Rank is often reflected in personality. Dominant wolves are confident, sober, outgoing, and assured. Low-ranking wolves are nervous, shy, and sometimes withdrawn. If a dominant wolf loses its rank, its personality may change. Zimen’s captive subdominants were friendly with strange wolves and even sought them out, something they could only do when away from the dominant members of the pack. One of Zimen’s captives would get out and go to the village, where it played with dogs and children. But when it became alpha male, it ceased to do that, and attacked people and strange dogs through the fence. It even attacked Zimen. Once it lost its dominant status, it reverted to its old congenial personality.
In practice, the idea of the alpha has been stretched to mean “leader.” The alpha in a school of fish is whichever fish happens to be swimming in front. When the school turns, a different fish may be the alpha. With wolves, it is often presumed that the alpha directs hunting and the movement of the pack. Some observers believe that the alpha keeps the pack together as a society; but whether the alpha does so by being aggressively intolerant of disorder or by fostering a sense of companionability is not known.
People inevitably say of Mech that he is the “alpha” of wolf researchers. Indeed, he is the researcher with the broadest and longest experience watching wolves in the field and arguing for them in committees, in state legislatures, and in the halls of the U.S. Congress. When reporters want to know about wolves, they call Mech—and they call often, for wolves are an enduring source of controversy. Mech’s efforts to bring what he has learned about wolves into the discussion of what we should do about them has kept him at the center of that controversy for decades. Minnesota had a bounty on wolves until 1965. Mech testified in the legislature against continuing the bounty, arguing that only wolves known to have attacked livestock ought to be killed. When the legislature did not reauthorize the bounty, farmers and hunters alike were outraged. Though the wolf was declared an endangered species by the federal government in 1967, legal protections didn’t start until 1974. Even then the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources continued to trap and kill wolves, and did so until the federal government warned that it was violating the Endangered Species Act. Minnesota has never liked having the federal government preempt its control over a species, and today still wishes to see the wolf delisted and a sport-hunting season opened on it. In 1978, the federal government downgraded Minnesota’s wolves from endangered to threatened, to try to reduce conflict. But in 1983 and 1984, when the state tried to allow the sport hunting of wolves, conservationists sued and barred the hunt. There is still a lot of anger over wolves in Minnesota, and Mech, who has repeatedly come to their defense, has borne a lot of the anger.
He takes it from both sides. Defenders of wolves also criticize him for his willingness to permit wolves that prey on livestock to be killed. “In a pluralistic world,” he says, “I believe we have to manage most of our wildlife. We can’t have bison running through wheat-fields. We have to manage bison when they’re in areas where they cause damage. And we have to manage wolves.”
He sees that the constituency for wildlife has changed. “Since Rachel Carson and Earth Day,” says Mech, “there’s a whole new breed of people who’ve become interested in wildlife, maybe more from reading or television. Many of these folks didn’t grow up hunting and fishing and trapping. A lot of these folks turn more to animal welfare and animal rights and wildlife rehabilitation, which from a biological attitude makes very little sense. They think that every wild animal out there is like a pet. It’s a very emotional approach to life, and it leads to such absurdities as two people independently asking me why the government doesn’t go out and round up all the wild wolves in Minnesota and give them physical exams and euthanize the ones that aren’t fit and feed the wolves so they won’t have to go through the gruesome thing of killing. The people who get interested in that phenomenon are very important to conservation, but, alas, it’s for the wrong reason. We have people worrying about every individual muskrat while people are out there draining the marsh. If we can save the marsh, we can have muskrats forever.”
It is in part because Mech has stood between these conflicting forces that he is recognized by nonscientists as the leading authority on wolves. But if he is a leader, he does not—at first glance—seem very wolflike about it. He is not aggressive, and it is hardly in his nature to speak ill of someone else. Careful with his words, he is apt, when speculating about why wolves do something, to use two or three qualifiers in a sentence, to say “maybe” or “almost,” or to apologize for suggesting a mere analogy. Perhaps this is all a reflection of his watchfulness: he does not speak for what he does not know. And when he is in a room full of biologists, he is likely to seek consensus. He chairs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Wolf Specialist Group, which advises the IUCN and comes up with action plans for wolf conservation all over the world. “Most governments will listen to us,” he says. But the meetings of the group are strewn with controversy. Should the group oppose the use of poison? Should it condone aerial gunning of wolves as a method of research? If Italy’s last three hundred wolves prove to have interbred with dogs, should the group support their protection on ecological grounds? Such questions may be argued heatedly. Mech is apt to end the discussion before it gets too contentious, trying to save tempers and working relationships until the issue develops a semblance of civility. Says Mech, “We try to work by consensus. I think it’s a better way to go if you can do it. Why embroil yourself in controversy if you don’t have to?”
As he says this, it is hard not to think about what some people say about alpha wolves being not the meanest and most aggressive, but the ones that are best able to bring harmony to the pack.
• • •
Mech is currently conducting research in Alaska’s Denali National Park, on remote Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, and in the Superior National Forest of northern Minnesota. He delegates much of the Alaska and Minnesota work to graduate assistants who stay in the field, but prefers to do the Ellesmere Island work himself, because Ellesmere is open terrain, and in midsummer the sun does not set, and he can watch the wolves twenty-four hours a day. Since 1966, however, he has devoted the bulk of his time to research in the Superior National Forest.
The Minnesota study is wide-ranging. The big question has always been what effects the wolves have on the white-tailed deer population. Wolf trapping goes on from June to October, deer trapping from January to April, with radio-tracking all year round. An extremely diverse collection of scientific publications have come out of the twenty-six years of study, from papers on scent-marking and papers on howling to papers on home-range size. Mech is constantly coming up with ideas for scientific articles he feels he should write. “I know far more about wolves than I’ve ever published,” he says. “The major work from this project has yet to be written.” He writes much of his research by dictating into a miniature tape recorder during the five-hour drive between the lab and his office in St. Paul. He is working on a book on predation that will explain what he has learned about wolf-prey systems.
One of the things Mech is interested in is what makes some wolves disperse. “What I’m trying to get at is, why do some subordinate wolves stay with the pack for years and years, and others take off? What is the triggering mechanism that makes them go? Are they kicked out, or do they go on their own?” And that is why we are about to go out to find and capture Wolf 171.
We put on three pairs of socks and thickly insulated snow boots. Mech pulls a Gore-Tex shell over his fleece pants and I zip up a goose-down parka. We get into his Fish and Wildlife Service Chevy Corsica, and he follows Norton and Seabloom, who are driving a pickup truck and hauling a trailer carrying two snowmobiles. The sky is low. It is ten degrees out, and snowing. Mech drives forty miles an hour over the snow-paved roads of the forest, steady as a rock at the wheel.
As he drives, Mech mentions that, in thirty-five years of study, except for Ellesmere Island, he h
as had only fifteen encounters with wolves without the aid of radio collars or airplanes. “All were fairly brief,” he says, most of them windshield sightings as he drove along a forest road. One wolf crossed a highway in front of him in Alaska, and he almost hit it. He points out a spot on this road where he saw a pack cross in front of him. He recounts another in Ontario, and others in Minnesota. He remembers every one. So rare were the encounters, he says, that “each one was memorable. Each one was an event. If one ran out in the road in front of us right now, it would be extremely exciting.”
The point is, says Mech, “it’s difficult to find these animals from the ground.” So you use either airplanes or radio collars, and preferably you use both. The National Park Service forbade the use of radio collars on Isle Royale because visitors would object to scientists’ meddling with the lives of wild wolves in a national park. But in Minnesota, the United States Forest Service had no such objection. Today, radio collars allow Mech to follow the movements of individual packs and to find and retrieve their kills. He can also collar deer to get a better idea of how many of them fall prey to wolves. “Primarily, everything we’ve done since 1968 is based on radio-tracking,” he says. “We’ve radioed five hundred wolves in this area. One wolf we followed for eleven years and three months.”
The first collars were simple radio transmitters beeping out an unvarying ping-ping-ping, twenty-four hours a day, an electronic case of hiccups that kept up until the batteries died. They allowed researchers to plot the location of wolves on maps and to find kills and dens. To allow researchers to follow individual wolves a long time, the batteries had to be replaced, and to do that, the animals had to step into traps. Many wolves would not do that twice in a lifetime.
“Twenty years ago,” Mech says, “I had the idea to make a collar through which you could drug an animal. For ten years, I just thought about it. Then I put a student on it.” The 3M Company hired the graduate student and put close to $1 million into development of the collar. After five years of work, they came up with a collar that would dart a wolf in the field. The collars must be handmade, and they cost about $1,750 apiece, but they can do an enormous range of things.
The collar has both a standard transmitter, to emit beeps, and a receiver, to receive commands from the researchers. It also has a computer, so it can interpret the commands. The researchers can turn it on and off. When it is on, a mercury switch on the collar senses tilts of more than ten degrees. Each tilt is recorded on a counter, and the record is stored in the computer. One pattern will indicate that the wolf is up and running, another that it is sleeping, another that it has died. The collar thus keeps a record of the wolf’s most recent thirty-six hours of activity, and the researchers can instruct the collar to confide its observations into a laptop computer in the field. If the collar fails, it has a mechanism that allows the technicians to instruct it to fall to the forest floor and continue to broadcast signals until they find and retrieve it.
The collar has two gunpowdered-charged syringes inside metal sleeves strong enough to survive wolf bites. The syringes are armed with the drugs Telazol and Rompun in a solution of glycol to keep them from freezing. By triggering the darts, the researchers can immobilize a wolf from a half-mile away, and then follow the radio signal to capture the animal or take blood samples. The cylinders stand out on the wolves’ necks like small antlers. It wouldn’t be at all unlikely for a hiker or a hunter in the woods to glimpse one of these animals and mistake it for a young deer. And if wolves insult one another, the ones with the collars must take some hard kidding about looking like badly dressed herbivores.
Wolf 171 is one of four wolves and two deer wearing this collar in the study area. Says Mech, “With the deer, we’ve directed the collar to listen for high activity counts in twenty-four hours. We know that deer are chased by wolves. I have absolutely no idea whether that is once a day, once a month, once a year, or once in a lifetime.” With the collar, they can get some idea when the deer has been chased. “Once we recorded not only the chase, but the wolf killing the deer,” says Mech. “It probably was one of the collared wolf packs in that area that killed the deer.” So it is possible to monitor both the victim and the killer simultaneously, an unveiling of woodland secrets hitherto denied to an observer on the ground.
The next step with this collar will be to have it locate the wearer precisely without having to fly or triangulate, to work something like the ETF loran navigation system used by boat operators. It will report by radio signal the wolf’s latitude and longitude within 154 meters every fifteen minutes. Currently, researchers get one or two locations a week by flying, and that only when weather permits. With the locating collar, a computer could map the wolf’s movements, and the researchers would always know where to start looking for an animal that had stopped broadcasting.
Mech is always looking for ways to spy on wolves. He would like to use satellite collars, which transmit exact locations to orbiting satellites several times a day, but, he says, “It’s extremely expensive, and not that practical.” He has tried implanted transmitters—cylinder-encased radios, slightly larger than a lipstick, surgically placed inside the abdominal cavity of a wolf. “We have not used them routinely. With a radio under the skin, you don’t get a signal that’s very powerful—you can’t put a very big battery in a subcutaneous transmitter. And our wolves travel far and wide.
“I’m constantly looking for things that will improve our data-collecting ability,” says Mech. “Technology is the only thing that has made wolf studies possible. Without that technology, we’d be back doing studies like Sig Olson, slogging around in snowshoes at one mile per hour.”
On Road 424, we stop and get the radio out of a metal case in the bed of the pickup truck. Seabloom turns it on and broadcasts an instruction to Wolf 171’s collar to turn itself on, and Norton, standing on the roof of the cab, sweeps the horizon with a hand-held antenna, searching for an answering signal. We get nothing. There is just the stillness of spruce and pine, a latticework of bare birch and aspen branches, and the silence of snow. We drive another half-mile, stop, get out, broadcast, and listen. In this way, we troll for wolf, traveling down miles of snow-covered logging road. In fair weather, they would do this in an airplane and have the location in a half-hour or less. In the falling snow, it is two hours before we get a signal back. Seabloom instructs the collar. It replies with twenty double beeps, as if to say, “Hello, hello.” Then there is a steady signal. The wolf is probably less than a mile away.
In the cold, it takes us half an hour more to get the snowmobiles down into the snow and our gear into a sled to be towed behind one of them. When at last the gear is ready, Mech offers the back of the sled, where one can stand like a dog musher and feel more engaged with the winter woods, to anyone else. No one claims the honor, so Mech takes it, and we set off down a snow-covered logging road that winds into the forest. After a half-mile, we stop to retake bearings. The signal is faint and intermittent. We go another quarter-mile. The signal is a slow, rhythmic pinging, indicating that the wolf is lying down, probably asleep, within a half-mile of us. The cawing of two ravens off in the trees may indicate a kill there; the wolf may have fed and moved away to sleep. We get off the snowmobiles and Seabloom and Norton chat the computer through another set of commands. Norton instructs the collar to report on the wolf’s activity. The collar answers with the slow pinging of a sleeping wolf. Another command arms the dart.
Norton sends a command that fires the dart. We hear a sudden rapid series of beeps as the wolf is startled by the eruption inside her collar and the sting of the needle. She gets up and lurches off. For a minute, there are rapid beeps. Then they slow. Within three minutes, the wolf has collapsed and the slow, rhythmic beep resumes.
What must she have felt from the jab of the dart until the drug took hold and scattered her consciousness? Did her legs grow heavy and the air thicken in a riot of gravity? Did the trees jelly and streak as she lunged to escape? Somewhere in the woods, she
lies motionless, eyes staring, tongue lolling.
We put on snowshoes. With Seabloom carrying the antenna and the receiver, we follow the radio signals into the woods. The snow is deep; it is still falling in thick flakes. As we brush by trees, branches crack and snow falls down the backs of our necks. We must climb over logs and go around densely clustered spruces. At one point, Mech stumbles noisily. I wonder what the wolf is hearing, how clumsy she must think humans are, how noisy and awkward of movement.
In the hilly terrain, it takes a half-hour to find Wolf 171. She has plowed into the ground sixty feet from where she lay when the dart struck. Her tracks show she has come from a bed in a cluster of spruces at the bottom of a hollow and has crossed a hillside, keeping to cover, perhaps flattening herself out a little to go under a deadfall. The drug overtook her as she entered a small forest clearing. Her legs are folded under her, as if she had started to rise and then forgotten what she was about to do. Her nose is wedged into the snow. An attending raven croaks perplexedly from the trees.
Norton and Seabloom remove the collar carefully because the needle is still in the wolf’s neck. After extracting the dart, they spread out a heat-reflecting space blanket, lift the wolf onto it, and drag her into the shelter of a cluster of balsam firs. Norton carefully dusts newfallen snow from the back of the wolf, and pulls the edges of the space blanket over her to help keep her warm—one effect of the drugs is that, despite the blanket, the wolf’s temperature will drop from a normal 101 to below 96. As she sprawls on the blanket, her eyes still glow bright yellow. She yawns and blinks, unable to shake off the chemical restraint.
Wolf 171 was collared in September at the age of four months, in hopes of understanding how hormonal changes relate to dispersal. She was darted in November for tests, and again in December because the collar needed new batteries. Now, for the third time, they take a blood sample. This is difficult, for the wolf’s veins do not stand out, and in the ten-degree cold, the researchers’ hands are not agile. After they get a baseline sample, they inject a hormone into the wolf. The hormone will stimulate the wolf’s pituitary, which in turn will prompt her to release sex hormones. Every ten minutes for the next hour, more blood will be drawn, and each of the seven samples will ultimately be screened for sex hormones. “We’re interested in the degree of maturation in relationship to when they disperse,” Mech explains. When I ask if the hypothesis is that animals that mature earlier are more likely to disperse, Mech says, with characteristic lupine caution, “Something like that, but I’m not saying that. The hypothesis is that there is some relationship. We’re not sure what it is.”
The Company of Wolves Page 14