Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  On December 18, Mary and I went to check on him near the junction of the hydro line and the Bonnechere road. It was dusk as we set out, shuffling through twenty centimetres of snow. We followed his signal off a side hill and into a lowland spruce-alder tangle where tracks of deer and snowshoe hare were plentiful. As we proceeded with flashlights, the signal became louder. In places the brush was so thick we had to crawl. Soon the signal was very loud, too loud; we were closer than wolves ever allow. As we aimed our flashlight into the thicket, we knew the wolf was within a few metres of us. Then the flashlight beam hit him. He was lying on his side on a patch of bare ground under low spruce limbs, legs spread as if he were running, dead. He had died so recently that his body was still unfrozen and his collar not yet on mortality mode. He had dug out a hollow in the spruce needles, curled up there for a while, then moved a metre where he stretched out for the last time.

  I hoisted his emaciated body across my shoulders and we made our way back. A three-quarter moon illuminated the forest and stars ornamented the sky on this funeral march with the last of the Foys wolves.

  Later autopsy at the University of Guelph showed five broken ribs, one of which had not healed, and a broken leg that had fused crooked from an injury long ago. A stick had lodged between his upper carnassial teeth against the pallet of his mouth. It had been there a long time as shown by the adjustment of his gums. The stick suggested rabies, but results came back negative. Body worn out, he had starved in the midst of plenty.

  We had learned from the Foys Lake pack that a wolf exists at two biological levels: individual and pack — and claim that our observations support those who believe that natural selection operates on them both. There is general agreement that nature selects the best from functional, biological units, defined as living systems that work synchronously and share a common fate. In an individual, cells, genes, tissues, and organs function together, with mutual interdependence. The better fit the individual, the more successful it will be in leaving genes to future generations.

  At another level, however, individual wolves are imbedded in packs where they also function together, with mutual interdependence. The genes of all the individuals form a pool. Pack members work synchronously, displaying cooperation in group hunting; reciprocal altruism in sharing kills made by various pack members; and division of labour in caring for young, in hunting, and possibly in boundary patrolling.

  Individual wolves compete within a pack for dominance with attendant rights to breed and feed. Similarly, packs compete with one another for land and resources. If the pack includes animals that are good at finding and dispatching prey and caring for pups, then as an amalgam of individuals, it will be more fit — be a more successful competitor in land-claim negotiations with other packs, and leave more offspring than other packs with fewer skills.

  Wolf — individual. Wolf pack — supra-organism.

  WINTERS OF DEATH

  THE WOLF evolved primarily as a hunter. Its low reproductive rate offset its low mortality. The survival of only a few young each year was enough to maintain populations. A conservative strategy, it served the wolf well throughout its evolutionary history — until the wolf itself became hunted. After that, over much of its range, the strategy failed.

  Despite similar human persecution, the faster-breeding, eat-almost-anything coyote has managed to persist. Though millions of coyotes have been killed, more may live in North America now than ever before. Coyotes compensate better than wolves for their losses. No complex social structure limits breeding, and they can breed at a younger age than wolves. While wolves compensate too, their ability to do so is more limited. The wolf, hunter-turned-hunted, is biologically set up to be victimized by humans.

  The war on wolves has been well chronicled both by the bounty hunters of old and the writers of today. Chronicled, but except for the famous “last of the loners” such as the “Custer Wolf,” not personalized. Few trappers know anything about the individual wolves they kill. Most acquaintances are brief, made down the barrel of a gun or at the end of a snare wire, ending in death.

  Mary, the student crews, and I see wolf killing differently because, for us, wolves are not just impersonal quarry, but subjects of great interest. Their histories personalized them — where they were likely to be on a star-filled night, where they dug their dens and their pups played, where they liked to hunt and with whom they hunted. The social carnivores and primates, especially, show personality, emotion, variation in behaviour, freedom of choice. To know how these traits have shaped the lives of individual wolves develops empathy, respect, compassion.

  Lace curtains framing the farmhouse window slid aside and a head appeared. A man at his woodpile behind the house stopped chopping. We felt conspicuous out there in the open, standing on a concession road between two farmhouses. We were being watched. Normally we take bearings on wolves from the seclusion of the Algonquin Park forest. But with this fix made on Jack Pine 1 on January 26, 1991, all that changed. The bearing lined up with a dilapidated outhouse, the wolf somewhere in the forest beyond. It seemed incredulous to be tracking Algonquin Park wolves in the farmlands, but we would have been more amazed had we known the new direction our research was about to take.

  The new direction, in retrospect, had been apparent five days earlier when Graham flew a telemetry survey that ended over the southeast side of the park. To get back to the Pembroke airport meant flying beyond the park boundary north of the town of Wilno, then over the village of Round Lake Centre and the cluster of houses at Bonnechere. Out there, farm fields make up about 20 per cent of the landscape scattered among pine plantations and mixed forests. Long ago an ancient Bonnechere River flowing off the Algonquin Highlands deposited delta soils onto the floor of an expanded Round Lake, providing the substratum for marginal farmlands today.

  As he flew over this partly settled land, Graham idly dialled up a few wolves listed as missing and got a shock. He heard the signals of two wolves on mortality mode and another wolf still alive. The live one, Lavieille 5, held a territory in the centre of the park sixty kilometres away. An adult female, she had been missing since summer.

  Until then, we had recorded a few instances of park wolves that had been killed out in what we had labelled “the farmlands.” Their radio-collars had been turned in to the MNR. Graham had talked to the people who had shot, snared, or trapped them, and although he had identified some anti-wolf sentiment, we thought little about it. We had listed those dead wolves as dispersers, young animals looking for land of their own. Even a large park cannot be expected to contain all long-distance dispersers.

  Looking back now, I count six radio-collared wolves that died in the farmlands near Round Lake Centre before Graham’s memorable flight and our outhouse fix. Three of them had been identified by the field crews as yearlings and therefore good candidates for dispersal, but three had been classed as adults.

  In those years, we were aware of the annual deer migration to the Round Lake area twenty kilometres beyond the park, but we did not know its magnitude. In 1990, Lee Swanson had begun her master’s research on the environmental stimuli that triggered this migration. Early each winter, deer previously scattered across the eastern twenty-seven-hundred square kilometres of Algonquin Park migrate up to fifty kilometres to the vicinity of Round Lake. They seek shelter and shallow snow provided by lowland conifers and, to get it, concentrate into approximately two hundred square kilometres of this semi-agricultural landscape. Some deer continue another ten kilometres beyond Round Lake to farmlands near the village of Germanicus, and a small number migrate from the northeast corner of the park to the vicinity of the town of Petawawa. In some winters a few deer stay in lowland pockets inside the park, as Graham’s aerial observations showed.

  Despite the deer migration, wolves in the park still had plenty of moose as prey. Packs stayed mostly on territory, and Graham succeeded in finding almost all the radio-collared wolves on most flights. The idea that wolf packs would abandon their territori
es to follow migratory deer did not occur to us. No other study had reported that.

  So we envisioned Lee’s work as adding to our general knowledge about the large mammal system and did not closely connect the wolf and deer studies until that January day. In my notebook I wrote: “Could wolves other than dispersers be following the deer out of the park, and if so, what are the consequences?” We soon found out.

  February 21, 1991. I answered my telephone at the university to a man who said he knew someone who had shot a radio-collared wolf near Round Lake Centre. If we wanted its carcass, he would get it for us. Mary and I drove up the next day.

  His farm buildings were clustered on the snowy flats southeast of Round Lake, a green pickup parked by a two-storey square house. In the back of the truck lay the dead wolf. A tall man came out, introduced himself, and watched while Mary turned on the receiver and scanned the frequencies. The wolf had a dark face and a bowed hind leg; we knew who she was even before the receiver cycled to her signal — Basin 3 Foys, alpha-female of the Foys pack, the wolf we had come to know so well.

  The man invited us in, and we sat in his kitchen. His father came over from next door and explained that he had poisoned wolves in the past. Before long, the son admitted shooting the wolf himself. When we described in sympathetic terms what we knew of her life, he seemed surprised. He explained that when his friends shot collared wolves, the standard procedure was to smash their collars. Unlike them, however, he was concerned that the wolf was important to somebody’s research. He had been away to university and had come back to take up farming on land next to his father’s.

  We drove with him to his woodlot where he told us that he had heard wolf howls late one afternoon while chopping wood. Grabbing a rifle from his truck, he walked a short distance before encountering the Foys Lake pack. His shot had gone straight through Basin 3 Foys’ heart.

  It had never occurred to him to do anything else, he said. All his friends, everyone around there, would have done the same thing. We walked on and he showed us where deer tracks pummelled the snow in a cedar stand he was cutting for fence posts. No shortage of deer. After he felled a cedar, he told us, deer would be there feeding on the top in only an hour. In a few days everything green on the tree would be eaten.

  By the end of the afternoon, he admitted that wolves had never done either him or his father any harm. Deer were plentiful. Why not live in peace? His mind was more open than many others we would encounter.

  The upshot, though, was that Basin 3 Foys now lay dead and frozen stiff in the back of our truck. We thought about her rendezvous site at the hydro line, and the ten-point buck in the cedars beside McDonald Creek, and her deep howl intertwined with those of her pack on the quiet August evenings. Making her loss even more poignant, the next day we discovered that the pack was still in the same woods, moving slowly away from the scene of their tragedy.

  All that day we trailed them through the shallow snow over hardwood hills into the next concession and beyond. Foys 1,3,4 — the pack was heading back to the park. We stayed far enough behind not to disturb them, yet were close enough to hear the repeated howls of one wolf — long, forlorn notes breaking downward in melancholy intervals. From past experiences we recognized the howl as one we had come to call the “mourning howl.” We have heard it both in the wild and in captivity when a packmate has been injured or killed. Sorrow and grief are not just human emotions, as people who own dogs know.

  The very idea of a park with its purpose of wildlife protection was tarnished, diminished, made hollow by the senseless death of Basin 3 Foys. It should not have happened. But similar deaths kept happening. Travers 1 and Mathews 5 both were shot near Round Lake Centre; Annie Bay 2 disappeared near the town of Wilno; Grand 5 went missing. In day-to-day contacts with local people at gas stations and grocery stores, an unsavoury picture began to emerge. Conservation officer Pat Sloan, not a wolf lover but dedicated to upholding the game laws, recounted the story of periodic wolf roundups. Snowmobiles were used to drive wolves to concession roads where hunters lined up to shoot them. We learned the names of locally famous wolf killers such as Max Lepinski, reputed to have killed more wolves than anyone in the district. He baited them with carcasses just outside his kitchen window and shot from there. As proof, he turned in the radio-collar of Travers 1, a big adult male killed that way on March 13, 1991. Travers 1 had been the second wolf radio-collared in our study back in 1987, but we had lost track of him in 1989 after his collar had gone dead.

  By the end of March 1991, 61 per cent of the twenty radio-collared wolves that were alive the previous summer had died, a few to rabies, others to humans, maybe more that we didn’t know about with smashed collars. Whenever a biologist has more than 10 per cent of a population marked, as we did, it is fair to conclude that the sample represents the entire population. We interpreted our 61 per cent as indicating a loss of approximately fifty to sixty wolves from the eastern half of Algonquin Park, at least half killed by humans.

  That winter of death, in contrast to previous winters, most of the packs moved back and forth between their territories and the farmlands. Something different from the earlier years was happening to precipitate so much wolf migration, and we began to reconsider a possible connection with the migratory deer.

  According to local people, deer had migrated to the vicinity of Round Lake for years although they used to stay closer to the park where logging was the heaviest. In the late 1960s when the density of deer in the park was close to ten times its 1990 level, the drainage area for deer migrating to Round Lake was much smaller. Most deer travelled instead to other heavily used wintering areas throughout the park. The park’s first master plan drawn up in 1975 identified ten such areas. Doug Pimlott calculated that back then 90 per cent of the diet of park wolves in winter was deer.

  The deer population collapsed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Winters of heavy snowfall, lack of suitable conifer cover, and less early successional forests took their toll. To bolster the remnant herd, the MNR began distributing hay to landowners in the Round Lake area. Both deer and local people developed traditions difficult to break.

  The years just before our study were ones of slow, steady deer recovery despite one setback in 1983, according to the MNR, when the deer migrated out of the park early during the rifle season. Throughout the 1980s, deer benefited from a decade of low snowfall all across the northeastern portion of their North American range. As our study progressed, we documented their gradual expansion in the park as more of them appeared each summer farther west towards the height of land. We speculated that as their population increased, the area occupied by deer accustomed to migrate to Round Lake would increase as well.

  At some point in this modest deer increase, the wolves apparently began to key in on this migration, possibly when the drainage area reached some threshold size. Or perhaps it occurred when the deer population reached some threshold density, or the migration reached some threshold degree of completeness. Whatever the reason, for the wolves, following the deer more closely than in previous years had disastrous consequences.

  We began field work earlier the next winter, 1991-92, anxious to see if the wolves would follow the deer again. Lee and Graham arranged with the superintendent of tiny Bonnechere Provincial Park to use the gatehouse just off Highway 62 as occasional winter quarters. Mary and I stayed there too, all sleeping on the gatehouse floor.

  On December 5, the nighttime temperature dropped to −26°C, and just like the previous winter, within forty-eight hours the deer came pouring out of the park. With infra-red trail monitors set up on six runways, Lee counted 1,822 deer entering the winter yard within a few days. Snow was only twenty centimetres deep, and the temperature, after the cold spell, hovered near freezing.

  When Mary and I arrived on December 16, no park wolves had travelled down to the Round Lake deer yard, but each of Graham’s flights held surprises: Travers wolves in Mathews territory; Pretty wolves in part of old Foys territory; Jack Pine wo
lves in McDonald Creek territory. As the deer vacated the central part of the park, the wolf packs did too, trespassing on each other’s territories with abandon, even poaching deer along the way.

  On December 17, the Pretty Lake pack of five travelled twenty kilometres off territory and killed a deer on Feely Lake while the resident pair was fifteen kilometres away feeding on its own deer. The following day, cold and sunny, Mary and I drove to within a couple of kilometres of Feely Lake on a one-lane logging road. We announced our presence to approaching logging trucks over our CB radio every half-kilometre, and pulled off quickly into the snowbank if a trucker answered. Because of their limited ability to slow down, we granted them the right of way. Eventually we parked at a ploughed pull-off and hiked from there.

  Out on the ice of Feely Lake, a few scraps of the deer lay in the centre of a converging lattice of wolf tracks. The deer pelt lay among red pines on a nearby point, everted and skinned just as neatly as if done with a knife. Pretty 1’s signal came in distantly to the northwest as the pack headed back to its own land. It had left its territory, made the kill, consumed it, and was heading back home all in twenty-six hours.

  Wolf movements were perplexingly erratic, and we asked ourselves whether the previous winter’s heavy mortality could have fractured their system of land tenure. In late December, the Grand Lake West pack of four came down to the deer yard, then two days later returned to its territory. During much of December both the Jack Pine and Travers packs were split. A pair, or possibly trio, of Travers wolves moved east to the boundary of the park, then northwest almost to the Ottawa River thirty kilometres away, an unusual movement well off territory. Meanwhile, the other Travers trio took an excursion through the territories of three different packs and finally stopped at a dead bull moose frozen on its brisket in starvation position under some red pines.