Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  That May she began to define a new territory partly in and partly out of the extreme southeast corner of the park. A few weeks later she died of unknown causes; John retrieved her decomposed carcass.

  There were other small animals, and, scanning their computer files, I have looked for a pattern in their lives. Second smallest was Jack Pine 4, a three-year-old male, sixteen kilograms (thirty-five pounds). Over the one year and nine months we knew him, he seemed normal, always with other members of the Jack Pine pack. Pretty 4, a yearling female, eighteen kilograms (forty pounds), also seemed to live a normal life as part of the Pretty Lake pack. Basin 13, an adult female, 18.1 kilograms (40 pounds), lost her collar at the capture site so we know little about her except that she was an immigrant, unrelated to other Basin Depot wolves. She was travelling with the large alpha-male of the Basin Depot pack when caught.

  One striking fact about the eight smallest park wolves is the short time they lived. They averaged one year and two months after collaring. Even this is an inflated value because one of the eight lived four years. Excluding that one, the average longevity after collaring was only nine months.

  Another striking fact is a lack of breeding by small animals. Based upon body length, more than twice as many large females were breeders in the Algonquin population as expected from their ratio in the population as a whole. Among fourteen known alpha-females, only two were classed as “small,” one being the Byers Creek female living in the farmlands outside the park. Only two other breeding females were classed as small-medium, animals still very close to coyote size. This lack of small breeders could be predicted; if coyotes get into wolf packs, rarely may they attain the necessary dominant social position to become breeders because large size is such an important prerequisite. They might breed, however, if pack structure has broken down.

  Three of these small, coyote-like animals that invaded or lived in Algonquin Park were caught where wolf packs had been shattered and the land was either vacant or just being reoccupied. Others lived in packs that had suffered unusually heavy losses. Less than half of them seemed normal.

  The clincher to our concern over these small animals came from a phone call from Sonya Grewal just before this book went to press. This set of small animals, all caught in the park, grouped genetically more closely with coyotes than do Algonquin wolves.

  Why haven’t more coyotes invaded Algonquin Park? Mice, voles, and snowshoe hares, their usual food, seem plentiful enough. In recent decades, coyotes have expanded into closed forest environments similar to those that make up Algonquin Park in New England and the Maritime provinces, even Newfoundland.

  The most likely explanation is repulsion by wolves. That guess is strengthened by the observations of Dave Mech, who told me that among his unpublished data is evidence that when the Minnesota population he studies dropped below roughly one wolf per thirty-nine square kilometres, coyotes from surrounding lands invaded. Our estimated Algonquin Park average density is one wolf per thirty-eight square kilometres, right on that danger threshold, crossing it in various years. When the Minnesota wolf population recovered, coyotes disappeared, but with unknown genetic impact while they were there.

  Coyote expansion has taken place in eastern North America where wolves have declined. Generally this is believed to be a result of an absence of wolf aggression. Only in the early 1900s after wolves were extirpated did coyotes enter southern Ontario, then wolfless New England, and the Maritime provinces.

  As red wolves declined in the southeastern United States between 1920 and 1940, coyotes invaded from the west, or in some cases were deliberately released. According to references cited by Gerry Parker in his book Eastern Coyote, hybridization took place throughout these overlapping ranges in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and other nearby states. The body weights of the last wild red wolves measured between 1968 and 1972, just before they became extinct in the wild, were considerably smaller than animals weighed before 1930. Gary Henry, current team leader of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s red wolf recovery program, believes, like many others, that the shrinkage in size can be attributed to hybridization with coyotes.

  What happened to the red wolf should be a warning for what can happen to wolves in the southern part of Ontario and Quebec. Perhaps the warning is already too late. Graduate student Hilary Sears has collected carcasses south and east of Algonquin Park from commercial trappers who were going to kill them anyway. Weights are similar to those of the last red wolves, intermediate between wolf and coyote. Genetic analysis has confirmed their distinctiveness as more coyote-like than Algonquin Park wolves. Surprisingly, some of these animals come from continuously forested regions just like Algonquin Park.

  Despite the appearance of the landscape there as favourable for wolves, logging roads open to public hunting crisscross the land, and there are no controls on wolf killing. Under such unregulated pressure from humans, wolf populations typically decline, while coyotes persist. Outside Algonquin Park we seem to be replaying the last days of the red wolf before extirpation by fragmenting wolf populations and so inviting coyotes in to hybridize and genetically swamp out the wolf. Neither of the possible barriers to interbreeding we have suggested — small body size of coyotes so social inferiority, nor short life spans — apparently have been sufficient. Maybe they will not be sufficient in Algonquin Park either, with continued wolf killing and time. How much time? We will not have any evidence to answer that question until it is too late.

  Putting the evidence together, Algonquin Park is a fortress held by wolves, under siege by coyotes. The supply lines for reinforcements have been at least partially severed. Using covert infiltration, the invaders have partially broken down the defences. Given time, might they stage a successful coup? It is a serious threat.

  There is more to the hybridization story, and it begins long before coyotes first entered Ontario one hundred years ago. Ron Nowak of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the acknowledged expert on canid taxonomy. His skull measurements indicate that there are two wolf species alive today. One is the gray wolf, Canis lupus. It formerly lived throughout North America and parts of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and is sometimes called the timber wolf, arctic wolf, and tundra wolf, which all are the same species. The other species is the red wolf, Canis rufus, which lives only in the southeastern United States. In North America, the gray wolf is further subdivided into five subspecies.

  Algonquin Park wolves are listed as members of the subspecies lycaon. Not much lycaon is left in the wild. It is gone from all its former eastern United States range, which used to extend down to the Carolinas, gone from the Maritime provinces, and lives today only in southern Quebec and Ontario south of the French and Mattawa rivers.

  A plausible evolutionary history supports this classification of the gray wolf into five subspecies. According to Nowak, the red wolf, or a small precursor very much like it, differentiated from the coyote about one million years ago and spread throughout North America. Sometime between 800,000 and 600,000 years ago, some animals crossed the Bering land bridge to populate Europe and Asia. There the species altered to become the gray wolf, forming several subspecies. One of them returned when the land bridge was again above water, about 300,000 years ago. That one, slightly altered, is the subspecies nubilis, alive today and inhabiting most of the remaining North American wolf range.

  Subspecies nubilis is larger and greyer than its originating North American red wolf stock, having had the opportunity to change over a few hundred thousand years in Europe and Asia. Possibly it also had the opportunity to interbreed with a long-present wolf-like animal abundant in Europe and Asia called the Etruscan wolf After returning to North America, the gray wolf, subspecies nubilis, spawned off the other three gray wolf subspecies. Two became arctic subspecies isolated for a time in unglaciated lands there, and the third became the Mexican wolf isolated by desert in the south.

  The gray wolf subspecies that is missing in this story is lycaon. Because of its similarit
y to the red wolf, Nowak believes it appeared early in the wolf’s evolution, but describes no place for it to have lived in isolation long enough for subspeciation to occur. It just does not fit.

  The answer to the question of when and where subspecies lycaon arose seems obvious now. Lycaon and the red wolf are just too similar to be separate species. Their skulls are very similar both in size and shape. Both species are smaller than other North American wolf subspecies. Both hybridize with coyotes, whereas only subspecies nubilis in Minnesota (possibly misidentified?) does so to a limited extent, and there may be some evidence for it in the Mexican wolf, which is extinct in the wild but about to be reintroduced from captive stock. In all other places, such as the Rocky Mountains, nubilis and coyotes live side by side but do not interbreed. Red wolf and gray wolf lycaon look so similar that every time Mary or I show slides of Algonquin wolves at wolf conferences, the biologists studying red wolves are amazed. The body weights of red wolves released in the wild, chosen from captives because of their larger size, are identical to those of Algonquin Park wolves. All the other gray wolf subspecies, on the other hand, look very different — bigger and either greyer, whiter, or blacker.

  The genetic evidence from Brad White’s lab shows that red wolf and lycaon are similar not just because both hybridize with coyotes, but despite hybridization. Strip away the coyote component and the two wolves group even more closely together, further illustrating their unity as a species.

  Brad, Paul, and Sonya speculate that hybridization may have occurred at least periodically throughout the red wolf-lycaon evolutionary history, maybe right back to its origins from coyotes or a similar animal. It probably occurred then — and now, because they look so similar — with the wolf just larger, and having disproportionately larger head, broader muzzle, deeper chest, and bigger feet. These differences were not always enough to prevent interbreeding. Through periods of changing habitats as glaciers came and went in the north, often wolf and coyote must have lived in the same places. It is illogical to think that hybridization has occurred only in the past few decades.

  With a long history of hybridization, when are genes from parent species validly reassigned as bona fide characteristics of their descendant hybrid species? There is no easy way to find out which genes are relatively new and which have had a long history as part of red wolf-lycaon wolf, but the geneticist team is working on that. We can only describe the genes that are there today. So, instead of using wolf-specific or coyote-specific genes to estimate the degree of hybridization in red wolf-lycaon wolf, it is fully justifiable to interpret the genes and their frequencies, regardless of origin, as characteristic of the red wolf-lycaon wolf species living today.

  If wolves were being reclassified anew, and there is no reason not to, there is a strong case to call the lycaon wolf of southern Ontario and southern Quebec and the red wolf the same species. With this new genetic evidence, the present classification of lycaon as a subspecies of gray wolf appears to be unjustified.

  Which name should prevail? On a genetic tree, the Algonquin population of lycaon lies closest to the root of wolves, less influenced by coyote hybridization than either the red wolf or southern Quebec wolf. As well, the Algonquin Park lycaon has one unique gene found in one-quarter of the population that has been lost, possibly through hybridization, in southern Quebec lycaon and the red wolf.

  So, reclassified, Canis lupus lycaon and the red wolf, Canis rufus, would both become Canis lycaon. A logical common name would be the “lycaon wolf,” or “eastern wolf,” or the “eastern timber wolf.”

  Canis lycaon, ironically, is exactly the first name given North American wolves in 1775 by the European naturalist Johann Schreber. He provided that name for a wolf described a few years earlier by French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon. This wolf, captured somewhere in New France, was brought back alive to France by military officers. In volume twelve of Buffon’s forty-four volume natural history of North America is a picture of this black animal, with detailed measurements of every part of its anatomy including internal organs.

  Would reclassification matter? The red wolf became extinct in the wild in the mid-1900s, but captive stock has been reintroduced since 1988 into North Carolina and Tennessee. A vigorous and seemingly successful recovery program is taking place under the United States Endangered Species Act. Recognizing lycaon as the Canadian counterpart of the United States red wolf, which has been the subject of intensive restoration efforts, adds significantly to the case for more adequate protection. So does recognizing its distinctiveness from other gray wolves, whether full species status is accepted or not. In its very limited remaining range, where packs are continually being fractured by human killing, and where it lives in close juxtaposition with coyotes, it may be under unusually intensive genetic siege.

  We have no endangered species act in Canada. In this respect, we lag behind the United States by decades. We do, however, list over 275 species, subspecies, and regional populations in various categories of endangerment and have developed recovery plans for some. The governing body is called COSEWIC — Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada — with federal, provincial, and non-governmental representatives.

  In a 1997 status report commissioned by the committee, subspecies lycaon was proposed for listing even before this genetics story unfolded. A representative of the MNR opposed it, and the decision was deferred for two years. Now, full species or not, its genetic uniqueness makes acceptance even more indisputable. The MNR has little choice but to comply, then give it greater protection. Politics should not confound taxonomic classification.

  We have begun additional research because of these findings. One component is to determine if lycaon hybridizes with nubilis to the north. Another is to find out if any relatively pure Algonquin lycaon wolves exist anywhere outside Algonquin Park, such as in the vicinity of the Magnetawan River to the west or anywhere we have not yet looked in the Madawaska Highlands to the south, the only two large blocks of wildlands left in the subspecies’ range. If we do not find healthy, unfragmented populations of lycaon anywhere else, and smaller, more coyote-like animals predominate wherever populations are heavily exploited, which is everywhere outside Algonquin Park, then we will be even more concerned. Algonquin Park may be the last refuge of the purest remaining lycaon wolf.

  WILDNESS

  BEYOND THE conspicuous — a moose grazing water lilies, a wolf trotting across a frozen lake, the ranks of Algonquin hills — is a quality, a character, a complexion in nature that comes from something fundamental. It buttresses ecosystems; it provides a foundation. Forged from eons of evolution, built from the intimate intermingling of living things, independent of crushing human dominance, is “wildness” — ecosystems and species shaped through millennia by nature.

  Wildness is not easy to find any more. We control nature, directly or indirectly, even in wilderness parks. In the glare of human endeavour, wildness shrinks. Nonetheless, hidden deep in a stand of old-growth pine, strung through the damp lowlands, cresting a distant ridge, are fundamental patterns and basic interrelationships — the rules of life. They are worth finding, necessary for comparison with all the made-over rest.

  A hierarchy of scale is the principal design feature of nature, the first diagnostic character that some celestial designer would describe if asked about life on Earth. In all wild places, small animals make a living exploiting small resources in small areas scaling up to large animals exploiting large resources across large areas. Body size sets energy needs, metabolic rates, life spans, territory sizes, and allows ecosystems to provide life support for many living things simultaneously. Every species is structured to live in this hierarchy.

  Understanding the wolf, or any species, means understanding its hierarchical place. The wolf’s large body, well over the mammalian global average of a mere one hundred grams, means that it has an excessive energy demand per individual, must get its food in large packages, and cover a lot of ground to obtain it. A
minimum viable wolf population, able in the long run to maintain its genetic diversity and overcome environmental contingencies, needs a lot of room. Such a population has been estimated at 150 animals using the internationally accepted criteria of at least 50 randomly mating breeders, inflated by immatures and social subordinates. The figure is unrealistically low, because the condition of random mating is not met in wolves due to their pack structure. But the land requirements for only 150, roughly the pre-breeding season Algonquin Park population, is the entire park.

  At this scale of a few thousand square kilometres, the wolf has the ability to both stabilize or destabilize ecosystems, dampening prey eruptions or limiting the size of prey populations when it drives system change (top down), easing off its impacts to insignificance when it rides the system (bottom up). In Algonquin, we conclude that the wolf is largely riding more fundamental changes made by logging and wildlife exploitation. The wolf is in response-mode. Too many other events are occurring, park notwithstanding, for it to play a major role, by itself, in changing prey numbers. As well, both Algonquin wolves and their ungulate prey are on, or near, their range-edges, where, like most species, environmental conditions are more variable and significant than species interrelationships.

  It might be different in a more stable, range-central environment, one with less human impacts, one perturbed on a frequency of every hundred years or so by natural fire rather than by a twenty- or forty-year logging rotation, not to mention erratic fur prices, changing hunting quotas, and shifting forest-product economies. There, wolves might commandeer a greater influence on ecosystems.

  However, what wolf-prey-vegetation-soil relations would be like in more stable environments remains speculative. No wolf studies have been done where human impacts are insignificant (excluding Isle Royale National Park, an island with little possibility of wolf or prey dispersal or immigration). Few large, unstaked, unhunted, and unlicensed places exist, and where they do, wolves are sparse and research costs high. Draw on a map a two-hundred-kilometre radius around every arctic and subarctic settlement: that is the one- or two-day range of a snowmobile and represents hunted and trapped lands. Then map all the exploration and logging roads, and the fly-in hunting camps. Wolves are legally protected on less than 2 per cent of wolf range in Canada, and, even there, protection is inadequate in parks that are too small.