The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Devoted as its inhabitants were to the keeping of sheep, the British Isles led the way. In the tenth century, King Edgar tried to eliminate wolves from Wales by imposing a tax of three hundred wolf skins on the Welsh King Ludwall, and granting amnesty to rebels who brought him a hundred wolf heads. The last English wolf had been killed by 1500. Wolves persisted in Scotland for another 250 years. In the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, it was the duty of all men to participate in at least three wolf hunts a year. Scottish wolves were probably affected less by organized hunts than by the removal of the forest to make sheep pastures. Deprived of its natural prey, the wolf was forced to live near intolerant humans. The last one was captured in 1743. In Ireland, the last wolf was killed in 1770.

  Denmark killed its last wolf in 1772, but France and Germany had remote mountain forests in which wolves survived much longer. From the time of Charlemagne, the French appointed military officers to lead organized wolf hunts, but wolves persisted in France until about 1940. In 1992, a wolf is thought to have appeared in the French Alps, possibly having walked in from Italy. The Germans hunted wolves even more assiduously than the French. In 1817, more than a thousand wolves were killed in Prussia alone. By the mid-nineteenth century, wolves were rare, and by the middle of the twentieth, they were presumed extinct in Germany. Germans had so little experience of wolves that in 1976, when eight wolves escaped from a research project in Bavaria, the neighboring people panicked, and troops were called out. In six weeks, seven of the escapees were shot. The remaining female was at large for two years; when she was finally shot, in July 1978, she had a litter of pups, proof that there was at least one wild wolf still out there.

  In Spain, wolves survived through 1970 in Galicia and Castile-León. However, two children were purported to be victims of a wolf attack in 1974 near Orense, and that led to renewed persection. About a hundred wolves were killed within a few months. Wolves still survive elsewhere in Spain and in Portugal, however, and over the decade of the 1980s, their range seemed to be increasing.

  Wolves once ranged down the spine of Italy and inhabited Sicily. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they had vanished from most of the country. In 1973, there were perhaps no more than a hundred surviving in the Apennines. Restricted to mountains and to farmlands around Rome, they were protected in 1977. They have since increased to between 300 and 350, but through most of their range there is no native prey, and they live off of garbage, discards from butcher shops, and occasional forays into livestock pastures. They sometimes kill and eat dogs, and that makes them the target of hunters, who put out poison for them. And the wolves interbreed with domestic dogs. It is feared that the entire Italian population may now consist of wolf-dog hybrids.

  Wolves were hunted out of the Scandinavian countries, and survive there today only because they disperse from the countries of the former Soviet Union. There are thought to be only about a dozen each in Norway and Sweden, and perhaps a hundred in Finland. They came back into the Scandinavian countries only after clear-cutting in Soviet Karelia opened the habitat to moose; when the moose population increased, so did the wolf population, whose dispersers sometimes headed west. Despite their rarity, it is still legal to hunt wolves in Finland.

  The countries of the former Soviet Union once had enormous populations of wolves. During the world wars, wolf controls slackened and wolf populations grew. In the late 1940s, the entire Soviet wolf population was estimated at 200,000. Through the decade of the 1950s, intensive hunting, poisoning, and aerial gunning took 40,000 to 50,000 of them a year. The Soviets were headed toward the kind of eradication that took place in the United States, but in the 1970s, owing to a surge of conservation spirit, control efforts waned. In the middle of the decade, wolf numbers increased, following which there were renewed efforts to control wolves; in 1979, more than 32,000 wolves were killed. Soviet researcher Dmitri Bibikov feared that the population might drop below 50,000, and that wolves might soon disappear from half their former range. A 1990 population estimate, however, put the number at about 70,000. Wolf populations in the former Soviet Union today seem healthiest in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia, where wolves are not very accessible to aerial hunting. With the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it may be decades before an accurate tally of wolves can be made in the region.

  In Eastern Europe, wolves have tended to survive in the border areas, thanks in part to the statesmen’s habit of putting borders where there are the fewest people and then keeping new settlers away from them. Wolves could repopulate Germany from the border areas of Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland has healthy wolf populations in the Carpathians; near Biescady National Park, hunters in recent years have harvested wolves at a rate of one wolf per ten square kilometers. Czechoslovakia was thought in 1992 to have about 35 wolves. The border regions of the Carpathians are the stronghold of wolves in the Balkan States. In Rumania, where wolves are still shot for the bounty, there continues to be a sizable population. In Yugoslavia, there were an estimated 2,000 before the civil war began, with the densest populations in Serbia and Macedonia.

  Estimates of Greece’s wolf population range from 300 to 3,000. In the 1960s, hunters and shepherds were killing an average of 700 wolves per year, and there was a state bounty on wolves until 1980. To this day, the government sanctions organized hunting and the use of poison. The most important limit on Greece’s wolf populations might be the wild game they feed upon, which is disappearing as human populations expand.

  Wolves can still be found in most parts of Turkey. In 1973, more than 1,000 wolf skins were sold in shops in Istanbul. But as the Turkish population grows, there is, as in Greece, less and less wild game left for wolves to prey upon. In Iran, there are at least 1,000 wolves. They are found all over that country, but the healthiest populations are in the northern mountains. There are wolves in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but their populations are not well studied. India has an estimated 1,500 wolves, most of them in the mountains of the north and west.

  There are 110 to 150 wolves in Israel, and most of them have to feed, in the absence of wild game, on livestock and garbage. Wolves have been protected in Israel since 1954, but farmers nevertheless poison them when one gets into livestock or chickens. There are an estimated 30 wolves in Egypt, 10 in Lebanon, 200 in Jordan, and between 200 and 500 in Syria.

  There are wolves in northern China, but no survey has ever been done to estimate their numbers. Mongolia, believed to have at least 10,000 wolves, also has the highest ratio of livestock to people of any nation; that poses conflicts between humans and wolves. In the 1980s, Mongolia exported nearly as many wolf skins as the top two exporters, Canada and the Soviet Union.

  Canada is likely to be the best hope for the species. An estimated 50,000 wolves survive there. They never existed on Prince Edward Island or the Queen Charlotte Islands, and were extirpated from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and portions of southern Ontario and Quebec by the turn of the century, and the last Newfoundland wolf was killed in 1911. But across the north and west of the country, despite repeated organized government wolf-control programs aimed at increasing moose and caribou populations for the benefit of hunters, there are wolves.

  There are thought to be 4,500 wolves in the Yukon, 10,000 in the Northwest Territories, 8,000 in British Columbia, 4,300 in Alberta, 4,000 to 6,000 in Saskatchewan, and 8,000 to 9,000 in Ontario. Trapping takes a smaller and smaller portion of the population each year, as prices for wolf pelts decline: 7,000 were trapped in 1982, but only 2,000 in 1990. Hunters take approximately 2,000 wolves a year in all of Canada. There are year-round hunting seasons on wolves in the Northwest Territories, Ontario, and British Columbia, and limited seasons in Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta, and the Yukon. Though in some areas wolves may be overharvested, the annual hunting-and-trapping take ranges from 4 percent to 12 percent of any province’s collective population. Despite hunting and trapping, populations in British Columbia and southern Alberta, which have the highest
harvest rates, and in Ontario and Quebec all seem to be increasing, rather than decreasing.

  Wolves are legally protected on only 2.7 percent of Canada’s land area, but even that figure is misleadingly high: Canadian national parks established since 1978 are open to native hunting. John Theberge calculates that wolves are actually protected on 1.2 percent of Canada’s land area, a total of about a dozen places, which average only five hundred square kilometers apiece. “In those areas,” says Theberge, “there may be only a few packs whose range doesn’t overlap park boundaries. When you add it up, that’s nothing.” Moreover, existing protections are not ironclad. In 1994, Thelon Game Sanctuary in the Northwest Territories was off limits to hunting, but it had been proposed for national-park status. If it became a park, natives would be permitted to hunt wolves. “Thelon,” said Theberge, “is over half the protected range of wolves in Canada.”

  The United States engaged in the most organized eradication effort of any nation. Bounties were paid for wolves, and poisons put out for them. Meanwhile, wolf habitat filled with people and emptied of game. By the twentieth century, the wolf was extinct in most of the states east of the Mississippi. By 1970, populations remained only on Isle Royale and in Minnesota and Alaska, with occasional migrants from Canada seen in Montana and Idaho. Several of the subspecies are no longer to be found anywhere in the wild. Canis lupus monstrabilis, the wolf of West Texas, and mogollonensis, the wolf of the southwestern mountains, are extinct, and if nubilus, the buffalo wolf of the Great Plains, survives at all, it does so only in captivity. Canis lupus baileyi, the Mexican wolf, has not been seen in the wild in the United States since 1970.

  To stop the decline, the U.S. Department of the Interior has invoked the Endangered Species Act. The eastern timber wolf and the red wolf were both listed as endangered in 1967. The Northern Rocky Mountain subspecies, Canis lupus irremotus, was listed as endangered in 1973, the Mexican wolf in 1976. In 1978, the Fish and Wildlife Service stopped classifying separate subspecies and extended protection to all gray wolves in the contiguous forty-eight states. The protections thus afforded under the Endangered Species Act provide stiff penalties for anyone who kills or harasses a wild wolf in the United States outside of Alaska, and generally require permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for those who wish to keep wolves in captivity. The protections have had the effect of stimulating a modest recovery of wolves in the lower forty-eight states.

  About seventeen hundred wolves survive in northern Minnesota, where their numbers have been maintained by immigrants from Canada, and where they are classified as “threatened.” With protection, wolves have begun to reestablish themselves in northern Wisconsin and northern Michigan. In 1994, there were thirty to thirty-five wolves in Michigan’s upper peninsula, and at least fifty wolves in fourteen packs in Wisconsin. And wolves have been turning up in increasing numbers in Montana, Idaho, and Washington, as changing hunting and forestry practices and warmer winters in British Columbia and Alberta increased survival rates there. In Alaska, there are believed to be some seven thousand wolves, despite an annual hunting-and-trapping take of more than a thousand. The wolf population is believed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to be stable or slightly increasing.

  Before humans made war on wolves, the geographic reach of a wolf’s genes must have been impressively long. The pattern today, however, is ubiquitous and clear. Everywhere human habitation spreads, wolf populations decline. Richard Thiel, working in Wisconsin, found that, wherever there was more than .58 kilometer of road per square kilometer of habitat, wolves failed to survive. It wasn’t just the presence of roads, but of humans, who shot, snared, trapped, or ran over the wolves. David Mech, Steven Fritts, Glenn Radde, and William Paul did a similar comparison of road density and wolf populations in Minnesota and got comparable results.

  The grave threat is that eventually there will be broad areas without wolves that will serve as barriers to the dispersal of wolves and the sharing of genes. Even in Canada and Russia, where the largest expanses of healthy habitat remain, there is some threat that ultimately wolf populations will grow isolated from one another, broken into biological islands, and winnowed down to replicas of Isle Royale. The last wolf won’t succumb to a bullet. It will weaken from the slow but inexorable loss of genes. It will die of uniformity.

  If the wolves vanish from Isle Royale, Peterson unhesitatingly believes they should be reintroduced. Not everyone agrees. Says Peterson, “People say they got here on their own, they went extinct on their own, let ’em come back on their own. I’ve had a lot of trouble with the word ‘natural,’ as in ‘Let them come back naturally,’ lately. Their chances are affected by the fact that there are a hundred thousand people on the north shore of Lake Superior.”

  This is a difficult issue for the Park Service. For several decades, Isle Royale was the only United States national park outside Alaska to have wolves, and Isle Royale has become known especially for its predators. The Park Service has viewed the fact that the wolves came on their own as a key part of the story, and they have kept human contact with wolves to a minimum. Says Peterson, “For the Park Service, I think it has been an important place, because it is sort of the ideal of what parks aspired to be ecologically. For a lot of people, just knowing wolves are out here that aren’t being heavily manipulated is an important thing. Isle Royale seemed to be the best possible example of letting natural management work things out.”

  But there is a second question operating here. One must ask not just what the wolves need, not just what the Endangered Species Act seems to demand, but what the land requires. Should we save the species for the sake of keeping types of animals? Or should we save the function they perform as part of the fabric of life? Peterson believes we ought to be looking at the ecosystem, not just one of the parts. “I think it would be irresponsible not to bring wolves back. We’ve got so many other parks with unrestrained ungulates. We know what’s going to happen. Here, the moose will continue to eat the place to pieces. The balsam fir will disappear. This place is renowned for being a park with predators. Without predators it would be known as a place run down by moose.”

  Deciding on reintroduction would be very difficult for the Park Service. “If we had to put wolves back here, we’d have to decide what brand to use,” says Peterson. Where would the new ones come from? Since genetic analysis has suggested that Isle Royale wolves are less closely related to those on the mainland shores than they are to wolves from much farther north, there is some question about whose genes these are.

  One might simply reintroduce wolves from several different locations, but the individuals that prosper might do so because of momentary advantages, not because of long-term fitness. “I would tend to do it the cheap way,” Peterson says. “Take some wolves from Minnesota that are due to be euthanized because of cattle depredation, examine them for disease, vaccinate them, and get them over here quick. They wouldn’t necessarily be moose killers, but some would probably make it.”

  If the wolves vanish, the National Park Service may not have the luxury of depending on “natural management.” Faced with the disappearance of balsam fir and perhaps moose, and who knows what else in the chain of consequence, they will have to make a decision. “We’ve got to decide what species we want here and what species we don’t,” says Peterson, “and that decision hasn’t been made at Isle Royale before. There isn’t a tradition of mulling these things over. Those easy days are gone.”

  The easy days are gone for wolves in general. As human activity continues to spill out into wolf habitat, wolves are increasingly going to be confined in biological islands. The reintroduced populations of red wolf in the American South are island populations that are likely to require a support program of captive breeding to avoid genetic depression. Reintroduction of Mexican wolf in the Southwest is likely to require similar support.

  At Isle Royale, Peterson is anything but confident. “If I were a betting person, I wouldn’t bet on this one,” he
says. “They are so flat; they’re not doing what wolves do. One pair hasn’t reproduced since 1988, but they’ve got eight hundred moose in their territory. All the experts are saying, ‘We told you so.’ It would be a big thing if they turned around.” It would show that, at least here, a small population is viable.

  At the Rock Harbor dock on Isle Royale, a ranger naturalist is giving a nature talk to visitors who are awaiting the arrival of the afternoon ferry to Copper Harbor. It has been raining, and the campers on the island are gloomy about prospects for summer ease on the long Fourth of July weekend. The talk, too, is gloomy: the ranger is explaining the decline of Isle Royale’s wolves. Two young children suspend between them, like a clothesline, the sagging skin of an Isle Royale wolf. They are oddly unenthusiastic about the honor; perhaps it is a comment on the intensity of life in a living wolf that this relic seems not to elicit much excitement. An adult camper has asked why the Park Service doesn’t deal with the population crash by transplanting more wolves to the island. The ranger tells them that wolves are territorial and that the new wolves might not get along with the existing wolves: “They might kill each other.” Perhaps more important, she adds, “The Park Service has a hands-off policy,” feeling that “natural management” or management without human intervention is the best course because it offers the best chances for authenticity and for health. Besides, the research question of what is happening to the wolves couldn’t be answered if new wolves were brought onto the island.

  Off in his cabin, Peterson ponders the likelihood of solving that question. Outside the cabin, the rain continues to fall. The ragged mist of clouds hugs the lakeshore. Raindrops slip quietly from the trees into the duff of the forest floor. It is achingly silent.