Different from territorial behaviour, with its obvious or inconspicuous expressions of defence, is simple “home-range behaviour.” By definition, the landowner stays in one general area but makes no effort to exclude other individuals or groups of its species. An animal that knows a place well benefits because it can find food and avoid both predators and accidents with relative ease. Home-range behaviour is a more benign, sometimes even cooperative, spacing mechanism.
Home-range behaviour may be characterized by simple avoidance between the landowner and intruder. Then, it is enough just to detect one another’s presence, enough for a wolf at times simply to smell where a member of another pack has been to send it packing. Home-range behaviour with avoidance is so difficult to distinguish from passive territorial behaviour that, in practice, often the two terms are used interchangeably. The wolf literature is full of both.
Nonetheless, wolf populations normally are thought to exhibit a textbook example of group territorial behaviour, capable both of passive defence through scent marking and howling, and active aggression, even killing. Because territory size adjusts to prey densities, this behaviour may be shaped by the availability of food — “resource partitioning” in the jargon of ecology. Or the motive may be defence of a mate.
What about dispersing animals with the free pass they seem to hold to trespass anywhere they like? What about kin affiliations in a wolf population that make aggression and competition illogical from a genetic standpoint? What about successful trespass and even carcass sharing? What we found was not so simple.
TRAVERS PACK, Mathews Lake pack, Grand Lake pack, Pretty Lake pack. For a while, before things changed, these wolves provided winter experiences that intermingled over the years to convey an impression at once harsh and harmonious. The oneness of life and land is easiest to sense in winter when the superfluous is stripped away, and the soft and sensitive are sleeping it off or have migrated. When a snow-laden gale lashes the limbs of the maples and whips through the pines, and the wolves hunch into the wind as they travel up the lake, then the system reveals some of its inner workings.
We lived during those winter field sessions well within the park in a ramshackle, brown, three-storey MNR staffhouse at the abandoned railway stop called Achray. A few other buildings disturbed the pine forests there: a once-elegant, small stone house with wide porch, perched on a scenic bank above expansive Grand Lake, and a small log cabin used by one of Canada’s famous artists, Tom Thomson, when he worked there in 1916 as a park ranger. A couple of white shacks for workers lined the railway track, along with a long bunkhouse and garage. They all spoke of a different age when Achray was a logging centre. Better roads and pickup trucks ended Achray’s prominence; now loggers can drive all the way home each night. Today even the railway is gone — rails, ties — all trucked away in 1997. With only its few remaining buildings, Achray is left closer to being nothing, more appropriate in a park.
During the early years of our research, the MNR leased out its oversized staff house to Algonquin College, whose teachers brought classes of forestry and wildlife students out from the campus at Pembroke for two weeks at a time to train them in bush skills. We made an arrangement with Tom Stephenson, who worked for Algonquin College, to give evening talks about our research in exchange for accommodation. It was a satisfactory arrangement, except for the all-night student partying. Through the thin walls of the staff house we often heard informal evaluations of our talks. Although laced with expletives, the commentary, when discernable, showed a lively interest in our work. Young wolf haters were outnumbered by students who were developing a wider appreciation of nature.
Along one wall of the kitchen ran a vast cast-iron stove meant to cook meals for work gangs of fifty or so men. Across the long dining room was a row of windows looking out over scenic Grand Lake. No wonder Tom Thomson was inspired when he lived at Achray. The original sketch of his famous Jack Pine, today a Canadian icon of “the true North, strong and free,” was painted from a similar view of Carcajou Bay across Grand Lake. Out back, a large bird feeder kept stocked with food configured blue jays into a colourful node. Evening and pine grosbeaks or red and white-winged crossbills coloured the platform when the blue jays were off on other business. Often a richly coloured red fox sat in the snow nearby, hoping a chunk of suet would fall off or someone would toss out some table scraps. Both happened frequently enough to make the wait worthwhile.
We sort of backed into an arrangement with Tom Stephenson to stay at Achray. At the beginning of our first winter’s field work, we thought we would have to camp. Winter camping is fine when you devote a significant portion of your time to being comfortable at best, or staying alive at worst. We have done well in central Labrador on two metres of snow, but then we had an eight-by-ten wall tent, a bed of spruce boughs, and a small, airtight wood stove. The camp took hours of maintenance each day: cutting wood, melting snow for water and other survival chores, a necessary but weighty time-loss from collecting field data.
By poor luck, our first night out, in mid-December 1988, was blistering cold, bottoming somewhere between −35°C and −40°C. Before dark, Graham, Mary, and I scraped away the snow from under the pines beside tiny Pretty Lake and set up our tents. Then we went out searching for wolves, returning before midnight. The night was cold yet bearable, but in the morning I froze a finger against the metal plunger while trying to light our one-burner stove. Graham’s plastic ground sheet disintegrated in his hands. Our feet became numb in our frozen boots, forcing us to run around until we could get a fire going. We had nowhere, and no inclination, to write up the previous night’s field notes or fill out data forms.
We put in a good day tracking wolves, but with clothing wet from perspiration, the prospect of a cold camp again was not pleasant. That is when Graham remembered Achray. Graham and Jenny had stayed there once the previous summer when the staff had invited them in, and Graham remembered that the window of his room had a broken latch.
Nobody was there when we rolled in. The latch was still broken. The unheated bunk room turned out to be even less comfortable than the tent, but in the morning we heated it up a bit with our little stove and ate breakfast in relative comfort.
After that, Graham made the informal arrangement with Tom Stephenson. Happily for us, Achray turned out to be strategically located near the interface of a number of wolf packs. Often we could stand in the parking lot and dial up three or four wolves from more than one pack.
Not only that, but big, redheaded Tom, the image of a nineteenth-century woodsman, strung many entertaining wolf stories. Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. We were particularly intrigued by his description of how the wolves would come down long, narrow Grand Lake from the west, then fan out, one or two staying on the lake, others in the bush, and hunt their way back, all travelling parallel to the shore. We were interested by the use of topography in the hunt that Tom’s story implied. Over the course of a few winters, other people told us similar tales, such as how the wolves on the west side of Lake Travers would drive deer down the point and catch them on the ice.
It is easy to overinterpret observations like these, and coupled with Tom’s propensity to round out his stories, we were not too sure what to conclude. However, a number of times we did observe the Grand Lake pack moving fanned-out as he described. Once, our departure from Achray was delayed because our truck would not start. We have memories of many such truck malfunctions, usually resolved by draping sleeping bags and coats over the hood and putting a Coleman stove under the engine until it warmed up. Achray, buried in the hills, seemed to be a cold sink. While we were waiting for the truck to revive, a single wolf came trotting down the lake. To test Tom’s idea, we hiked up the road to see if we could find parallel tracks of companion wolves, and we did — one wolf back about one hundred metres from the shore, another back two hundred metres farther.
The pack obviously benefited from this pattern of movement. A deer flushed in the trees by a
wolf might run to the lake, where better footing improved its chances of escape. But there it would meet one or more lake-travelling wolves in a good position to bring it down. In the 1960s when wintering deer were more common, Doug Pimlott found that many deer were killed on lakes, presumably because they made some effort to escape there.
An intelligent species such as the wolf, adapted for group hunting, should be able to use topography to its advantage. Such application of intelligence would require only memory, and knowledge of one’s territory, which wolves certainly possess. It would be a highly selected trait. Nevertheless, thinking over the bulk of wolf kills we have examined over the years, in only a few places have wolves repeatedly ambushed deer. Most kills seem to be at happenstance places.
In the core of winter, the sun throws little warmth, the nights are brittle. Trees crack, and ice on the lakes booms until muffled by snow. Snow curtains the streams, silencing them. Grouse remain buried in their night-beds and snowshoe hares stay in the deep recesses under the spruce trees. Living things hunker down, husband their precious calories. Northern lights flicker at night, backlighting the uplifted arms of the pines and etching the lattices of maple limbs against a translucent sky.
Among those many illuminated nights, the night of March 12, 1989, stands out, described in newspapers at the time as the “northern lights display of the century.” It was seen as far south as Texas. That evening we had given a talk to the Achray crowd in the dining hall. Later, with our daughters and Graham, we went out to see if we could tune in a radio signal from one wolf or another along the Sand Lake road. After a warm day hovering around freezing, the temperature had plummeted to −25°C. No breeze, moon less than half full, no human-caused light pollution in the night sky, conditions were excellent for the show. I follow my notes, made later that night in the Achray bunkhouse while the student party raged in the rooms around: “At the jack pine stand near Lake Travers we became aware that the northern lights had changed from a subdued horizon-glow to bright bands shooting across the sky. We stopped the truck, got out, and watched as the sky grew brighter, then suddenly, in a broad swath, turned pink. The pink deepened to crimson and mounted all the way to directly overhead where it became a pulsing, full corona. Across the red sky played white, pink and greenish searchlights, expanding, contracting, flaring up, expiring, reviving, pulsing, ‘dancing heal and toe.’ Gigantic magnetic shapes, soon expanding to within 20 degrees of the southern horizon, glowed and pulsed rhythmically, west to east, each cloud lighting up in sequence. One moment they were shaped like cumulus clouds, another like wispy cirrus strands. Wave after wave of colourful light crossed these magnetic clouds, wrapped in an intense blood-red sky. It was unreal, unworldly. We felt transformed to somewhere else in the universe. In the face of all that galactic power, human endeavour seemed scarcely to count.”
We drove with our headlights off to Pretty Lake, then to the bridge over the Petawawa River to listen for signals or howls but heard nothing. Back to Achray at 1 A.M.
Across a broad range of species, territorial behaviour is found under circumstances of a favourable cost:benefit ratio. Where the cost of staking out, marking, and defending a territory is greater than the benefit of exclusive use of the prey in that territory, then territory is replaced with some other social system running from active cooperation to nomadism. So we looked for examples of these systems, as well as evidence of boundary marking and defence.
Once, the Mathews Lake wolves made a three-day circuit around their territory. They started close to their southeast boundary at a moose they had run off a little lake and killed in a thick stand of balsam firs. The struggle had left tree limbs broken and trunks splattered with blood. After the wolves had consumed about three-quarters of the carcass, they left, heading west. Suspecting they were travelling their southern boundary, we snowshoed along a hydro right-of-way to intercept them. Five sets of wolf tracks crossed our path.
Back at our truck again, some campers driving by reported seeing wolves at Pretty Lake ten kilometres farther on. There we found wolf tracks and heard the Mathews wolf’s distant signal. The pack had swung north, by then almost six kilometres beyond its normal boundary, and was trespassing on the Pretty Lake pack’s land. The next day, Graham found the Mathews wolves from the air back on their own northwest corner, and from there they travelled downstream along the Petawawa River, their northern boundary. The following day they were back at their moose kill. The Pretty Lake pack had not detected them, as far as we know. Although the Mathews Lake pack had pushed beyond its normal range on this foray, the evidence that it had made a boundary patrol seemed to fit expected territorial behaviour.
Their patrol cost them a modest price. While away from their moose carcass, Grand Lake 2, an adult female, not only trespassed, but treated herself to a meal. The day before the Mathews pack left, she had been stationary right on the edge of her territory less than one kilometre from the moose kill. That night she moved in. We followed her signal across a bog, the soft light of the moon casting our shadows ahead of us and sparkling off a thousand snow crystals. Her single set of tracks showed that she was trotting as she left the bog and plunged into thick lowland conifers. She was travelling straight, as if she knew exactly where she was going. Eventually we turned back for fear of pushing her and drove a short distance down the road for a cross-bearing. The bearings crossed exactly at the Mathews pack’s moose kill.
That was the only night we caught her poaching. This was not a case of willing prey sharing because she had picked her time to avoid being discovered. All that really was involved was avoidance behaviour. Even before the Mathews Lake pack returned, she was back on territory again.
Although poaching was not common on these winter territories, there were some other interesting cases. On December 18, 1991, four wolves from the Jack Pine pack killed a deer on a pond within the southcentral sector of the Grand Lake East pack’s territory. Meanwhile, the Grand Lake East pack of six was eleven kilometres to the northeast and, as far as we could tell, stayed there for the three days their “guests” were dining, so they may not have known about the kill. Perhaps they had their own carcass, not visible from the air, but if they detected the trespassing pack, they did not take offence.
Two days later, surprisingly, a new pack was at the remains of the same deer, although by then not much was left. The new Grand Lake West pack of four, who had never before travelled in Grand Lake East territory, was on the carcass when Graham flew over. Meanwhile, the Jack Pine wolves had left the carcass and were about three kilometres away. Unfortunately, we do not know what transpired earlier between them at the kill. Still the landowners, the Grand Lake East wolves seemed to keep their distance.
Another two days later, unbelievably, yet a third pack was at what was now only a blood patch on the snow. The Basin Depot pack of seven had moved up from the south. By then, the Grand Lake West pack had gone back home and the Jack Pine pack was even farther south, killing a fawn in the territory of the Grand Lake East pack, who again did not seem to care.
Years later, in February 1998, a pack of four Jocko pack wolves gave way to seven Jack Pine pack wolves at a half-consumed moose. Both packs were trespassing. Michelle found the pack of four from the air on her morning telemetry flight — she was working for us again that winter. The wolves were hidden by the trees on the southside of Grand Lake. By the time we got there by snowmobile and snowshoe in the afternoon, the Jocko pack was gone, but the Jack Pine pack was there, feeding on the moose. Again we do not know if the carcass was conceded or won.
Trespass sometimes occurred just beyond territorial boundaries, making zones of overlap between packs. No known prey poaching was involved on the occasions when Mathews Lake wolves would swing across Johnson, Berm, and upper Stratton lakes at the eastern end of the Grand Lake pack’s territory. Occasionally collared members of both packs were less than one kilometre apart; we could hear their signals from the Achray parking lot.
We made it a practice first th
ing every morning to go out and swing the antenna. Often enough we heard signals from one or both packs. One cold morning just after daylight we got the signals of the Foys Lake wolves from the parking lot, loud enough that we realized they must be within sight, so we ran out to the lake. The Foys Lake pack lived to the south, normally separated from Grand Lake by a long, high ridge that neither pack used. This morning, they had crossed the ridge to trespass along the shore of Grand Lake itself. We saw them strung out in single file where two days previously we had watched the Grand Lake wolves. Meantime, the entire Grand Lake pack was thirteen kilometres away at Clemow Lake at their own moose carcass.
More than just boundary overlap was a ten-kilometre intrusion a pair of Pretty Lake wolves made one night along a road into the Grand Lake territory. Tracking was easy; the road had been freshly ploughed, then lightly dusted with snow. Similarly, a Jack Pine wolf once spent two days well within the Pretty Lake pack’s territory while that pack was three kilometres away, stationary and possibly on a carcass. Another time, Grand Lake wolves travelled deeply into Jack Pine territory. No charges laid, no penalties exacted.
Boundary overlap like this, even the occasional deep invasions, were minor events compared with the redefinition of whole territories. In 1991 the Grand Lake pack shuffled the deck. Our data were good on the Grand Lake wolves partly due to viewing opportunities out on the lake itself and partly because the railway along the shore provided easy access. Our longest string of data, almost five years, came from Grand Lake 2, collared in July 1988 by Graham and Jenny. Her den was dug into the top of an esker that lined a fast-flowing creek not far from the west end of Grand Lake. She was part of a pack of six. Late one grey afternoon, we watched her and her packmates trotting in typical easy fashion down the centre of the lake. We crouched behind some spruces beside the railway and howled. The wolves swerved our way to investigate. A March thaw had left slush on top of the ice, and soon we heard wolf feet sloshing close by. Feeling guilty for deceiving them, we abandoned any effort at peering out and crouched even lower. The sloshing stopped in front of us; undoubtedly they were scenting the breeze. We were revealed as surely as if we had been in full sight. They loped away.
Wolf Country Page 10