Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  The rocky crest provided an excellent vantage point to monitor movements in and out of their rendezvous site without disturbing them. We had collars on the alpha-male, alpha-female, and a yearling female. In addition, the previous afternoon an unprecedented event had occurred. Basin 6 Jocko, a male from a pack to the southeast, joined the Jack Pine pack. Later, genetic analysis confirmed our impression that he was the alpha-male of the Jocko Lake pack.

  He arrived near the Jack Pine pack’s rendezvous site in the late morning. Graduate student Joy Cook flew over and reported his signal about two kilometres from us. When Mary and I located him, he was only half a kilometre away and ten minutes later was on the same compass bearing as immature female Jack Pine 7. We quickly drove a few hundred metres for a cross-bearing and confirmed that they were together. Their signals moved in tandem as they entered the rendezvous site, where one of them began a long sequence of bark-howls. The other collared wolves were absent, but the pups must have been there; they always were.

  We could not imagine a strange wolf being allowed right into the rendezvous site. Never in three years of tracking had there been any association between the wolves in these two adjacent packs. We expected to hear sounds of a fight.

  A few seconds later, a different wolf began barking just off the bearing we had on the two wolves. That must have been an uncollared baby-sitter. Barks changed to howls, then silence.

  We sat beside some alders and waited to hear more, unable to approach closer for fear of disturbing them. This was wolf-only business. Nothing else transpired. Soon Jack Pine 7 drifted out of range, leaving the interloper with the pups and whatever uncollared adults were home.

  Two hours later when we returned from checking another pack, alpha-male Jack Pine 8 had come in and was on the same bearing as Basin 6 Jocko. Variation in the trespassing wolf’s signal showed that he had not been killed.

  Because we were anxious to monitor developments, I had climbed the hill for my night’s vigil. Mary was back in our other tent near the truck in the semi-shade of a budworm-sickened jack pine tree, the best we could find nearby. We had returned only recently from a month in Costa Rica visiting Michelle, who had a summer job studying bats, and Mary had contracted what was diagnosed later as histoplasmosis, a fungal disease spread in bat guano. The hilltop was too close to the wolves for her to cough without disturbing them in the calm of night.

  From 9 P.M. until after midnight, I sat on the rocky crest in a patch of sweet fern surrounded by scraggly maples and oaks. During that time, the day shift went out — hermit thrushes and white-throated sparrows stopped singing — and the night shift came in — nighthawks overhead and whip-poor-wills lashing the forest with their repetitive songs. As darkness came, I watched big cumulonimbus clouds build up above a salmon streak on the western horizon. Now and then the clouds were illuminated by flashes of lightning that caused static on the receiver.

  Summarizing my field notes, initially, JP8 and B6J were together at the rendezvous site, and alpha-female JP3 and her immature daughter JP7 were about six hundred metres upstream near their den abandoned a few weeks previously. A half-hour later, JP8’s signal was coming in from close range. Apparently he was investigating me, or I was inadvertently on his travel route. He made a semicircle around me in the dark staying about a hundred metres back and kept going. Without hearing his signal, I would never have known he was there.

  Not much happened until 11:35 P.M. when I was startled by two treble howls from an adult at the rendezvous site. I had fallen asleep despite the mosquito attack. A few seconds later, one pup gave a few high, nasal howls. I got up to check the receiver. JP8 had returned.

  By midnight it was obvious a storm was approaching. The aspens began talking and the lightning was more persistent. A loud clap of thunder rolled over the forest. B6J was still at the rendezvous site, JP7 was distant to the north, JP3 was gone, and JP8 was close to me once again.

  Suddenly the sky split apart with a long, dazzling flash that lit up the entire ridge for about four seconds. The thunder came almost immediately. There I stood on top of the hill, antenna raised above my head. So to hell with JP8. I put the antenna flat under a tree a few metres away and headed for the tent. One minute later I heard the first hiss of oncoming rain. Quickly the rain rheostat turned up.

  By 2 A.M. the storm was over, and I was left lying in a pool of water on the tent floor. In veiled moonlight I walked up to the top of the hill through the wet sweet fern to find that JP8 had gone and only B6J was on the air. Was he the designated baby-sitter? Back in the tent, I killed all the mosquitoes and set the alarm for 5 A.M.

  At 3:52 A.M. pup howls awakened me. An adult must have returned. I climbed out to check and found that, sure enough, JP7 had come back. The signals of B6J and JP3 were weak to the north; possibly she had returned to take him to some distant kill. For a while I sat on the hill. Forest dripping. Soft, wet, warm. Diffuse moonlight. Then I returned to the tent, killed all the mosquitoes again, and set the alarm for 6 A.M., but I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay in the wet, hot tent and listened to a nighthawk practising percussion dive-bombing. At 5 A.M. a slight hint of daylight touched the tent wall.

  My notes seem to reflect the typical coming-and-going home life of a wolf pack in summer. One or more adults nearly always stay with the pups. Howling occurs when wolves change guard. Wolves leave singly or in groups and return when they want.

  Most remarkable was the casual acceptance of Basin 6 Jocko, as if he had always been a member of the pack. We understood why three years later from genetic analysis done on blood collected when he was collared. Jack Pine 3 was his mother! After three years and founding his own pack, he had returned to mother and his natal land. We were amazed that this would happen. Later we learned why.

  We kept as close to a twenty-four-hour vigil as possible, obtaining additional locations from Joy’s twice-daily overflights via air-to-ground radio. Most often the wolves went southwest when they left the rendezvous site, and often we found their tracks on a road there. Never were they in one place long enough for us to suspect a kill, but they may have stayed at one only briefly before returning to the rendezvous site with food for the pups.

  One evening we inadvertently disturbed the pack. All three collared Jack Pine wolves were about four kilometres south of the rendezvous site, and Basin 6 Jocko was out of range. Wanting to confirm the number of adults in the pack, we returned directly to the rendezvous site and Mary howled. There was no response. The signals of Jack Pine 7 and Jack Pine 8 were barely audible in the distance, but thirty minutes later both wolves had returned, travelling at eight kilometres an hour — a trot — to get there. Because alpha-female Jack Pine 3, the most sensitive pack member to howling near the pups, was not present, we believed that our howling would not be intrusive. So we howled again. This time the wolves responded. Although Jack Pine 3 was not close enough for us to hear her signal, she must have heard us, because only three minutes later, she was there too. She must have been running flat out. Realizing we had disrupted their routine, we backed the truck out, turned around, and, with only the parking lights on, slowly drove away.

  The next two days in succession we found the tracks of two wolves along eight kilometres of a sandy road right to the southern boundary of the pack’s territory. The wolves urinated and scratch-marked all the way. Probably our howls, sounding like an unknown wolf in their territory, had stimulated this territorial behaviour.

  The Jack Pine pack gave us some surprises and provided some insights into wolf social dynamics. Even one that did not live long, Jack Pine 1, surprised us. He dispersed from the Grand Lake pack to the Jack Pine pack as a four-year-old, his age confirmed by cross-section tooth analysis performed at G. Matson’s wildlife ageing laboratory in Montana. In other studies, most dispersing wolves are young animals just becoming sexually mature. As our study progressed, we found more instances of adult dispersal and adoption into other packs. Possibly because so many wolves in our study were killed by humans,
more adult wolves were left wandering and packless. Prior to Jack Pine 1 joining the Jack Pine pack, that pack’s alpha-male might have been killed, leaving the position up for grabs.

  Another surprise was the tendency of the Jack Pine pack to split up in winter. They did this more commonly, or for more prolonged periods, than other packs. In 1990-91, three wolves spent the entire winter together outside the park while the other five stayed on territory. The next winter, four wolves spent the whole time as roving trespassers in the neighbouring Mathews Lake, Pretty Lake, and Grand Lake packs’ lands while the remaining six wolves stayed home. Once, the trespassing group was within two kilometres of the Pretty Lake pack, but that is the closest we found them to any residents.

  Jack Pine 6

  She has survived a long time for an Algonquin wolf and is still out there threading the hills around Zigzag Lake. We classified her as large for a female, based on our index of weights and lengths, but she barely made that category The second time we caught her she was 2.3 kilograms heavier, likely the effect of a good meal.

  She was born in 1989 or 1990, daughter of Jack Pine 3. During her first winter on the air, when she was either two or three years old, she stayed with the Jack Pine pack only until late December. Then we found her trespassing with her mother in the Jocko Lake pack’s territory to the southeast. Her older brother, by then the alpha-male of the Jocko Lake pack, was only one kilometre away. She had known him in 1990 before he dispersed. Accepted relatives?

  Then she disappeared for six months, showing up again back in her home territory, sometimes alone, twice with her mother, Jack Pine 3, and the rest of the pack. Obviously she was remembered and still welcome. Later that summer she vanished again, and over the next fourteen months we found her only once even though we kept her frequency programmed into our receivers. By then a four- or five-year-old, she was ranging widely, apparently still shopping around for a mate.

  In September 1994, MNR biologist Mike Wilton found her while flying south of the park. He was radio-tracking black bears at the time and had our wolf’s frequency programmed into his receiver. That winter she was part of a pack of seven, and extended her range to define a territory in the extreme southeast corner of the park.

  Mary and I caught her on a hot July day in 1995 and replaced her well-worn collar. She was lactating, the alpha-female of what we named the Zigzag Lake pack.

  The following winter, with the help of local forest technician Colin Fabian, we snowmobiled and snowshoed to a moose she and her pack were attempting to eat. The moose had gone through the ice in the middle of a small lake and had been unable to climb out. Only its head, neck, and shoulders were exposed, and they were frozen solid. Although the wolves returned periodically to this food source, they could never get at the rest.

  She denned that summer under a big pine by the water’s edge of a scenic, unnamed lake, and by winter her pack had grown to nine. They spent most of the winter outside the park living close to houses. By winter’s end, her pack was down to five, for unknown reasons.

  In the summer of 1997, a set of early-June flights showed scattered locations back in her home territory but not centred at a possible den site like they did the previous year. Maybe she had lost her dominant position in the pack. Two collared offspring from the previous year rarely travelled with her.

  She received her third radio collar in January 1998, when we contracted with Helicopter Wildlife Management from Utah to net wolves. Mary, in the spotter plane, found the pack on the ice of a small lake, then radioed the location to the helicopter and circled as it came in below the Cessna to net the wolf. The wolf was measured, weighed, and recollared without being drugged, and was off again in only a few minutes.

  Now either seven or eight years old, she is one of the older wolves in the study. She has been a survivor, both as a lone wolf and an alpha.

  Jack Pine 3

  She was the matriarch, maintaining her alpha position while wolves in her own and surrounding packs came and went with alarming frequency. Captured first in 1990 and recaptured twice after that, she gave us six and a half years of data before she died. Nothing about her physically suggested superiority. We classified her as a medium-sized wolf.

  Where she denned in the old streambank, the creek provided a curvilinear alder-grass tangle through jack pine flats. Beaver operations had strung the creek with small ponds, drowning standing trees that olive-sided flycatchers perched on. The surrounding jack pine stands offered little browse for moose and deer, causing them to concentrate in this riparian strip. Even the rendezvous sites where Jack Pine 3 moved the pups each summer were only short distances away from the den along the same creek.

  Mary and I saw her only once, tracking her signal one day in early December with our daughters. She and her mate, Jack Pine 8, had ambushed a deer near the foot of a lake, twenty-five kilometres off territory. Jenny and I followed their signals, but they had left the carcass. Mary and Michelle were guided to the kill by the raucous calls of ravens. The wolves went up a creek and out onto the lake ice. We watched them, just the pair, reluctantly walking away, glancing back at us every few seconds.

  The partly eaten carcass lay half-submerged along the edge of the creek where the deer had broken through thin ice. The wolves had been tugging at it, unable to get at the deep-water side.

  Jack Pine 3 first became the alpha female of the pack either in 1989 or 1990 and maintained that position for six or seven breeding seasons, an unprecedented length of time. Genetics analysis done by Sonya Grewal and Paul Wilson in Brad White’s laboratory at McMaster University later revealed that we had collared three of her offspring, four of her grandchildren, four of her greatgrandchildren, one brother, and two nieces. Before pairing with Jack Pine 8, she had mated with another male who must have died or had his position usurped (wolves are normally monogamous). Her genes end up today in six different packs and will spread even farther in the next generation. All but one of these packs hold adjacent territories to hers or are one-pack-distant; one granddaughter lives three packs away.

  All this dispersal based on knowing the fate of just three of Jack Pine 3’s pups over a period of seven years suggests much more. It shows that the population was unstable, as we also know from our mortality data. Territorial vacancies and part-packs, characteristic of an exploited population, apparently provided many opportunities for wolves to disperse and breed successfully.

  This dispersal meant, as well, that if Jack Pine wolves trespassed anywhere nearby, they would likely be on a relative’s land. They might not know each other if they had never lived together, such as if the territory holder was a grandparent, niece or nephew, or sibling born more than two years apart, but they would if it was a son or daughter or a sibling from a successive year. Such close relationships may lessen aggression and be one way an exploited population heals itself.

  Whatever ways dispersal aids the population, Jack Pine 3’s genes — so adaptive, so successful — live on though she is dead.

  The railway was a boon to the Jack Pine pack. In the ditches beside the track were plenty of moose bones with wolf scats nearby. One winter’s day we radio-tracked Jack Pine 3 and Jack Pine 8 through deep snow and dense bush to the railway, where a crowd of ravens flew up. Instead of finding a carcass strewn along the embankment, this moose, to our surprise, came pre-packaged. Its legs had been cut off and were in a torn cardboard box; its head was in another. A short distance down the tracks was the railway siding of Travers Station with a couple of cabooses where linemen lived. Wolves were not the only large mammals to scavenge on train-killed moose.

  Another moose fell victim to a train on the east side of the Jack Pine pack’s territory in late August 1994. On a windy afternoon we heard the signals of all three collared wolves from a high hill. A cross-bearing established their position along the railway. When we drove closer, we noticed ravens sail over in the direction of the wolves. We left the truck carrying our camera and binoculars and headed uptrack and upwind. More ravens
skimmed the trees ahead.

  Near the second bend, we left the tracks, edged slowly along the trees, and crawled to a rock outcrop. Slightly below us, only twenty-five metres away, an uncollared wolf was tugging at the mangled remains of a moose. Although we were almost completely exposed, the wolf had not detected us. Slowly I raised the camera and got off a few shots. The wolf gripped the skin of a leg with its incisor teeth and pulled back, the whole leg moving without the counter-pull of another wolf. Then it crouched down and chewed with its carnassial teeth. The collared wolves, satiated, were out of sight in the trees nearby.

  After a few minutes, the wolf raised its head, turned, and started moving directly towards us. At ten metres it bounded up over a rock, saw us for the first time and froze. Nerve impulse travelled from eye, to brain, to its cognition centre, to legs, and a second later it jumped back and bounded up the embankment onto the tracks. There it looked back as if in disbelief that we were really humans and it had been so careless. Then it was gone.

  After dark we came back and put up a tent at the edge of the trees. The next morning at daybreak, again the collared wolves were just out of sight. Ravens were working over the carcass, so full of meat they could barely hop. We spent a long morning in the tent without seeing any wolves.

  Sometimes after a period of inactivity, events occur so suddenly and unexpectedly that only later can you piece together what happened. We climbed out of the tent, and I started to unhook the fly. Mary walked about ten paces to pick up a piece of notepaper we had dropped the previous evening. I heard a stick snap just behind the tent, and looked up at an uncollared wolf in full bound towards her. By the time I exclaimed “Mary,” the wolf was almost there. Glancing up and seeing the wolf so close, only a second or two from contact, Mary involuntarily straightened up. The wolf arched its back in mid-air, hit the ground, turned, and bounded off.