or temporally). This probably explains why hunting and trapping impacts begin showing up at loss rates well below the natural average annual areawide rates.
Diminishing Species Integrity
As we've seen from several Denali wolf groups, most of the wolf behavior and wolf-related ecological patterns and processes that prevail in the prolonged absence of hunting, trapping, and other human killing are adaptive, including the foraging variations that result in area-to-area differences in the frequency of intergroup conflicts. Shredding and sometimes even temporarily distorting wolf groups via hunting and other killing is therefore likely to diminish and simplify something about the species, its groups, its interactions with prey, and/or broader system interactions.
When this happens, it amounts to an important biological loss even if wolves recolonize an area or their numbers have not yet declined much. As I pointed out regarding wolves, and as other researchers have observed for hunting and fishing in general, it should be assumed that hunting- and fishing-induced evolution might occur with unforeseen biological consequences that could be difficult or impossible to reverse. For species like wolves, with little or no significant evolutionary history of being exploited, selective pressures induced by hunting and other human killing are likely to act in the opposite direction of those induced by natural mortality.
Complex systems such as wolf societies can be expected to behave in counterintuitive, nonlinear ways, with lags and discontinuities. This provides all the more reason for not assuming that all is well simply because there has been a numerical “recovery” (or series of annual recoveries) from human killing, particularly in the case of a relatively new wolf population. State management plans that have taken effect with federal delisting will allow sufficient ongoing killing to risk long-term changes in the fundamental behavior that sets wolves apart as a species, including by fragmenting and simplifying and otherwise diminishing the primary functional units, if not an eventual longer-term decline in numbers. Endangerment can happen via diminished numbers of individuals but also by diminishing the numbers of individuals and groups behaving in ways consistent with the species' natural direction of evolution.
While I disagree with proponents of delisting that there is a biological rationale for allowing routine hunting and trapping of this species, I agree that there will be a need to remove problem wolves now and then, most commonly when wolves begin moving into areas of heavy, incompatible human use. The previous legal status of northern Rocky Mountain and western Great Lakes wolves already allowed officials to employ these measures; it was not necessary to delist them for this purpose. Delisting is resulting in widespread, indiscriminate hunting impacts on many established groups of wolves in areas where there are no major conflicts with people and the wolves are essentially controlling their own numbers (both group sizes and number of groups), as wolves do under natural or near natural conditions.
To ensure their continued presence and vitality, the integrity of important functional characteristics, not merely numbers, must be guarded carefully for each and every species. Otherwise, we might one day find ourselves inhabiting a lonely, deadened planet, where living wildness and all of its gifts will only be a memory. There is cause for much concern, but it is still not too late for us to recognize the difference between life and mere existence.
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Snapshot: Scientist as Advocate
Rick Steiner
Rick Steiner was a conservation professor at the University of Alaska for thirty years, specializing in environmental issues. He continues to advocate many of Haber's ideas today.
After Gordon's tragic death in 2009, I knew I had lost a true friend and colleague. I was asked by his family in Florida to collect his research materials, publications, photographs, etc. and place them with the Alaska Resources Library and Information Service here in Anchorage for all to access. As I went through the materials, I was struck not just by the reminder that I had lost a good friend, but also by the unique kind of scientist that Alaska and the world had lost. And I learned more about wolves in those few weeks pawing through Gordon's research materials than I thought was possible to know about wolves. His stacks of materials, many dating from the 1960s, dust-covered, paper fading, provide a fascinating glimpse into his life intertwined with his beloved wolves. The research collection also provides a look at the profound sense of sadness, and sometimes rage, Gordon felt about the continuing loss of the many wolves he had come to know personally, and to care for so deeply.
I had first become friends with and a professional colleague of Gordon's about ten years ago, as our careers took similar trajectories: applying science in conservation advocacy. We met weekly each winter at his favorite coffee house here in Anchorage, Café del Mundo, where he would set up shop with his laptop, engaging any and all who wished to talk about wolves. Everyone was deeply impressed with Gordon's intellect, his passion for wildlife, and particularly his passion for wolves. I was also fascinated with the intricate details of the social lives of wolves he had recorded. His research was without doubt one of the most significant contributions in the history of wildlife science. Together, we drafted legislation that would have increased the use of science in Alaska's wildlife management, and wrote several joint letters to the governor and National Park Service, seeking greater protection for Denali's invaluable wolves. I was truly honored to join him in the political application of his science.
Gordon was the quintessential field biologist, the sort that we don't really have around anymore. He was far more comfortable spending long hours at forty below observing Denali wolves than being in an office. And he did what many other scientists don't: he advocated the application of his scientific findings. Two things, both interrelated, best describe Gordon's unique contribution to wildlife science and ecology, and both set him apart from most others in the field: (1) his in-depth, long-term field observations—careful, methodical, thousands of hours of observation—conducted in winter and summer, in all sorts of weather, for over forty years; and (2) his passionate advocacy, based on his findings, for protecting wolves.
On this last count, he went against the established, stale orthodoxies of science. But it was clearly his intimate understanding of the intelligence, social organization, and sentience of wolves that fed his passion to protect them. For Gordon, there was no other choice. It seems that anyone who comes to know the fascinating, caring lives of wolves as he did would have to take that step. He advocated protection of Alaska wolves with all the tenacity of a family group of wolves guarding a litter of newborn pups. For this, he was reviled by those who are threatened by the truth about wolves, and greatly admired by the rest of us.
I hosted Gordon on a statewide Alaska Public Television debate on Alaska's wolf control program in 2004, face-to-face with his most ardent opponents, where he and his colleague, Priscilla Feral of Friends of Animals, methodical
ly destroyed the arguments of wolf-control advocates. I again hosted Gordon and Priscilla in 2005 for a public debate in Anchorage, at which they had both agreed to debate their opponents on the issue of wolf control, but none of their opponents showed. Gordon's opponents must have known that logic, science, and public opinion ran strongly against their backward ideology of killing wolves, and that they would lose any fair debate on the issue with him.
In the end, the enduring legacy of Gordon's forty years of research will be the new and powerful understanding we all now have of wolves, and the sacrosanct need to protect them. As well, perhaps his lesson will provide a model to young scientists, who have to begin advocating the application of their research results. I am sure that someday, those who don't yet appreciate this lesson will, and Gordon Haber will be remembered as the true scientific pioneer he was.
When I think of Gordon and his decades of life spent with wolves, I am reminded of an Ed Abbey quote about a centuries-old desert tortoise: “He knows his home, loves it, stays there, guards it.” And as Gordon's home was with Denali wolves, he did just that.
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CHAPTER 14
TOKLAT'S HIGH VALUE: THE CASE FOR UNEXPLOITED WOLF GROUPS
GARY BAKER, WHO FIRST FOUND WILD WOLVES FOR HABER IN 1966, SAID HABER was always a dynamic presence. “He delivered it with both barrels,” Baker said. “He wasn't afraid of confrontation. If he felt you were wrong, he'd go to the mat with you.” And his longtime pilot, Troy Dunn, noted that Haber carefully chose those battles—always choosing those that would have the most effect on the wolves themselves, especially the Toklat family group of Denali. The Toklats were the one family group that spanned Haber's entire career with wolves; they were there when he arrived, and they were there when his plane went down in 2009. In fact, Haber was most likely tracking the Toklats or their offshoot, Toklat West, when he died; his plane crashed in the mountains just downriver from the East Fork cabin, in the heart of the Toklat family territory.
“He was on a path,” recalled Karen Deatherage, “of changing how we see wolves, how we view their relationships, their families. Numbers, he said, are secondary to relationships and actions. It isn't about numbers; it's about traditions, about cultures.” In this chapter, Haber makes this case one last time—with the Toklats at the core. He also explains just why he stopped using the term “pack” and why these Toklat wolves represent a continuous nonhuman family lineage, something increasingly rare and valuable in today's anthropocentric world.
THE TOKLAT WOLVES OF EASTERN DENALI NATIONAL PARK LIVE together as one of the world's oldest known nonhuman social groups in the wild. As such, Toklat, also known as East Fork, is a biological treasure, a gold mine of research opportunities for understanding more about the characteristics of a successful society and cooperative behavior in general. Toklat is also important to the biological integrity of Denali as the oldest of only about twenty predator functional units that interact year-round with the ungulate populations and subpopulations of this ecosystem. It is the world's most viewed and probably the world's most photographed group of wolves. It provides a wealth of educational and scientific opportunities. The history Toklat embodies in this ecosystem gives it a special aesthetic value as well, something like the aura of a 150-year-old bowhead whale or 2,000-year-old redwood.
There are certain behaviors that make Toklat—and made its former neighbor to the east, Savage River—so successful, interesting, and important to study and protect. The Savage River family was well established in 1966 but disappeared in the winter of 1982–1983, probably due to illegal aerial hunting. None of Savage's successors—Headquarters, Sanctuary, Mount Margaret, Toklat East—has lasted for more than eight years in the presence of continued trapping and hunting just outside the east and northeast park boundaries, which was part of their home territory.
When I began this research in 1966, Toklat was a well-established family. Adolph Murie, the famous naturalist-scientist who was still studying bears and wolves when I arrived, told me this was the same family of wolves he began observing in 1939 and described in his classic 1944 monograph, The Wolves of Mount McKinley. From my own observations, I know Toklat is at least forty-three years old, and from what Murie told me, it is probably at least seventy years old. Wolves of this family have been radio-collared continuously for the last twenty-one years. This ranks the Toklat wolves and a forty-six-year-old or older community of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, as the two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups anywhere in the wild.
Under natural conditions, longevity and levels of sociality can be expected to vary widely among groups of wolves, in areawide patterns related directly and indirectly to prey resources. Toklat, Savage, and Savage's successors have been the primary resident groups of eastern Denali, the only major area of the north side park/preserve where mountain sheep as well as moose and caribou are available to wolves. This richer, more diverse prey base has enabled Toklat (and formerly Savage) to avoid much of the direct competition and strife with other groups that results in higher natural rates of turnover and probably lower levels of sociality for wolves in surrounding areas to the north and west. Sheep provide a key additional winter hunting opportunity that reduces the need of the eastern groups to venture to the more dangerous caribou wintering areas just outside the park. The eastern groups also largely escape competition from migrating wolves because the latter are much more attracted to the nearby caribou wintering areas, in part because caribou are easier to hunt than sheep.
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Field notes #3
May 22 [no year]
10:15—arrived Headquarters area. Leaves starting to open noticeably in the HQ—hotel—East boundary area—perhaps one-fifth open now. Turned into a mostly gray day, with dull sky and fairly cool.
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Characteristics of Success
The Denali research suggests that being able to accommodate major prey changes, durable relationships among key individuals, and heavy reliance on altruism and other sophisticated cooperation are among the most important reasons why Toklat still persists and Savage River lasted at least seventeen years. Although both groups benefited from good overall prey resources, there were differences in the way these resources were distributed between their territories, and major seasonal and long-term prey changes. Both groups seemed to adapt primarily through social adjustments. Adapting efficiently to food constraints is obviously vital for any society's long-term success and in this case is consistent with other evidence that the eastern Denali wolves conserve their prey as “prudent predators.”
Durable relationships characterized both groups, especially their primary reproductive bonds. For example, over a span of thirty-three years, there were only six Toklat alpha (primary breeding) females, one of which retained the position for fourteen years until she died naturally. The behavior of three subsequent Toklat alpha and beta pairs in their prime, and of the surviving mates after human-caused breakups, leaves little doubt that these and other relationships would have lasted much longer under natural, undisturbed conditions. In the Savage River family, the same two males occupied the alpha and beta positions and maintained an efficient division of leadership for at least seven years.
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Field notes #134
June 2006
7:25—8 am (Stampede II) Wolf sleeping out in front of den with one black pup. Wolf returned from a hunt, very distended belly obviously from eating. She arrives at 7:35 am going straight to den in trees along bank. Initially she does not see #930 and black pup. Four pups 200 feet out on bar. But a few minutes later she comes out of trees, followed by two tan pups toward the others. The black pup sees her and comes to meet. #930 remains flaked out, not responding in the slightest. The four pups get her to regurgitate again, probably several times. Later the black pup and one tan nurse briefly while she is lying down, though she is not accommodating them much—doesn't seem to want to nurse.
2:30 pm—All seven pups
(5 black and 2 tan) appear in the open and romp and play. Then 830, who had been resting ~ 100 yds away, comes to them. They mob her, food begging. She does not regurgitate. Several times 1–2 pups try to nurse and each time she reprimands them by snapping at them—definitely is not nursing any longer. She then lies down and allows them to climb all over her, etc. Lots of this and pup-pup play.
3:30 pm—830 howls & looks to the S side of bar ~200 ft. away. Apparently that is where 429 is resting. Then the pups look that way. 429 appears, & comes to pups & 830—pups mob him—he snaps at them but they persist.
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Strong pair bonds do not necessarily preclude polygyny (“monogamy” can be a risky term). I directly observed one instance of cooperative polygyny in Toklat, in 2002, between the new alpha male, his primary mate, and her mother. This seemed to have little if any effect on his relationship with the younger female, which remained exceptionally close until she was trapped (and he was eventually shot) three years later. As described in chapter 2, for almost two months the male continued returning almost obsessively to the site where she was trapped, even right after mating with another female.
I suspected other polygynous matings with little effect on the primary bond, especially in the Toklat family, with its relatively high frequency of multiple simultaneous litters (in thirteen of the thirty-eight years I could determine the number of litters); in 1990 there were at least three and probably four Toklat litters. Savage River produced multiple litters in only one of the twelve years I could determine the number of litters. In that case, I observed a young adult male making intense sexual advances to a young adult female during the mating period in March, after the older alpha pair had completed its courtship and mating activities.
Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal Page 21