Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  East of the Kiosk region along the CNR railway through the park lies the ghost town of Daventry. A logging road drops south to it and beyond. Park rangers had reported that loggers working there commonly saw tracks and heard wolves. We drove to a huge log-filled clearing to investigate. A big yellow log-loader was parked there, its long arm poised for action, looking greedy like the lumber mills it served. Ironically, given our feelings about logging in a park, the network of logging roads makes our research easier.

  It was a Sunday when we first came to Daventry, so the big trucks were not rolling. Wolf prints plastered the sandy road on top of the tire treads. We spent the afternoon among the ghosts in the tangled clearing where the village once stood. In times past, the trains had stopped there on their way up from Ottawa to North Bay to take on water and disgorge an occasional party of adventurers into the back country. Raspberry vines and grasses now claimed the opening. Aspens and balsam firs grew from barely discernable ruins of buildings. Recovery, healing, memories of people fading into forest.

  Back at the log landing we took our place and watched the lights dim and the curtain of night spread open to reveal a starry sky. We waited, but not for long. A whole pack tuned up in the darkness out across a beaver meadow behind the log landing.

  The next day we set traps to the clang and clamour of heavy machinery. The loggers, of course, saw our truck and wanted to know what we were doing on their closed road. Our explanation was not greeted with enthusiasm. The crew was from Killaloe, a small town southeast of the park and a long way, about one hundred kilometres, for them to commute. Later, in the Killaloe area we would become the focus of public controversy.

  Gathered around an eighteen-wheeler, feeling outnumbered, I tried to generate some interest by pulling out a radio-collar from the back of our truck and explaining how it worked. “I got a better rig for a wolf,” responded a burly fellow who outweighed me by a ton. “It’s called a bullet.” Then I was regaled with the usual: “What good are they? No deer left. No moose.” Their comments were laced with invectives about “friggin’ wolves.” I tried to explain that despite wolves we were standing in a forest with one of the highest moose densities in Ontario, but that didn’t give anyone pause. What is knowledge in the face of prejudice?

  The situation became tense. Every little while the conversation would get back to why we were wasting government money on such foolishness. Finally another big eighteen-wheeler rolled up, ready to take more of Algonquin Park to the mill. The circle of men gradually disbanded.

  The next day we caught a large, adult male wolf. We had checked the traps in the early morning, again to the roar of logging trucks. At 4 P.M. we were driving back along the road, not expecting any action, when around a curve, only a hundred metres from the log landing, a trap was gone. We jumped out and immediately heard the chain clanking down in a thick tangle of alders. This was one of only two wolves caught in the daytime during our study, a mystery because we now know that wolves travel extensively both by night and day.

  Daventry 1 was a feisty but fearful wolf, only wanting to get away. In a thundershower that suddenly blew up, we drugged, collared, measured, and weighed him, took ten cubic centimetres of blood from his right front leg, and lay him on the ground to recover. The cool rain must have helped revive him, for no sooner had we taken our hands off him than he jumped to his feet and ran. Not far — his hindquarters could not keep up with his front end. We left him to sleep off the drug.

  We wanted to know if the Daventry pack’s territory abutted the Ratrap Lake pack to the west. Between Ratrap and Daventry runs a string of mostly long, narrow lakes roughly parallel to the CNR tracks. Believing Daventry 1 had to be there somewhere, Mary, Michelle, and I planned a night canoe trip. We set off from Kiosk, after arranging for volunteers Craig and Elaine Hurst to pick us up at the Daventry end at about 4 A.M. That gave us lots of time, we thought.

  We waited for dark at the end of the first lake. After a hot, humid day, the temperature was dropping noticeably; that should have warned us of troubles ahead. No wolf answered our first howl, so, flashlights in hand, we set off across the portage. The canoe balances on my shoulders, so I can hold one arm down at my side and let the flashlight beam illuminate the trail ahead. Stars bright, no moon, traces of ground fog. As usual on such August nights, migrating birds cheeped faintly as they followed the broad sky highway.

  Across Little Mink Lake, we picked out the next portage and walked it to Big Mink Lake only to find it bathed in fog. Casting off, immediately we were surrounded by invisible rocks. “Hard left … hard right … stop … back up!” We worked our way out from shore, now and then striking a rock and bouncing off or sticking and having to jerk our way off by shifting our weight in the canoe. Mary, flashlight shining on compass and map, calculated the bearing. No dark shoreline helped guide us, no stars.

  At the far end of the lake we were unable to spotlight the portage and again ran into rocks. Finally at shore I climbed out and Mary took over the stern. A web of game trails disguised as portages ran into the forest, each one petering out.

  We never did find the portage. From the map it looked like it ran uphill and down again to Cauchon Lake, with the railway bisecting the route, but fog hid everything. Finally I shouldered the canoe and we struck out through the bush, Michelle picking the “easiest” way. By then it was past 4 A.M. and we knew the Hursts would be wondering where we were. To pick our way down Cauchon in the fog, if we did manage to find it, would have taken a long time, so when we stumbled out onto the railway line, we stashed the canoe in the trees and walked out along the tracks. Daylight was working itself across the sky when we got to the Daventry road. The Hursts were asleep.

  Daventry 1 was a data failure. We picked up his signal only once from the ground, and Graham heard him once from the air. The big hills where he came from just swallowed him up again. And the Daventry pack? It remains a mystery. We never managed to collar another member. The pack, however, had provided us with interesting information about tolerance. In their rendezvous site they must have listened each day, all day, to the clamour of heavy machinery and the shouts of men. The wolves even walked the roads in broad daylight, as Daventry 1 had done, barely out of sight of the unsuspecting loggers. Repeatedly in future years, we would find this curious correlation between active logging and the presence of wolves. Maybe more deer were there, feeding on the tops of downed trees. Wherever we are in the park, after the loggers leave for the day, or on weekends, we always check for wolf tracks around the skidders and trucks, and often find them.

  Sometimes we have been asked to comment about regulating logging operations in wolf habitat — by other jurisdictions, not, unfortunately, by the managers of Algonquin Park, where we have proposed restrictions and have encountered indifference. Despite evidence such as that presented by the Daventry pack, we consider a no-tree-felling area around active and traditional rendezvous sites to be a common courtesy. The Daventry pack’s rendezvous site itself, at the edge of a bog, had not been violated, so the wolves had stayed put. Cutting too close, or the presence of people — loggers, photographers, or anyone — in a rendezvous site is sure to trigger the pack’s departure. Den sites are even more sensitive and should be protected from all forest activities to a minimum radius of one kilometre, as they are in several Canadian and United States national parks.

  Nonetheless, wolves’ acceptance of forest change and human presence — their tolerance of people — greatly exceeds our tolerance of wolves.

  South of the Ratrap wolves lay the territory of a pack whose tracks we saw, howls we heard, and scats we collected. But for two summers we learned little about them. We called it the Namea Lake pack, but never liked the name because of its similarity to the Nahma Lake pack directly to the south.

  Once, a Namea wolf put on a dazzling virtuoso performance of howling. It was a cool August night, and we were down in an ugly logging cut mercifully blurred by darkness. As usual, wolf tracks were all around the skidders pa
rked for the night. The wolf was about three hundred metres away when it first howled, alone unless its companions were silent. In response to Mary’s second howl, the wolf replied a record two hundred times! Normally, wolves howl maybe three or four, up to ten or twelve, times. This wolf went on and on like none we have ever heard. First came mouthed-over bark-howls, short in length and treble in pitch — twenty-five of them, followed by a brief pause and forty-six more. Another pause lasted for three minutes, then fifteen longer howls, a three-minute pause and twenty-one more, a two-minute pause and thirty-six more, now long, less treble, and breaking. The change in howls may have reflected the wolf’s shifting emotional state, gradually becoming less perturbed by our auditory intrusions into its world.

  We walked back to the truck, put it in neutral, and rolled down the hill to be closer to the wolf. One of Mary’s howls set it off again, twenty-six times, a three-minute pause, then thirty-one more, its howl cutting up the night into small pieces and tossing them into the slash. The wolf did not approach. We waited for half an hour expecting to hear brush breaking nearby, but finally it gave up, or got fed up, or just went away.

  Five days later we captured a Namea wolf a few kilometres away. Best of all, his capture was closer to Birchcliffe Lake than it was to tiny Namea Lake, so Birchcliffe became the official name of the pack. Graham was glad. After coming off telemetry flights and being spaced-out on motion-sickness pills, he could distinguish and pronounce the difference between Nahma and Birchcliffe somewhat better than he could Nahma and Namea.

  Birchcliffe 1 was a light, tawny wolf who had threaded the game trails around there for six or seven years, judging by his well-worn incisors. He weighed in at twenty-eight kilograms (sixty-two pounds), a middle-weight. His eyes were wary, distrustful. He fought off the effects of the drug fast and was gone. A few days later we picked up his signal to the northwest along a boggy little creek, then, at other times, he was farther away, and we were able to start defining his territory. It fit nicely between Nahma and Ratrap, enclosing one large lake and a chain of small ones named after two of the famous Group of Seven artists: J. E. H. MacDonald and Lawren Harris. Some evenings we would slip our canoe into this chain of lakes and howl the route after dark; occasionally the Birchcliffe pack was there.

  By spring 1990, three Ratrap wolves and one Birchcliffe wolf were on the air. From telemetry flights the previous winter, Graham had defined their territories. Mary and I were anxious to increase our sample size, so in July, we set up camp at the rapids again. We set traps in accustomed places, watched moose in the famous (to us) bog, canoed to distant corners of the region, listened nightly to wolf howls, fought mosquitoes at dusk, and collected water at the spring. Then, unexpectedly, our work in the northwest came to an abrupt end.

  July 10, 1990, was a warm, sunny day. We slept late, having radio-tracked much of the night. After breakfast at the rapids, we drove over to the Fassett Creek gravel pit, climbed up on the back bumper of the truck, and searched for a signal. Distant from the south, Ratrap 3 came in. But wait! Fast pulse — mortality mode.

  When you work for weeks to radio-collar each wolf, hearing mortality mode comes as a great disappointment. Somewhat dispirited, we took a bearing and started hiking through the bush. The signal took us down the Fassett-Ratrap wolf trail that two summers before had been heavily used by this pack when it was determined to confuse us. Where the trail ran down into a wet sedge-meadow, we left it and traversed a side slope of sugar maple-yellow birch forest. After walking another three hundred metres, the signal became loud.

  Ratrap 3 was a medium-sized, adult male, captured and radio-collared by Carolyn Callaghan and Cam Douglas only thirty-six days previously. Nothing on the capture form had appeared irregular. He had been a healthy wolf, thin as is common but not emaciated. He had apparently taken the drug well and recovered quickly. Since collaring, he had moved extensively throughout the Ratrap territory. Now when we got to him, he lay stretched out full length at the base of a hemlock. From the lack of smell, he had been dead only a few hours, although long enough that his body was cold.

  We examined the site for signs of a fight, wolf on wolf or wolf on moose, but the vegetation was not torn up. We felt his body for broken bones or bleeding, but he appeared in good shape. Puzzled, I hoisted him up across my shoulders and we hiked back to the truck. We would freeze him and later have him autopsied by our pathologist, Ian Barker, at the University of Guelph.

  But we had noticed two peculiarities that bothered us. Unexplainable was a bit of exposed underbark at the base of the hemlock, as if the wolf had chewed there. Also strange was a stick lodged between the wolf’s carnassial teeth, lying up against his hard pallet, and another at the back of his throat. Mary raised the possibility of rabies because an animal that is disoriented by this disease may chew at anything. We dismissed that idea because only one case in wolves had been recorded south of the tundra biome in North America, that one in Minnesota.

  At the truck we bagged the carcass, tied it on top under the canoe, and headed out to Kiosk. We kept talking about the hemlock tree and the sticks, however, and finally convinced ourselves to have the wolf checked for rabies. On the radio-phone at Kiosk we called Agriculture Canada in North Bay and were given instructions on how to remove the wolf’s head with a knife, of course wearing surgical gloves. We arranged to meet a veterinarian at a café along the highway.

  The vet was sure rabies was not involved because of the two sticks in the mouth and throat. No wolf, he considered, could stand the sticks, and the one in the throat probably had punctured the esophagus, but he took the head anyway.

  He was wrong. Two days later an MNR ranger drove up to our tent. “You should go get rabies vaccinations,” he announced.

  Although rabies is common in Ontario, mostly among foxes and domestic animals, we had trouble getting shots. For two days we phoned health clinics and hospitals in the area and were referred from one to another. We wanted to know, as well, if the wolf could have passed the virus thirty-six days earlier to the student crew, and found opinions divided. Rabies dies within a few minutes of exposure to air, but the danger to us was from contact with wolf saliva while routinely examining tooth wear. We followed the safe route and eventually all got vaccinated. From then on, pre-exposure rabies vaccination has been mandatory for all field crew members.

  One dead wolf would have had little consequence to our study, but that was not all. After a flight a few days later, Graham left a message at the Kiosk ranger station that Ratrap 1, Ratrap 2, and Birchcliffe 1 were all on mortality mode, that is, all our other radio-collared wolves in the northwest.

  It took a flight with an MNR floatplane to a remote lake to get to Birchcliffe 1 and one of the Ratrap wolves. They had died within a hundred metres of one another. The trespassing Ratrap wolf may not have been aware of its location. The remaining Ratrap wolf had died in its own territory. Two of the wolves were too decomposed for a rabies check, but the other Ratrap wolf tested positive.

  Periodically throughout the rest of the summer, one crew or another would swing by and find some wolf tracks and scats. The next winter, Graham flew over a few times and once saw the tracks of some remaining Ratrap wolves threading across a lake, so the rabies epidemic had not annihilated them.

  Rabies killed two more of our radio-collared wolves on the east side of Algonquin Park, for a total of six. If our sample of radio-collared wolves, then about twenty, represented 10 per cent of the park population, possibly sixty or so wolves died in the epidemic.

  These results led us to investigate clinical records in Ontario more fully, some in files of the MNR, some held by Agriculture Canada. To our surprise we found fifteen confirmed or strongly suspected cases of rabies in wolves in Ontario since 1960, and fewer than fifteen cases of rabid coyotes annually. Most were in a zone of overlap between the two canid species, and identification was sometimes not confirmed.

  Reviewing a decade of records south of the upper Great Lakes in Minnesota, Michigan
, and Wisconsin, no cases of rabies were confirmed in wild wolves between 1981 and 1991. Why the difference? Two different strains of rabies were involved: a fox strain in all the Ontario cases, and a skunk strain south of the Great Lakes. We speculated in a paper published in the Journal of Animal Diseases that because foxes feed more commonly at wolf kills than skunks do, transmission of the fox strain to wolves might be easier. Nobody knows why rabies is so rare in forest-dwelling wolves, notwithstanding our results. We have not found rabies in the Algonquin population since then.

  In his Ph.D. thesis, Graham concluded that the density of wolves in the northwest was roughly 27 per cent lower than in the eastern sector of the park. Pack sizes were only marginally smaller, so the lower density was primarily the result of larger territories.

  These larger territories appear to be at least partially the result of less total prey. In winter, with almost no deer in the northwest, the biomass of prey there was roughly 12 per cent less than in the east. Besides less ungulate prey, snow depth may have reduced wolf efficiency, or lengthened hunting time. Moose come in packages roughly six times larger than deer, so there are fewer animals to find. Probably because wolves experience greater difficulty in obtaining prey in the northwest, wolf biomass there was 0.27 per cent of ungulate biomass compared with a slightly higher 0.37 per cent in the east. Both values, however, fall within the low, expected range from other studies.

  In the northwest, wolves had a surprising 11 per cent snow-shoe hare in their winter diet, a high value for any wolf study, suggesting that wolves may have been experiencing some difficulty in obtaining enough moose or beaver. A small percentage of deer in their winter scats showed an ability to find them when few were around.

  And were any useful evolutionary messages hidden among the high northwest hills? Only that, inexorably, the wolf population there reflected both the obvious — its prey abundance and the conditions of the forest — and the subtle — its diseases and the quiet flow of calories through the ecosystem. Wolves play the ecosystem game of life with the cards nature deals them, their social integrity and population fitness at stake, a new hand every season, a different deck on occasion, changing players, shifting odds. Large carnivores, at the top of the energy pyramids, need wide adaptabilities.