The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Pimlott, Theberge, and Joslin are also responsible for the most popular howling event of all. In the summer of 1963, Algonquin Park officials asked them if they would hold a campfire talk in which they took visitors out to hear wolf howls. They expected a few dozen campers to show up. Recalls Joslin, “When the time came, it was a shock. There were six hundred people. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were all upset, because they hadn’t been informed, and here was all this traffic on the road. We heard some wolf howls, and you could have heard a pin drop. All this horde of people standing under the stars, silent.” Ever since, wolf howls have been held on occasional Thursday nights in August at Algonquin Provincial Park—only in August because then the wolves are likely to be at rendezvous sites along Highway 60, and only on Thursdays because a weekend howl would flood the park with vehicles. In 1990, sixteen hundred people attended each of two howls. Since 1963, more than sixty-five thousand people have attended. Says Algonquin Park interpretive naturalist Mike Runtz, “In the calmness afterwards, there’s always applause, thunderous applause, from fifteen hundred people. And as the people drive off, they yell, ‘Thank you, Thank you!’ at the howlers.”

  In recent years, wolf howling has become a tourist activity at Algonquin Provincial Park, Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan, Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, and Jasper National Park in Alberta. It is done also at the International Wolf Center, a project fostered by David Mech near Ely, Minnesota.

  Wolf howling sort of creeps up on people. Wolf researchers even start howling at other people as a kind of good-humored gesture of hope. Theberge once howled for the Canadian Minister of the Environment on a busy Toronto streetcorner. Mech had a group of wolf researchers troop into the Minnesota Legislature’s chambers when the legislators were about to vote on appropriation of funds for the International Wolf Center, and called upon the researchers to give a howl. Recalls Theberge, “It was pretty tacky, but we did it. And the legislators howled back.”

  Once we start hearing a nobler voice in the howl of the wolf, we are likely to start arguing for wolves and wilderness. Pimlott and Theberge sought to do just that in Algonquin Provincial Park. Pimlott felt the wolves in the park were unfairly persecuted. His study showed that the deer population was, if anything, alarmingly high—fifteen deer per square mile. In 1966, perhaps finding Pimlott’s views threatening, the Ontario Department of Lands and Forest, which felt it had a responsibility to produce moose and deer for the benefit of hunters, stopped funding the study. Pimlott took a position at the University of Toronto, where he could express his views more freely. He organized the Canadian Nature Federation, the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Wolf Specialist Group. Until his death in 1978, he was one of Canada’s most eloquent and insistent voices for wilderness and wildlife conservation.

  Theberge followed in Pimlott’s footsteps. He says today, “I started as a young person interested in wolves and ended up a person interested in having places to put them.” Theberge has become a leading opponent of wolf-control programs in Canada and Alaska. He sits on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Wolf Specialist Group, and he has tried to get the group to add to its International Wolf Manifesto a provision saying it is unethical to kill wolves simply to find out the effects of predation. “I will oppose killing of wolves on ethical grounds,” says Theberge. His declaration has not been without cost. “A Canadian biologist said to me, ‘You’re a disgrace!’ There are wildlife managers now who won’t even speak to me.”

  Today, he continues the work Pimlott started, studying the wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park. But this project has itself become an enormous challenge. Local residents hunt the deer and moose heavily themselves, and when they see the deer decline, as they do periodically, the hunters are quick to blame the wolves. Many of the older local people do not hear anything redemptive in the voice of the wolf. One day in 1992, after flying to radio-locate wolves, Theberge landed at the Bonnechere, Ontario, airstrip. Two men drove up in a pickup truck and snarled out the window at him, “We don’t like wolves and we don’t like you. We get to hunt deer two weeks a year and the wolves hunt ’em fifty-two.”

  Logging inside the park had, since the 1880s, opened up clearings into which grew stands of poplar, aspen, red maple, dogwood, and raspberry, which increased the deer population. But when the United States imposed tariffs on Canadian softwoods in the 1970s, logging subsided, and deer habitat in the park declined. In winters, the deer moved increasingly into wintering yards of cedar and red osier dogwood near the communities outside the park. The year 1992 was a poor one for acorns in the park, and the park’s deer massed in wintering yards in nearby townships. Almost all the wolves in the park followed the deer out. Local hunters, seeing more wolf-killed deer in the yards, concluded that wolves were laying waste to the deer. Said Ralph Bice, a lifelong trapper and a guide in the park, “Nobody’s been to the woods like I have but admires wolves. But they need to be controlled.” The mayor of Round Lake said she feared her children would be attacked by wolves.

  The winter of 1992–93 proved to be a severe test for the wolves of Algonquin Park. Local residents declared they had a plague of wolves and set out snares. They gathered thirty snowmobiles and staged a wolf drive. Over the winter, 55 percent of Theberge’s radio-collared wolves died. Says Theberge, “We were radio-tracking to people’s houses and knocking on the doors and asking for our collars back.” Theberge followed the signals of radio collars into people’s yards and found his wolves dead and skinned. The carnage was great. One pack of twelve was reduced to two females. A pack of eight was reduced to a single female. “This is an obscene level of killing,” said Theberge. With help from the World Wildlife Fund, Canada, he got the Provincial Ministry of Parks to establish a ban on snaring wolves in three townships outside the park—which made many of the local people even angrier.

  One winter afternoon, John and Mary Theberge went to retrieve the carcasses of several wolves a man had killed near Round Lake. While they were sitting at the kitchen table talking to the man and his wife, wolves started to howl outside. Theberge would be the first to admit that he doesn’t know what the howls really mean, but what he hears in the voice of the wolf makes him fight for the survival of the creature. Almost reflexively, he went outside to listen.

  The wolf hunter and his wife remained at the kitchen table. She shivered and told Mary, “Oh, I hate that sound. You just can’t go outside the house!”

  5

  LEADER OF THE PACK

  The North Central Forest Experiment Station field laboratory is an old ranger station on the Kawishiwi River in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest. It is a log cabin with a big living room in front of a wide stone fireplace, a small kitchen, a couple of bedrooms, and a screened-in sleeping porch, set in a forest of balsam fir and Norway pine.

  Inside, David Mech is on the telephone with someone who says there is a freshly wolf-killed deer in the snow outside Ladd Williams’ outhouse. Mech has been following a pair of wolves in the neighborhood and is glad to have news of them and a leg bone from the carcass with which to judge the health of the victim. He hangs up and addresses himself to the morning’s main task, which is to find Wolf 171, a young female wearing an expensive, high-tech radio collar. It is time to run some blood tests on the animal and to retrieve the information stored in the radio collar’s small computer.

  Wolf 171 is nine months old and already traveling alone. Mech has been interested in what determines whether a wolf stays for life with a pack or becomes a disperser, an animal that drops out of the pack at a young age and wanders. Dispersing wolves may travel enormous distances. A female wolf left Mech’s Minnesota study area and was shot by a farmer in Saskatchewan, five hundred miles away. A wolf from northeastern Alaska went almost to the west coast, a distance of 450 miles. A wolf from Alaska’s Nelchina Basin turned up in the eastern part of the Brooks Range, more than four hundred miles awa
y. In Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, Rolf Peterson found that males tended to disperse more than females. Most of the dispersers that travel more than two hundred miles seem to be males.

  It is a risky business for the dispersers. They may starve without the shared hunting experience and concentrated killing power of the pack, or be attacked, injured, or even killed by other wolves as they wander. Launched suddenly onto unfamiliar territories, they are immensely more vulnerable to hunters.

  Young and Goldman held that a pack was a pair of wolves, their pups, and their offspring from previous years. Murie believed the two packs he studied in Alaska were such families. But dispersers show that wolf society is more complex. Some dispersers find mates on unclaimed territories and start their own packs; others join existing packs. Mech and Diane Boyd have seen wolves successfully move from one pack to another. Tom Meier, of the National Park Service, reports that, in 1992, 35 percent of the radio-collared wolves in Mech’s Alaska study area were living in a pack other than the one they had been born into. Meier more often saw unrelated wolves adopted by other packs than he saw dispersers form new packs. Adults may change packs more than once in life. Possibly neighboring wolf packs have familiar associations, and some wolves find friendships back and forth across territorial lines.

  Dispersal has obvious benefits to the species—it is a way of mixing genes in the wolf population, of reducing inbreeding and sharing traits over broad geographic ranges. If packs kept unrelated wolves from joining them, wolves would ultimately be breeding only with their own family members. Inbreeding leads to the loss of such genetically determined traits as immunity to disease, and also to reduced fertility: sperm in inbred animals typically shows much higher rates of deformity and lower rates of motility.

  If a disperser is to share its genes, however, it must become the dominant wolf in a pack. And because of this, dispersers highlight the conflicts in wolf society between community and individuality. Wolves are social beings, enjoying warm, companionable, and highly emotional lives within the pack. But wolves are also individuals, occupying different roles in a pack and competing, sometimes violently, for social standing and the right to pass on their genes. It is in a wolf’s interest to accommodate and coordinate with other wolves, yet also to contend with the same wolves. This dual nature draws the interest of humans almost as powerfully as the act of killing, because it mirrors our own contending social natures. Humans and wolves both evolved as group hunters. In consequence, they have surprisingly similar social lives: Both have dominance hierarchies; both care deeply for their young and their families and can display precise and exacting coordination in complex tasks; both take pleasure in companionship, children, touch, song, smiles, and play. Yet both can be aggressive and violent. Like wolves, we are sometimes altruistic and cooperative, sometimes ruthless and domineering.

  Since a dispersing wolf may either form a new pack or join an existing one, it is not clear whether a disperser is a leader or the loser in some lupine social contest. Understanding what makes a wolf disperse may help us understand what makes one wolf a leader and another wolf a clown. Is the best-adapted wolf the swiftest and strongest, the most aggressive, the most perceptive, the most convivial, or the most caring?

  What makes such questions especially difficult is that, again, we ask the same questions of ourselves. What is the core of our natures? If we are like wolves, are we cooperative and nurturing, or are we individualistic and competitive? Do we live for ourselves, or for the pack? If we do a little of both, how do we balance one against the other?

  Mech has just arrived at the field laboratory after spending two weeks of working at his office in St. Paul. Mike Nelson, the on-site director of the research program, brings him up to date on recent wolf sightings and tells him that bad weather has grounded the planes that usually go up to locate radio-collared wolves. Joel Norton and Eric Seabloom, two volunteer technicians who do the tracking and radio-collaring in the field, are putting on extra pairs of socks and sweaters, readying themselves for a day in the snow. Volunteers like Norton and Seabloom are the dispersers of wildlife management, recent graduates who, in order to catch on in the profession, must find a project like this to give their time to, sometimes for years, before they go on to graduate school. The field is full of aspirants, but the funding is always uncertain, so they work for experience and hope to win the sponsorship of an established wildlife biologist.

  Mech moves from one room to another, reading letters and telephone messages, catching up on the current location of wolves and radio-collared deer in the study area. He looks quietly at things, but he looks long and carefully. “Curiosity runs in my family,” Mech says. His father grew up on a farm and had a sixth-grade education, but he was eminently curious. “He was a methodical and expert fisherman,” says Mech. Heart surgeons, psychiatrists, business executives would ask to go fishing with him. “He’d take them out to pick their brains. He’d show ’em how to fish, and then he’d talk their ears off, asking them questions.”

  Even as a boy, Mech indulged his curiosity by trapping. “As a fourteen-year-old fur trapper, putting scent posts up to catch foxes, I was really curious about why is that fox interested in this urine? What does that mean to the life of the fox?” Today, when life gets too full of snarl and shrillness, Mech goes off to trap mink.

  The habit, he believes, reflects the predatory nature of humankind. He talks of “my long predatory instincts,” and adds, “I don’t take any pleasure in hurting anything, but I also don’t think we as humans shouldn’t kill things. Because we, like wolves, are predators.”

  We have long compared ourselves to wolves. Much of the comparison has focused on the wolf’s social nature. Jack London’s fictional sled dogs harked back to their wolf ancestry, and when one’s true nature asserted itself, the “dominant primordial beast” emerged. Buck, the lead dog in London’s Call of the Wild, killed his way to dominance and then used his leadership to instill efficiency in the dog team. In the same vein, Adolf Hitler, whose first name comes from a Teutonic word for “fortunate wolf,” referred to himself as “a wolf … destined to burst in upon the herd of seducers of the people,” and often used the pseudonym “Wolf.” As Führer, he was called by his admirers “Uncle Wolf,” and the implication of the name was that his dominance provided an efficient and companionable order. It is a long way from such mythical views of wolves to the scientific understanding Mech hopes to achieve.

  At the heart of our understanding of wolf society is the idea of the alpha wolf. In the 1930s, Norwegian biologist Thorlief Schjelderub-Ebbe developed the concept of a pecking order while studying domestic fowl. He observed that each bird in a flock tended to peck down on a bird of lesser status. By the 1940s, the concept of a dominance hierarchy, an ordering of status from most dominant to most submissive, was being applied to other species. In the 1930s and 1940s, Rudolph Schenkel studied captive wolves at the Basel Zoo. He called the highest-ranking male and female “alphas.” In theory, wolves have such dominance orders because, though they must hunt in groups, there is such a risk of overrunning the food supply that only one pair in the pack may breed. In general, among wolves, only the alphas breed, whereas, among other species, dominance hierarchies don’t reflect breeding patterns. A female chimpanzee, for example, will mate with a succession of males, one right after another, without regard for rank. Humans, too, breed regardless of status, and in some societies producing a lot of children is the chief means of gaining standing. Even among wolves, it is not always the alphas who reproduce. Mech observed that the breeding female in an Ellesmere Island pack was a subordinate female. And in one of Murie’s Mount McKinley packs, the dominant male was not the breeding male. Such matings pose the possibility that dominance is not just an expression of the sharpest bite or the strongest will.

  Dominant wolves have prerogatives. Any wolf in possession of food is likely to have a zone of one to two feet around it that no other wolf will enter. But dominant wolves have wider zones of person
al space. Mech observed that, after the Ellesmere pack fed on a musk ox, the alpha pair took possession of the carcass. At the kill of a musk-ox calf, he saw a subordinate male propel itself toward the dominant male, with ears and lips back and body low in emphatic submission. The subordinate male crouched below the alpha and pawed at his face, like a puppy. The dominant male snapped at the subordinate and it fell to the ground. Mech wondered whether the gesture expressed a kind of homage.

  Dominant wolves may have powers we do not clearly perceive. Eric Zimen studied a captive pack in Germany in which two females bore pups several years in succession, but the pups of the subordinate female always died. Though he could not say conclusively why the pups died, he had the impression that the subordinate mother and her young were heavily stressed, perhaps by psychological pressure from the alpha female. Zimen suggested that the alpha female kept subordinate females from coming into breeding condition by some similar psychological means. He found that all of his subordinate females had vaginal bleeding at estrus. They ovulated and had the same hormone levels as the alpha female, and some even produced milk, but they did not become pregnant. Klinghammer found that, with the alpha female present, subordinate wolves were in estrus only twenty to thirty days; if he removed the alpha, the subordinates’ estrus periods lasted forty-seven to sixty-five days. Similarly, Mech found that, whereas wolves normally don’t breed until their second year, pups reared apart from adult wolves would come into season and even breed at nine to ten months of age.