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

by Haber, Gordon

  • Ravens follow wolves to scavenge on the remains of their kills and often taunt young wolves into chasing them [chapter 9].

  • Wolves try to help other family members caught in traps or snares and have been observed returning to sites of trapping deaths for weeks after losing a family member [chapter 6].

  • Behavior that is fearless and curious of humans (such as along the Denali National Park road) is nonthreatening and natural for wild wolves—not evidence of “habituation.” It is the fearfulness they learn from human persecution that is not natural [chapter 10].

  • The Toklat family group in Denali National Park is at least forty-three years old, and most likely over seventy years old. This ranks the Toklat wolves as one of the two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups in the wild [chapters 1, 14].

  • Individual wolves are important, and total numbers in an area say little about the health and integrity of wolf populations. Loss of significant individuals, such as alpha adults or helper females, from trapping or hunting can lead to long-term effects in wolf family groups, causing loss of hunting and socializing traditions, loss of dependent pups, dispersals, and, ultimately, loss of the group [chapter 11].

  Raising Pups

  • Wolf dens are an elaborate, deep, honeycombed series of burrows and entrances that are used year after year. All members of the group are involved in preparing the dens. They include play areas for the pups, rest areas and lookouts for adults only, socializing areas for hunting departures and arrivals, and a maze of interconnecting trails, spread over as much as fifty acres [chapter 3].

  • During intervening periods most wolf dens are also used by other animals, including foxes, ground squirrels, porcupines, and wolverines. Burrows at some sites were probably excavated originally by ground squirrels and were later enlarged by foxes, then wolves [chapter 9].

  • Many dens in Denali National Park may have been used for thousands of years or longer. Archaeological evidence indicates that at least three ancient wolf den sites in Denali were also shared with humans from three thousand to ten thousand years ago [chapter 3].

  • Raising new pups at a den is social glue for wolves, without which individuals seem more likely to split apart and disperse at a time of the year when some young adults are already predisposed to disperse [chapter 3].

  • Yearlings develop some of the closest bonds with the new pups, and their close care of the young pups is one of the manifestations of the wolves' sophisticated cooperative breeding behavior, in this case a form of “helping” that also amounts to a division of labor [chapters 3, 4].

  • Adult wolves engage in deliberate teaching, particularly of two- to three-month-old pups. Older wolves take them on short “puppy walks” to better acquaint the pups with the world outside the natal den [chapter 4].

  • Loss of significant adults (and teachers) can cause groups to lose unique hunting abilities, the ability to hunt certain prey at all, the ability to find winter kill, and the ability to maintain their territory [chapter 8].

  • In some wolf family groups, such as the Toklats, that rely heavily on the most challenging prey like moose and sheep, pups require a two- to three-year period to learn from older, more experienced wolves. If they are denied this, by loss of the adults, then their very survival is at stake. Much of this learning amounts to traditions that are refined over time, behavior that helps adapt the group to the specific resources and other conditions of its area [chapter 4].

  • Pups progress through four fairly distinct phases in learning how to hunt: (1) hesitation and fear for the first few months after homesites are abandoned in the fall; (2) exuberant (and ineffective) overreaction to potential prey in midwinter; (3) effective participation, with adult guidance, at about one year old; and (4) effective hunting at two to three years old [chapter 4].

  • This prolonged period of dependency of pups on the adults, about 25 percent of their total life span, provides the means by which knowledge can be passed from one generation to another. This is a general characteristic of intelligent animal societies, including our own. And as with the young in many primitive human societies, young wolves have the added advantage of being raised in an extended family, where the presence of many adults caring for them—not just one or two parents—exposes them to the broadest possible opportunity for learning [chapters 3, 4].

  Hunting

  • Wolves can spot prey from at least eight miles away, anticipate and intercept potential prey escape paths, and drive prey into difficult escape terrain for capture [chapter 7].

  • Wolves are not indiscriminate killers but are deliberate and careful about which animals to pursue. For scavenged winter carcasses, they eat parts as they thaw and may have to wait for thawing before consuming it all, if they are not interrupted by humans [chapter 7].

  • Wolves are able to distinguish subtle differences between the fittest potential prey and those that may not be so fit. As a result, the weakest tend to be culled from the population first. Only about 5 percent of wintertime wolf-moose encounters in Denali resulted in an attempt to kill the moose, but most kill attempts were successful [chapter 7].

  • Wolves have been observed to encircle a moose and hold a standoff for up to seven days, until the moose collapses in exhaustion [chapter 7].

  • Scavenging of winter-killed ungulates is a primary source of food for wolves. Denali wolves scavenged, rather than killed, about three-quarters of the moose they ate and about half of all the caribou and sheep they ate. Scavenging can contribute up to 85 percent of wolf diet in harsh winters with high winter-kill. Wolves commonly dig to frozen carcasses buried under the snow, as deep as ten feet or more, into hard-packed drifts and avalanches [chapters 7, 8].

  • Wolves can communicate to other group members the location of a prey kill site, allowing other wolves to find it, even when it is as far as eight miles away [chapter 4].

  • While resting at the den, adults will often ignore prey that wander through the area [chapter 5].

  • Wolf groups have been observed consuming a twelve-hundred-pound moose within forty-five minutes and a two-hundred-pound Dall sheep ram within twelve minutes [chapter 7].

  • Wolves develop unique hunting traditions that fit their territories and aren't used by any other wolf groups. When a family group is lost, their unique hunting traditions are often lost as well [chapter 7].

  Humans Killing Wolves

  • For wolves, shooting and trapping causes significant impacts—lasting long after numbers have recovered—on wolf family social structure, behavior, hunting patterns, distribution, territories, genetic variations, and mortality patterns of survivors and recolonizers [chapters 10, 11].

  • While natural mortality (e.g., winter, starvation) is proportionately greater in pups and yearlings, hunting and trapping takes proportionately more adults, and alpha adults, as these individuals often lead hunts and forays. Thus, human-induced mortality has a greater negative impact on wolf families than natural mortality [chapter 11].

  • Killing wolves doesn't usually reduce overall predation on ungulate populations. Other predators like bears fill the vacant niche, and wolf reproduction increases after alpha adults are lost. If a family group is fragmented due to hunting/trapping losses of alpha adults, other pairs are able to get away with mating, thus resulting in more, not fewer, wolf pups overall. This means that the hunting, trapping, and aerial killings by which humans have tried to reduce wolf numbers are instead most likely to have the opposite effect: to increase them [chapter 12].

  • Wolves compete with brown bears for prey (such as moose calves in spring), harass bears away from moose calving areas, and steal carcasses of animals the bears have killed. Thus, a reduction in wolves in such areas will not necessarily lead to a reduction in overall predation of ungulates but might actually increase predation [chapter 9].

  • Other than relatively light and sporadic subsistence use in areas where it is a traditional practice, it is clearly best to
not allow any harvests of natural wolf populations [chapter 12].

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  FROM BAD TO WORSE: AN UPDATE ON HABER'S WOLVES

  SINCE GORDON HABER'S DEATH, INFORMATION ABOUT Denali's wolves has become limited. No other biologist is out in the field with any regularity to observe and report on the wolves' status. What little we know is that things have seriously deteriorated for both Denali's and Alaska's wild wolves. The state has implemented the largest de facto predator control Alaska's wolves have ever endured, and Denali's wolf population has plummeted. Meanwhile, wildlife managers in Alaska and elsewhere largely ignore Haber's findings and manage simply by numbers, even though events keep proving him correct. Haber, said Joel Bennett, would be outraged.

  After Toklat's series of losses in the early 2000s, they contracted their territory, changed their hunting behaviors and den sites, and became less visible to park visitors. Toklat West, Toklat family members who split off and formed their own group, shifted into areas of the former Toklat territory.34 They began using two dens—including the East Fork, the den Adolph Murie observed—that are among the oldest in the park and closest to the road corridor. With these changes, Toklat West became the most-viewed group of wolves in Denali National Park.

  Then in April 2012, one of the two trappers who target Denali wolves shot one of his own horses, hauled it near the boundary of Denali National Park, and laid a minefield of snares around its body—the kind of saturation snaring that Haber had spoken out against twenty-five years earlier. Days later, the NPS learned the trapper's snares had killed two wolves, one of them a collared female from Toklat West. This was the female, according to the NPS, who was seen the previous summer nursing pups in the East Fork natal den. Killed after the mating season but before the pupping season, she was considered the breeding female of the most-viewed wolf family group in the park, and so, one of the most viewed in the world.

  By killing this breeding female, this trapper most likely also killed Toklat West's pups for the year. The remaining Toklat West wolves, though briefly seen at the East Fork dens in May, were not seen with pups that summer. With no ties to a den, and no concerted effort at raising pups—what Haber called the group's social glue—this group abandoned its den and fragmented. According to the NPS fall 2012 count, several wolves have left the group and other members were seen very rarely. When they were, they were most often seen as single wolves rather than in a cohesive family group. From this one trapping death, the Toklat West family group has shrunk from a highly cooperative and integrated family group of fifteen wolves to only five wolves.

  This is precisely the scenario Gordon Haber repeatedly warned would happen to Denali's wolves when not protected by a buffer in the Wolf Townships, or Stampede, area. It's the scenario his research shows will result with any human persecution of wolves, whether trapping, hunting, or predator control: alpha members are more likely to be taken, thus fragmenting and disintegrating the entire family group.

  Park Service biologists agree that the integrity of Toklat West, and the very future of this group, is now in doubt. Whatever the fate of this family group, it's clear that park visitors now have much less chance of seeing any wolves. In fact, wolf-viewing success for the four hundred thousand people who visit Denali each summer has decreased by more than 70 percent in just three years—since the Board of Game abolished the protective buffer in March 2010.

  News from the Toklat group, though sparse, doesn't bode well either. They have shifted their territory even farther to the northeast, and were seen in midsummer 2012 taking their pups over Primrose Ridge out of the park and toward the Wolf Townships. The other eastern park group, called Nenana River, dens within ten miles of the park road but is more elusive and rarely seen. They spend much more time on the edges of the park in the former buffer areas; one of their pups was killed in the summer of 2012 by a train near the park entrance.

  These wolves were Gordon Haber's research subjects, generations of wolves he'd observed for more than forty years. When his plane went down in October 2009, it wasn't just an experienced, world-renowned wolf biologist and advocate who was lost. Also lost was everything he would have known about the Toklat West wolves, about the rest of Denali's wolf groups, and about the wolves of Alaska. In short, we lost our best source of information on Alaska's wolves.

  Simplistic Population Management

  Haber was so certain of the significance of family groups to the essential nature of wolves that he rarely photographed a single wolf. As he wrote, “Wolves are fascinating as individuals, but what I find unique is the beautiful, interesting, and advanced social structure of an intact group. Fragmentation of a wolf group through hunting disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic.” He knew better than anyone that a lone wolf is a dead wolf—a fact painfully underscored by the 2002 starvation death of what he once called his favorite wolf, the Toklat alpha female.

  Yet Alaska's wolves continue to be managed without consideration of family group structure and traditions, or of the significance of particular individual wolves; instead, they're managed by population numbers alone. The State of Alaska's Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game claim there is no reason to change the level of hunting, trapping, and predator control as long as the overall population of wolves in any given game management unit (GMU) is at an acceptable level. To Alaska's wildlife managers, the loss of the Toklat West female wolf amounts to a “take” of one in GMU 20, a thirty-five-thousand square mile area about the size of the state of Maine. According to the state's standards, the wolf population of GMU 20 would still be “healthy” even if wolves disappeared entirely from all 9,375 square miles of Denali National Park and Preserve. What's more, as Haber pointed out, even the state's population numbers for wolves are seriously flawed. Not only are wolves managed simply by the numbers, but there are far fewer wolves than the state claims.

  Wolf population monitoring is primarily all the National Park Service is doing as well, said NPS biologist Dr. Tom Meier. Only one master's student research project currently focuses on wolves. This project uses collar data from six members of three family groups; with this data they are investigating whether the removal of the Wolf Township and Nenana Canyon Closed Areas (the protective buffer) has affected visitors' wolf-viewing success. The decline after the effects from the recently trapped female demonstrates, said Meier, that it has.

  Since 1986, the NPS has routinely monitored wolf populations as one of eighteen vital signs of overall ecosystem health in Denali National Park. To accomplish this, NPS conducts biannual aerial surveys and radio-tracks collared wolves once or twice per month. No researchers regularly hike to den-viewing areas to observe active dens. The knowledge that the dead Toklat West female was nursing pups was a one-time observation by a pilot during an NPS spring survey flight.

  Now, all we know are numbers, and those aren't looking good. From 2007 to 2010, the Denali wolf population dropped from 147 to 84 wolves. As many as 19 wolves from five family groups were trapped and hunted in 2007 alone. Two years later, in the fall of 2012, the population plummeted to 54 wolves, a 63 percent decline since 2007 and the lowest it's been in twenty-five years. And, because the fall count is usually higher with the new litters of pups, many fear that the spring 2013 count will drop below that quarter-century low.

  According to NPS biologists, prey populations are stable or growing, so food supply isn't an issue; instead, hunting and trapping, as well as an expanded predator control program in surrounding areas, are likely causes. Meier speculated that the state's predator control program has left such a vacuum around the edges of the park that Denali's wolves may be broadening their territories beyond park boundaries to fill this vacuum, becoming even more vulnerable to trapping and hunting. Clearly, this ecosystem vital sign of Denali's wolves is not in good shape. (See Plate 25.)

  Fewer Wolves, More Wolf Killing

  Since Haber's death, the Denali National Park buffer situation has also deteriorated.
At the 2010 Board of Game meeting, several proposals were submitted to create a complete protective buffer in the Wolf Townships. Many of these proposals were inspired by and based on Haber's work, which showed that the established buffer was incomplete. For example, in the winter of 2007–2008, at least twelve and as many as nineteen Denali wolves from five family groups were trapped and shot in a small area just east of the buffer. This significant bite out of the park's wolf population marked the beginning of the populations' dramatic decline.

  As testimony, one group presented a stack of Haber's research publications more than two feet high. But, recalled Rick Steiner, the board expressed no interest in what Haber's forty-plus years of research showed about the importance of the protective buffer. Even the National Park Service, alarmed by the drop in population and viewing success, proposed expanding the existing buffer zone for the first time ever. However, the Board of Game not only voted down every single buffer expansion proposal, they went further: they abolished the existing buffer and placed an eight-year moratorium on considering future buffer proposals.

  As of this writing, no protective buffer of any kind exists, and the effects are increasingly visible. The Toklat West female was trapped within the abolished buffer. And, according to preliminary data from the NPS viewability research project, viewing success of Denali wolves since removal of the buffer has declined by more than 70 percent: from 45 percent in 2010, to 21 percent in 2011, to just 12 percent in 2012. (See Plate 26.)

  Meanwhile, Alaska's predator control program continues to expand.35 Alaska's Board of Game has initiated state-sponsored wolf killing in more than 20 percent of Alaska's available land. These programs cover over seventy-six thousand square miles; with four new programs approved, including two on the Kenai Peninsula, the area will grow by at least a third. They have considered programs to kill a significant number of the rare Alexander Archipelago wolf, found only in old-growth forests of southeastern Alaska—the same wolves who, having lost much of their former habitat to clear-cut logging, are being considered for threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. The Board of Game is even attempting to spread predator control into Alaska's national parks and wildlife refuges.