Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  Many undergraduate students have contributed to the study, adding various talents and idiosyncrasies and keeping the human side of the job lively. Some of them wrote senior honours theses. Most have gone on to careers in wildlife conservation.

  Volunteers have played a big part, filling the gap between field needs and budgets. They have come from many places: Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, Germany, United States, and closer to home from Ontario too.

  Most of our flying was done in a white-and-blue Cessna 172 owned by Pem Air of Pembroke, Ontario. Many pilots enjoyed the sky manoeuvring, doing the job safely and well.

  Then there are the wolves, assigned pack names from lakes or other geographic features in their territories, given numbers in the order caught. They were allotted an additional pack name after the number if they later dispersed or showed themselves to be members of another pack. It was, at the very least, a fair trade — our intrusion into their lives resulted in fewer of them dying premature deaths. Gone now but not forgotten are alpha-female Basin 3 Foys and her mate, Foys 1, who headed up a pack of thirteen, and big, forty-four-kilogram (ninety-seven-pound) Basin 4 McDonald, who provided so much key information about the McDonald Creek pack. The howls of Nahma I will always ring in our ears. Alpha-female Jack Pine 3 wore three different collars over the course of five years and provided us with a thick file of data. We will never forget Billy I when we found her curled up under a tree, a light dusting of snow drifted over her, her neck one-third severed by a snare.

  Our study has been and is supported primarily by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF), whose president, Monte Hummel, not only encourages us and helps forge both research and conservation strategies, but participates with us in many meetings with provincial government officials, township politicians, and sister conservation organizations where we present our data and make our case. Concerned individuals and corporations who care about the character of Canadian wilderness give money to WWF for our work or donate directly to us. In times when dollars for wildlife have been shrinking, they make our work possible.

  Behind all our work lay the memory of one man who did much for the protection of both wolves and wilderness in Canada — Douglas Pimlott, who died in 1978. My years working for Doug formed much of my previous book, Wolves and Wilderness (Dent Canada, 1975). Doug shunned radio telemetry, which involves putting radio-collars on wolves, each one transmitting its own frequency, discernible by portable, battery-operated receiver. The electronics were new and undependable back then. But he did not shun the biopolitics of wolf and wilderness protection, and he made his mark. He founded the World Conservation Union’s Wolf Specialists Group to address wolf conservation needs around the world. He helped found many conservation organizations that continue their important work today: the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, the Canadian Nature Federation, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

  When Doug had amassed too much ill will from a segment of government policy-makers, the status-quo clones, he gave his red Chestnut “Bob Special” cedar-strip canoe to me, and with it the Algonquin wolf study. He never promised that either the science or the biopolitics of wolf research would be easy. I know he would be interested in what we have learned.

  AMBER FIRE

  AUGUST 1987. The first of over 150 wolves to oblige us with data, albeit unwittingly, lay sprawled out full length under a spruce tree. A light, all-day rain had petered out; the wet bush hung suspended in early-evening hush. From a distance a hermit thrush played taps.

  The wolf raised her head, struggled to rise, fell back. A few minutes passed. Phantom-like, a gray jay glided in, perplexed by the scene, and landed above the wolf. Cocking its head sideways, the bird uttered a confused-sounding squawk. Again the wolf lifted her head, this time trying to focus on the sound. Again her head fell back.

  More time passed. We sat as motionless as we could on the mossy ground a few metres away and watched. Then, thirty-five minutes later, the wolf lifted her head for the third time, groggy from the drug, but more alert — she was remembering. She looked for us, found us, our eyes met and locked. She held her gaze for a full minute, two minutes, an eternity. Wolf — human — each searching for meaning in the eyes of the other. Eyes so alike — iris, pupil, cornea, lens, size, musculature, movement. But eyes so different, reflecting two different social orders that began diverging, like two continents drifting apart, hundreds of thousands of years ago. One species possesses great physical prowess — speed and endurance, night vision, a keen sense of smell. The other possesses an unprecedented mental capability.

  Burning in those amber wolf eyes was the vital force of wilderness itself, a force that left our eyes some four thousand years ago as human civilization first began to separate man from nature. Locked in neural connections behind those eyes were ecological secrets we no longer remember, shared with the pines who whisper them from ridge to ridge, and the beavers who tell them in their lodges late at night. As a summit predator, the wolf ties species together, binds them into a marvellous functioning whole, provides the ecosystem glue.

  Burning in those amber eyes, too, were deep and unsettling questions. They were about the capacity to hate another species, about persecution and population genocide. They asked what kind of future we were creating for wolves and wilderness, indeed for species, ecosystems, the very biosphere itself. They were embarrassing questions; they made us ashamed. They brought tears to our eyes, changed the buoyancy of success into a poignancy of self-recrimination. Did we have to do this, to capture and lay at our feet the very spirit of wildness? We tried to look elsewhere, at the trampled ferns, the open drug kit, the poke stick with syringe attached, but always our eyes came back to the wolf, because we could feel her eyes on us.

  We had trapped the wolf in a foothold trap designed for scientific research. In Canada, commercial trappers trap a few thousand wolves every year. Those wolves not already dead from starvation and freezing must look up into the eyes of the trapper, as this wolf did. For them, the look is brief. The trapper puts rifle to wolf forehead and shoots. As a bucket of water douses a campfire, so the amber fire in a wolf’s eyes goes out.

  It has been said that wolf eyes are mirrors; what different people see in them is simply a reflection of themselves. Could they reflect even more, not just a person’s attitude towards wolves, but towards the environment, wild lands, nature itself?

  We named the wolf Nahma 1. She was the first wolf to be radio-collared in a pack whose territory centred on Nahma Lake. We did not call her Jane or Sue: it was enough to put a collar on her without further humanization. She was a yearling as shown by the limited wear on her incisor teeth, a medium-sized wolf with a slender build and long legs. She was tawny with black guard hairs along her back and flanks, reddish tinges behind the ears, and darker legs — a typical Algonquin wolf. She weighed twenty-seven kilograms (sixty pounds) by the bathroom scale, part of our handling gear.

  Fifty-five minutes after injection she was on her feet, wobbly, and gone. We collected our equipment and left. Her radio signal showed that she had not gone far. Probably she was asleep again under a tree.

  We hiked back along an abandoned railway bed once used to haul logs out of this hill country. Now healing, alders crowded the embankment’s shoulders, moss and grasses buried the cinders, and wolf feet used the path for a trail. Our truck was parked at a washout two kilometres away. We felt encouraged, especially Jenny, whose trap set had caught the wolf. With our two student crews, we had been trying to radio-collar wolves for five weeks without success. Finally we had a wolf to follow.

  When we returned the next day, we heard her signal weakly from the washout. Squadrons of deer flies accompanied us on our walk along the old railway, and cicadas hummed in the maples. Nahma 1 was up on a hill above what we suspected was the grassy rendezvous site where her packmates waited. From a strategic knoll beside a lily-covered beaver pond, we sat on a log and listened to her signal. Its irregularity told us she was moving. Five minutes passed, ten minut
es. She was working her way downhill towards the rendezvous site on a trajectory that would have her pass within two hundred metres of us. We moved into the denseness of a hemlock stand and turned the volume of the signal down. Now she was close, now she was past, like a ship going by in the mist. Forest phantom.

  In a few minutes she would be at the meadow’s edge. We left the hemlock grove and followed, to be within hearing when she reached her pack. She was in the opening now, walking fast to its far end, maybe even loping. A whine and a soft bark of greeting floated through the trees.

  We stayed, listening to the now steady beat of Nahma 1’s signal as she slept among her packmates. At dusk we heard what we had waited for, first a single wolf voice lifting from the other end of the meadow, then another, and a third — the wolves were spread out. The howls of the third wolf came from exactly where she was.

  On a map, Nahma Lake does not take up much space. From the ground it is almost obscured by big, rolling hardwood hills over which broad-winged hawks ride the summer thermals and in whose forests red-eyed vireos sing all day. The surrounding country is laced with bogs and streams. The loggers pulled out a few years previously, leaving old roads in the process of regenerating to one-moose-wide trails through raspberry vines and brush. Good wolf country.

  Our interest in this northwest side of the park was to compare the ecology of wolves where white-tailed deer were scarce with the rest of the park where deer were more plentiful. This was to be the basis of Graham Forbes’ Ph.D. thesis research. Partly because we could occasionally use a log cabin we had built nearby, Mary and I centred our work there; the student crews worked farther east.

  A week before we caught Nahma 1, Mary, Jenny, and I had canoed Nahma Lake and part of Craig Lake in a heavy afternoon wind, returning in the calm after dark. We had heard wolves, faint and far away, so far that we decided to search elsewhere for a more accessible pack. So we drove thirty kilometres to a system of logging roads near the ranger station of Kiosk. No sooner had we arrived than the chief ranger there received a strange report. Back near Nahma Lake a wolf had approached some campers to within a few metres. It had stayed only briefly, then walked away.

  So we returned to Nahma Lake, this time walking the overgrown railway by flashlight, pausing every kilometre to howl. Wolves respond to human howls commonly enough that howling is a useful research tool. We have used it more consistently over more years than other wolf researchers. The human howl does not have to be good, just loud. At each stop we howl three times with only short pauses between, then wait for about two minutes and do it again. On only our third stop, a pack with pups answered.

  The next evening we returned to howl at them again, wanting confirmation that they were not simply on the move. The forest was calm, out of breath after a hot, hazy humid day. No leaves rustled. No birds sang. Too much effort. We walked for half an hour along the old railway, surrounded by mosquitoes. A woodcock flew off the trail ahead, the whir of its wings making us jump. Firefly flashes loosely defined the edges of the wet meadow where we expected the wolves to be. Pups answered our howl, but no adults; rarely do we hear pups only.

  Because the howl had given us the information we wanted, we started back without disturbing them further. When we were almost to our truck by the washout, we howled one last time, wondering where the adults might be. A deep-throated wolf answered from a hundred metres down a stream, five or six long, beautiful, night-splitting howls, each like the other, dropping in pitch suddenly near the end. Following my notes made later that night:

  “We sat on the old railroad and made no noise. In five minutes I howled again. Now it was closer and gave shorter, softer howls. A few minutes later we heard sticks breaking in the alders right beside us, and the wolf began to whine. Mary whined back and it whined some more. Then it gave some very short howls, one to two seconds long, deep in pitch, low in volume — obvious short-range communication. For an amazing one and a half hours the wolf stayed no more than four metres from us in the alders. We kept the flashlight off, wanting to see how events would turn out, periodically giving short little howls or whines that the wolf answered. It seemed like it wanted to join us but just couldn’t get up the nerve to take those last few steps up onto the embankment.”

  Finally I stood up to ease my cramped legs. We heard the wolf move back a few metres (maybe to ease its cramped legs too). Then we made our way very slowly to the truck, thinking that the wolf might come out on the road, but instead its howls began to fade. At the truck, we howled again, and now from a more distant ridge it gave us a final serenade of longer, louder breaking howls like the ones it began with.

  Friendly, curious, perhaps it was the same wolf that had approached the campers a few days earlier. We had never experienced such a prolonged, close-range acceptance by, and back-and-forth communication with, a wild wolf.

  A year later, the event was almost repeated. That summer the Nahma pack had not used the same rendezvous site, although wolf tracks along the old railway told that pack members occasionally swung through. One August evening, three wolves answered us, one beginning its howls with a bark, or trailing an initial series of barks into a howl, typical of a wolf disturbed at close range. We checked the receiver; the radio-collared wolf was not one of them. Three minutes later, while we were sitting on the embankment writing notes by flashlight, we heard the bark-howler again, this time even closer. Another wolf howled from the edge of a pond less than a hundred metres away. Moments later, one wolf, very close to us, began to whine. Mary whined back. We heard a wolf splash across the outlet creek and rattle stones as it climbed a bank a few strides directly behind us. We waited, breathless, not wanting to turn around for fear that movement would frighten it. Mist was rising from the moonlit surface of a pond. A few migrant passerine birds peeped overhead. Nothing happened; silence.

  We waited for a full thirty minutes, then I howled, expecting to find that they were long gone. Two wolves answered from the outlet creek. What had they been doing all that time? Maybe they were exhibiting passive defence, staying between us and pups somewhere nearby. Or maybe they were just waiting for us to leave — so we did.

  Through a long journey of over one million years, wolves have lived with humans or our immediate ancestors first in Africa, then Asia, Europe, and for the last forty thousand years or so in North America. As two species of large mammals, often hunting the same prey, it was inevitable that some ecological relationship would evolve between us.

  If we had been equals in communication and reason, like early hominid species living at the same place and time, we might have become two warring species. But war requires a disagreement shared and communicated by members of each side, reciprocated hate, the ability to remember past wrongs, and the desire to retaliate. Wolves simply do not possess this emotional or intellectual equipment. So, while humans have waged war on wolves, wolves have exercised their only biological option, which is to behave as a hunted species. As such, wolves who react with fear have had an obvious selective advantage — they have been harder to exterminate.

  How much fear is locked into the genetic make-up of a wolf? How much can be modified by experience? The Nahma pack provided us with other evidence that illustrated the various ways wolves regard us. One frosty October afternoon that first year, Nahma 1’s signal was coming in loudly as we walked along the same old railway bed towards the now-abandoned rendezvous site. The signal from a radio transmitter is most audible when the wolf is in direct “line of sight.” Trees have little effect, but just one or two high hills are enough to block it out.

  She was close, so we turned towards some alders where the signal was loudest. Suddenly, there she was, standing face on, watching us. She trotted a few steps, seemingly not alarmed, then disappeared in the brush. Judging by her signal, she stayed within fifty metres or so for the next ten minutes. We sat on a mossy bank waiting to see what she would do. She may have been doing the same thing. Then she left. Curious, cautious, unafraid.

  Other wol
ves from other packs exhibited similar curiosity. The Brûlé Lake wolf, for example, routinely urinated on vehicle tires and on occasion walked down an abandoned railway in full daylight and in full view of people. We received so many reports about that wolf that Graham thought he could radio-collar it by immobilizing it with our dart pistol. One afternoon he sat on the old railway waiting for the wolf to show up. It did, walking straight towards him. He didn’t know whether to grab the camera or the pistol. As the wolf walked by, he took eye-level, full-frame pictures. Then as he reached for the pistol, the wolf galloped out of range.

  And a wolf in the Lavieille pack was curious too. One night in a logging clearing, student assistant Carolyn Callaghan and Jenny howled and received no reply. Then while they were writing up their notes, a wolf walked through the sweet ferns into the headlights of their truck and just stood there. They howled softly to it, which seemed to increase its curiosity. After a while they carefully climbed out the truck window, not wanting to open the squeaky door, and sat on the ground near the wolf. Cautiously it circled them, staying about ten metres away. Finally, as in our encounter with the Nahma wolf, humans broke off the engagement, not the wolf.

  At the park museum for a few consecutive winters before our study began, a wolf became habituated to humans and fed from the ground-level bird feeder attached to the window of the staff house. Nicknamed “Rosy” by park interpreters, it was the subject of several stories told by naturalists. Back when I was a student, another wolf raised ire at a children’s camp in the park for its habit of tearing clothes off a clothesline.