Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  When we graphed changes in wolf numbers over the years, they showed no relation to changes in deer numbers. This may be due to differences in the percentages of other prey species taken. But whatever the reason, clearly something besides predation was influencing deer numbers.

  Examining our data further, we discovered that the earlier the deer migrated, the lower their numbers would be the following summer. We would see fewer deer per kilometre driven in the park. Having ruled out malnutrition, that left only hunting by humans, and there was an obvious relationship. When the deer migrated early they were subjected to both a rifle season followed by an archery season that extended right up to a few days before Christmas. Both rifle hunters and archers are plentiful. Their pickup trucks are parked everywhere, especially close to the park. Platforms are built in trees along all the major runways, and hay is spread below or commercial buck scent hung nearby. The earlier the deer migrated, the more were killed.

  We thought our information would interest the MNR, particularly because by 1997 deer and hunting success had declined enough to alarm hunters and cause the MNR to establish a citizen’s advisory committee in the Round Lake area. Instead, from both the Pembroke and Algonquin Park district offices, the response was: That’s good because we have been trying to reduce the size of the deer population for years.

  We were amazed. Deliberately reduce the size of the Algonquin Park deer population? All this time we had been trying to figure out what was preventing a further increase in deer — measuring annual browse and the condition of carcasses and factors causing migration and spacing in the yard.

  MNR biologist Norm Quinn explained that the food supply was inadequate for the number of deer using the Round Lake yard, a perception he shared with some other managers. However, no recent data supported that belief. Almost forty years previously, in the winter of 1958-59, there had been a record snowfall and Doug Pimlott had found deer starving in significant numbers, but nothing similar has been recorded since then. And our data showed that deer were not suffering from any nutritional stress.

  It was a mistake in deer management, easy to make given the MNR’s lack of data, but more difficult to understand considering ours. Rarely had the MNR run a deer-checking station in the area to provide an estimate of the number killed by humans. The ministry had no recent estimate of population numbers, and we had not been consulted. The major control on deer numbers had been a far too generous human hunt. Local managers recognized it, and so did the deer committee, so that in 1997-98 the hunting quota was dropped on their advice from six hundred antler-less deer (females and fawns) to one hundred, plus as many bucks as there were licences. Wolf control, of course, was recommended too — it always is. Given the winter ban, the committee proposed incentives to encourage wolf killing before and after. We can only hope the MNR will not act on that one.

  Reflecting on our initial questions, the uniqueness of the migratory wolf population following and concentrating with the deer is the result of an amalgam of conditions. These include: the absence of fully territorial wolves in the deer yard resulting in poorly defended or undefended land; the extensiveness of the deer migration across the territories of many packs; the concentration of deer not into several small yards, as once occurred, but into one very central one; and the possible influence of past artificial feeding compounded by deer tradition.

  In the deer yard, the migratory wolves, with plenty of food and no land to defend, use simple avoidance instead of territoriality and aggression as a spacing mechanism. Individual deer, intent on finding good shelter and food, reduce the risk of being killed by yarding, but in doing so, expose the population to greater predation. More significant to changes in numbers is the price both deer and wolves pay to humans.

  This seems like a maladaptive system. While individual deer and wolves may be maximizing their fitness by migrating, the populations of both species are smaller as a result. By leaving the park, both populations are drawn down by human killing, and predation rates may be greater too.

  This conundrum can be interpreted in more than one way. It may be one among other examples of a conflict between individual and population welfare. Dominant territory holders of some species, such as ptarmigan, stake large blocks of land and expel others, thereby looking after themselves but causing the population to decline.

  Or maybe the conundrum is a human artifact of deer feeding, deer and wolf killing, half-protected park populations, and slow evolutionary adjustment.

  Maybe the system has gone through a “phase shift” from what it was like in Doug Pimlott’s days to arrive at a different set of static conditions from which it cannot easily escape. With disproportionately heavy predation on the few deer that winter in the park, deer may be stalemated into migration at whatever cost.

  What will happen next? As always with ecosystem studies, it is impossible to know. But ecosystems are never static for long; some environmental condition will change. Possibly with fewer deer killed by humans, the deer population will rise, leaving larger pockets of deer in the park that live to reproduce. If these deer are at a selective advantage over migrant deer, the wholesale deer migration will end. But it is just as likely that deer recovery will take the long time necessary for the regeneration of better winter cover, if, indeed, the logged-over hemlock and pine stands can recover and do not revert permanently to hardwoods.

  Or, with less canid killing in the Round Lake area, true wolf packs may become established that defend the land and repel migrant wolves. Or fur prices may escalate, or climates continue to warm, or …

  The beauty of natural systems lies buried deep in their adaptive potential, their hidden storehouse of possibilities that hide the future.

  NEW ADAPTATIONS, NEW SPECIES

  ALL SPECIES swirl into the present out of a long and turbulent past, leaving evidence in their wake of their evolutionary odyssey. Like the tail of a comet, the evidence becomes less distinct with the passage of time. Only scattered bones in tar pits and sedimentary deposits tell us that they lived.

  Bones in the southern United States bear witness that about one million years ago a wolf or its immediate ancestor, Canis edwardii, first appeared. It diverged either from the coyote or a common ancestor of both wolves and coyotes, Canis lepophagus. Later, wolf and coyote were joined by the larger and more robust dire wolf of possible but unconfirmed South American origin. They formed a canid trio that hunted the smallest to the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene Epoch.

  They were only the newest model of a very old and successful dog-like design. Wolf-sized animals called “dog-faced cynodonts” first appeared in the fossil record in early Mesozoic times more than 200 million years ago. Cynodonts were part of a megadynasty of “protomammals” that lived before the dinosaurs. They handed on the mainstream evolutionary torch to the precursors of the dinosaurs named Thecodonts, which also included wolf-like predators. Cynodonts then hunkered down as small forms to survive the age of dinosaurs and re-emerge as our own mammalian ancestors.

  Over the last 65 million years, the Age of Mammals, many wolf-like species have come and gone: Dissacus, a member of an extinct mammalian order that lived 40 million years ago, with amazingly wolf-like teeth but sporting hooves; Miacines, early members of the familiar Order Carnivora that differentiated 35 million years ago into dog-like animals of direct wolf-coyote lineage; Mesocyon, with shearing carnassial teeth and a massive skull that lived and died between about 25 and 20 million years ago; Tomarctus, known from fossil beds in Oregon and Nebraska, dating from the Miocene between 25 and 10 million years ago, that is considered to be in the direct wolf-coyote line by some biologists, despite its hyaena-like form. There were cat-like dogs, hyaena-like dogs, bearlike dogs; they all had their day and became extinct before anybody could radio-collar them. Last to bow out, about ten thousand years ago, was the dire wolf. Only the wolf and coyote are left.

  Forged in a Pleistocene world of competition and climate change, wolves and coyotes were not well adapt
ed to get along with modern man. Nonetheless, despite human pressure, the coyote has managed to succeed, although millions have been killed over the years by predator control in the United States. Under the same pressure, the wolf succumbed over much of its former wide range.

  There are reasons for this difference in persistence, including the coyote’s earlier breeding age and the lack of social restriction on the number of breeding females. Wolf and coyote — physically, physiologically, behaviourally, and ecologically — are different species. But not completely.

  The first time Mary and I saw the Vireo wolf, he was just a pile of fur partially hidden under October leaves. We had tracked him and heard his howl but never seen him. His completely bare skull, the canine teeth worn to stubs, lay on its side at the foot of a majestic old hemlock. By scraping away the leaves we exposed one mandible, a scapula, both femurs, one humerus. His spinal column was intact to the last caudal vertebra, all but the broad atlas, once the support for his large head. Some small animal, maybe a pine marten, had dragged it a few metres away, then abandoned it. His radio-collar lay on top of his fur, broadcasting its rapid, high-pitched signal to an unlistening and uncaring world, except for us.

  He had chosen to die alone in the heart of his territory at the foot of a big hemlock that towered above the hardwoods like a monument. His identity would become etched into its needles as the tree took up his atoms. Five metres away, an iron-stained creek plunged over mossy boulders on its way down through the trees. Its water must have played a requiem, easing the dying wolf’s last mortal minutes. Like other wolves, he had died near an active beaver pond. Had the leaves been off the hardwoods, he would have glimpsed the broad sweep of lowland cradling Wilkins and Robitaille lakes to the south — the land that had supported his life, supplied all his needs, rung to his howls, took the impressions of his big feet across its snow-covered lakes.

  His had not been a typical life, at least not in his later years when we had come to know him. He had given us a thick file of data, enough that three months earlier we had even predicted his death. His behaviour had become wolfishly unacceptable. Sure enough, in mid-October while flying over his territory, John Pisapio heard his signal on mortality mode.

  The Vireo wolf had chosen a remote place to die. We booked a float plane, but low cloud and wind forced us to cancel. Two weeks later we aborted a trip from Waterloo to get him because of high winds and rain. The following week we tried again, driving logging roads to within five kilometres of John’s mark on the map. We portaged canoes down a steep trail to Vireo Lake and set out — John and his brother in one, Mary, Michelle, and I in the other.

  The previous week’s snow had melted, but a scattering of large flakes raced us down the lake. Lacy hemlock crowns along the shore bent in the wind, and the ranks of hardwoods swayed on the hills. A flock of common mergansers, daring winter, lifted off the water ahead, and the occasional wind-tossed raven hurtled by. Otherwise, Vireo Lake was stripped of life, ready for winter.

  At the end of the lake we hauled up our canoes, took out the map, and plotted a bearing to the carcass about one and two-thirds kilometres away. The wolf’s signal came in from a hilltop when we were halfway there. At his carcass we examined the scene of death, picked up the collar to be refurbished, and packed up his remains into a plastic bag. So ended the record of an unusual wolf life.

  According to the capture report filed by Joy Cook on June 1, 1993, almost two and a half years previously, he was an adult male weighing thirty-six kilograms (eighty pounds). She named him Jocko 6, believing him to be a member of the Jocko Lake pack, because the capture site fell three kilometres inside that pack’s southern boundary.

  Throughout the summer he was located only five times, all but the last fix in the same general area, but always the two radio-collared Jocko Lake wolves were off to the north. His last fix of the summer fell south of the Bonnechere River, where the Jocko Lake pack never goes. So even before that first winter we suspected he was not really a Jocko Lake wolf.

  Not until a blustery January night did Mary and I first make contact with him. Earlier that day, Joy had picked up his signal from the air over the Round Lake deer yard. Having left the park only three days earlier, he may have been following the last of the migrating deer.

  Five kilometres north of him, the Jocko Lake pack was feeding on a deer out on the ice on Beaverdam Lake. That evening when Mary and I went out to monitor, the Jocko Lake wolves had gone, but to our surprise Jocko 6 (the Vireo wolf) was on the kill. He must have bided his time, waiting in the trees for the pack to depart. For a cross-bearing, we drove to the far shore and, with our headlights off, slowly approached to within 250 metres. We could picture him out there in the dark, wind ruffling the fur along his back as he tugged at the remains of the deer.

  Repeatedly our evidence showed that he was a lone wolf. A few days after the Beaverdam Lake incident, we tracked him to a single bedding site in a snowy marsh beside the Bonnechere River. He ran off just before we got there, a disappointment to Wayne Cunningham, a photographer from the Ottawa Citizen who accompanied us. Then another time we put him off a sunny knoll in a south-facing aspen stand where he had been curled up in the snow, basking in microclimate warmth.

  He seemed to have an aptitude for finding other packs’ kills, which may have been crucial to his survival as a lone wolf. Only four days after taking advantage of the Jocko Lake pack’s kill, he was inseparable from the air from a Jack Pine wolf at another deer carcass. At least twice that winter, however, he appeared to have made his own kills. Although old, he was a big, strong wolf.

  In the comments section of the data file that winter are repeated remarks about his extensive travels. Four times he returned to the park, often to the vicinity of Robitaille Lake twenty to twenty-five kilometres west of the deer yard. He did not follow a straight line in these travels, on one occasion roaming deep into the Basin Depot pack’s territory ten kilometres to the north. Once he stayed in the park only two days before returning to the deer yard. After February 6, however, he remained out of the park, roaming extensively throughout the Round Lake area until early March. Then, one week before he returned to the park for the summer, Joy saw him from the air with another wolf. Had he found a mate down in the singles bar?

  Not until the last day of July 1994 did we learn the answer. The Vireo wolf spent that early summer in the same remote area of the park where he had made his winter excursions, defining his territory to include Robitaille, Wilkins, and Vireo lakes. He was around Vireo Lake often enough that we added a new pack name to his identity, and he became Jocko 6 Vireo or, more succinctly, the Vireo wolf. He stayed south far enough to avoid trespassing on the Jocko Lake pack’s land as he had the previous summer. Finally we confirmed that he and his mate had at least two pups in a marshy rendezvous site. They stayed there, howling for us on occasion, until mid-August, the end of the summer records.

  Sometime between December 15 and 28, 1994, during the height of the deer migration, the Vireo wolf again travelled out to the farmlands around Round Lake. Often that winter we confirmed the existence of a pack of four. The big male was always one of them. Ninety per cent of their fixes fell within a small area covering no more than four square kilometres. Deer were plentiful there, but no more so than throughout much of the deer yard as shown by our track transects. Strangely, the pack’s territory was more coyote-sized than wolf-sized.

  Also strange was that this winter, the Vireo wolf, now with his new pack, stayed in the farmlands without any return trips to the park. His was the only pack that did. A few pockets of deer remained in the park that winter, enticing a few packs to stay on territory all winter and others to travel back and forth at least once.

  The land chosen by the four wolves consisted of some pine-poplar hills strung together by marshes and a large cedar swamp. With all its variety, it was good wolf and deer habitat, but it posed a problem for us. Most of it was private property. The person who owned a central portion of it had little use f
or wolves, or for us.

  Our first encounter with him was along a snowy, one-lane concession road that ended about two kilometres from his farmhouse. One January day, accompanied by a film crew from TVO (Television Ontario), we tracked the Vireo wolf and his pack along the road to an icy overflow where they had cut into the bush. The land on that side of the road was not posted, so we followed their tracks along a creek to an alder tangle where the wolves crossed on thin ice. Normally we would have jumped the creek, but the cameraman and soundman were attached by a two-metre-long cable. To make it across, they would have had to jump in unison. Both men weighed well over two hundred pounds and carried expensive equipment that added even more. We returned to the main road.

  The landowner had seen our tracks and yelled at us out his truck window to stay off his land. Our attempts to explain that it was not posted seemed to anger him more.

  Our second meeting a few days later did little to enhance our reputation. We had found a road-killed deer and were sure the Vireo wolf, always nearby, would find it too. That was the break the TV crew wanted. To improve their chances, producer Loren Miller phoned the Petawawa Military Base not far from Pembroke and asked for some tank camouflage. The next morning, with the camouflage draped over our truck, we proceeded slowly along the concession road towards the dead deer. Through the tiny holes across the windshield, suddenly on the narrow road ahead, we saw the same man’s truck. He stopped dead, probably thinking he was caught in a military manoeuvre. We reached him and Loren got out and tried to explain. When he realized that no tanks were about to appear and he was not in danger, he gave her the same curt warning to stay off his land.