Wolf Country Page 6
Each spring we still collect wolf scats in the northwest and walk a series of pellet transects to record changes in moose numbers. Volunteers Bill and Carrie Steer run some moose/deer track ratio counts along logging roads and locate packs. We watch for some major change in the system. Deer are recovering slowly, and if their numbers keep edging up, we may want to see if they migrate to winter range outside the park and influence wolves in that way.
Someday we may start up a full program there again. Until then, it is satisfying enough just to think of the Fassett marshes echoing from wolf howls, and tracks of a pack stitching the snow on Manitou Lake.
WOLVES ACROSS THE DOME
Coping with Chaos
Over time, the assembly line of nature slowly but inexorably rolls out genes, species, communities, entire ecosystems, making new combinations, tearing up the blueprints of the old and unsuccessful. It is the business of science to classify and find order in nature, to “search for systematic relationships and verifiable truths.” Science has been wildly successful: we can place a spacecraft on the moon or Mars; we understand the behaviour of atoms and molecules; we have cracked the genetic code.
In the midst of such overwhelming success, however, a new science has emerged, born out of failure. We still cannot predict weather, nor changes in ocean currents, nor molecular movements of diffusion, nor the changing behaviour of ecosystems. The new science flies under the banner of “chaos,” “complexity” “catastrophe and surprise.”
When processes in nature are simple and straightforward, that is, keep going in a constant direction, we have a chance to understand them. When they are complex and chaotic, we are only now beginning to try. There are principles awaiting discovery.
“Catastrophe,” when stripped of its everyday connotation as something undesirable, means only “sudden change. “As such, it often comes in nature as a surprise. It may be a hurricane or ice storm or flood, a forest fire, or an outbreak of spruce budworm. All share common features. There is an initial state before the event and a final one after and some silent pressure building up within the atmosphere or the forest that eventually erupts to move the system suddenly from the initial to the final state. The pressure may build fast, like the sudden formation of an atmospheric low pressure cell, or it may build slowly, like the initial population of spruce budworm. Finally, with the addition of just a little more atmospheric pressure or a few more budworm larvae, the catastrophic event occurs.
Ecosystems, while quietly going about their business and altering little with time, are full of hidden pressure gradients. Eventually pressure builds up to cause sudden change. Eruptions of moose or deer populations may be like eruptions of budworm. Time delays between a change in prey numbers and a resultant change in predator numbers may be like that too, while the predator adjusts its hunting behaviour. So predator-prey ratios may be stable at either high or low density but be unstable in between. A population of any animal may do well until it runs out of food, then suddenly collapse. A beaver dam may give way, draining the pond overnight. Dead wood accumulates to the point where the probability of a forest fire becomes a near certainty.
That ecosystems experience so many non-linear, minor to major catastrophic changes results in unpredictability and surprise. Some catastrophic change exhibits a periodicity making it partially predictable, such as fire that, on average, occurs about every hundred years in Canada’s boreal forests. Others, such as a sudden shift in major species without any obvious change in the forest, are unpredictable.
After the catastrophic event, what then? Will nature run things back to the beginning so sometime later it can all happen again? The answer is yes and no. Sometimes forest succession after fire is reasonably predictable. If the soils remain unaffected, a predictable sequence of trees and other plants will grow again, reconstructing the forest of old.
In other circumstances, however, the system will flip out into something new. Conditions may have changed. Maybe after a forest fire, topsoil has eroded away, or without the insulation of trees, permafrost rebounds upward to preclude tree growth ever again. Or after a temporary cessation of moose browsing, a generation of saplings has grown permanently inaccessible.
Then, new ecosystem models run off the assembly line of time — new combinations of species, different adaptive responses, novel ways to survive.
IN A BROAD north-south band just east of the central crest of Algonquin Park, we came to know five wolf packs: Little Branch, East Gate, Annie Bay, Lavieille, and Charles Creek. These were the transition wolves, familiar with both the tolerant hardwoods of the west and the pine-poplar forests of the east.
Across their lands, going east, the subtle interplay of rain, snow, humidity, and soils shifts the forest from one type to another. The transition is discreetly achieved, with just a touch more poplar at first, or more pine, then less sugar maple and yellow birch. The hardwoods slip away as if a magician passed his hand across the forest. This change-over reflects a distant geological past, ancient, naked mountains there long before life left the seas. Now, the remnant dome of low, gently rolling land is still high enough to wring moisture out of air masses moving in from the northwest, leaving the eastside forests marginally drier. Coupled with shallow or sandy soils, the legacy of glacial outwash, the ecosystem responds with a cast of more drought-tolerant players.
To the large mammal system, the forest shift is of little consequence. Poplar and red maple are just as good moose and deer food as sugar maple and yellow birch. The small and finely adapted may feel the difference, but big animals tend towards greater generality, one key to their success. For wolves, as long as there are deer in the thickets and beaver in the ponds, they are all right.
The wolves across the dome gave us shreds and scraps of data. Although we studied them less intensively than wolves of the northwest or the east, without them, some pieces of the ecological puzzle would have been missing. Without them, too, wolves would be receiving less protection in Algonquin Park today. And they provided us with an ecosystem history, an all-important time-depth perspective. These packs or their forerunners lived in Doug Pimlott’s “primary study area” during his years of wolf research from 1959 to 1963. I had known some of them as a student. Back then, the forest and its prey base were very different.
Some packs were primarily Graham’s, especially Little Branch, although at times Mary and I filled in with summer howling to find them. The Little Branch pack occupied the southern portion of the park, living in the two townships that hang down on the map like an inert pendulum, one below the other. Its territory extended beyond the pendulum on the east side. The pack paid a price for that.
These two townships, Bruton and Clyde, were added to Algonquin Park only in 1961, sixty-eight years after the park was established. To try to please everyone, the government of the day allowed hunting and trapping to continue. Already, Algonquin native people held trapping rights throughout the eastern one-third of the park, but in Bruton and Clyde, trapping rights were extended to white trappers too.
Graham collared a Little Branch wolf very early in the study on August 30, 1987. The next autumn, two West Virginian hunters arrived at a hunting lodge near the town of Whitney. Non-resident hunters are drawn to our frontier for the spring and fall black bear hunts. Part of the package for the Virginians included the services of a resident guide who had prepared the site. He had baited it during much of the late summer and early fall with meat scraps or day-old doughnuts and constructed a platform up in a tree for the hunters to wait on.
Baiting bears, deer, and waterfowl like this is legal in Ontario but not in many states, although there are some regulations affecting how you do it to waterfowl. Calling moose, placing out scents, chasing with dogs — all are legitimate. Little Branch 1 took the bait. The hunting lodge reported the success. Why not? It was perfectly legal. The hunters took Little Branch 1’s pelt back home to show the boys.
A second member of the Little Branch pack was collared in May 1988. Like
Little Branch 1, this wolf was an adult male. He managed to live only seven months more, then one January day Graham heard his signal from the air on mortality mode. The wolf was located well within the park, near the centre of his territory. Although the Cessna was on skis, there was no lake large enough to land on nearby. It was late May before Graham finally reached him and found a pile of fur and bones lying under a dangling wire neck snare. The local white trapper had not even bothered to check his sets.
In the official master plan for Algonquin Park, approved in 1975, is the statement that in Bruton and Clyde townships, “All species of Park furbearers, with the exception of timber wolves, may be trapped.” Park officials were ignoring their own directive and allowing trappers to kill wolves there, as many wolves as they wanted — just like they can on land outside the park.
Graham met with park officials, armed with photos of the dangling snare and a copy of their park management plan. The statement in the plan could no longer be ignored. Soon after, the MNR applied a zero quota for wolves to all white trappers in the park.
Of course the action raised a protest. At the MNR’s request, Graham attended a meeting of local trappers to explain our research. Tempers flared, and local newspapers carried complaints that wolves would eat all the beaver. That was only a minor skirmish compared to the battles that lay ahead, and it blew over — in part. The part that did not blow over was the now-aroused attentiveness of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters. This large federation seems to protest any erosion of hunting, fishing, or trapping rights on behalf of local rod and gun clubs scattered throughout the province. We would hear from them again.
Abutting the northwest corner of the Little Branch pack’s territory, at the base of the pendulum, lies the territory of the Louisa pack. As a student I knew this area well; the Louisa pack provided my first wild wolf experiences, including the first howls I ever heard. This pack’s responses lay the groundwork for the annual parkwide howling surveys I participated in for Doug Pimlott and my master’s research on the meaning in wolf howls.
Back then, the Louisa pack lived in a landscape of mostly hardwood cut-over, a sad example of “high grading” where all the marketable trees were taken with little regard for the future stand. I remember a forest made up primarily of big, gnarled yellow birches, magnificent giants too bent or rotten for the mill. They were the last of a generation. Nobody in Ontario has the nerve to say that yellow birch has been managed under “sustained yield.” Tiny, trident-shaped yellow birch seeds need to land on a mineral soil to germinate. Instead, in stands with sugar maple, the seeds encounter a blanket of fall leaves. The millions of seeds from these giant trees lie all over the previous autumn’s leaf-litter and rot. Yellow birch needs ground fire to prepare a seed bed, or soil scarification such as happens accidentally in log skidways or landings.
In contrast, maple seeds are large and fleshy with stored carbohydrates that allow them to send a radicle rootlet to penetrate the fallen leaves and jump-start a new generation. Without fire, maples will claim these stands.
Other species gun for yellow birches too. Sapsuckers, attracted to the heavy run of spring sap, drill holes that provide easy access for the spores of bracket fungi that, in turn, clog the water transport system with hyphae. Seedlings have to live in fear of browsing deer. The 150-year-old yellow birch giants were products of a time when there was a much smaller, or non-existent, deer population in the early 1800s.
I also remember old stables, and manure piles not yet rotted away — remnants of horse-logging, the end of an era. It was harder work to skid logs that way than with the mechanical “bush pigs” of today, but horse hooves were gentler on the forest than lug-and-chain tires.
We would have enjoyed canoeing Harry and Rence lakes again, searching for wolves and trying to raise a howl from the Galipo marshes, but we were not destined to work long in the Louisa area. Like the Daventry wolf, Louisa 1 was a data failure. She managed to slip her collar and leave it lying on mortality mode among the trees. After that we left; our study area was just too big to handle the pendulum too.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
McDonald 7 Basin, an immigrant into the decimated Basin Depot pack, became alpha-female and raised litters from 1995 to 1997.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Basin 14 successfully raised the pups after his mate of three years, Macdonald 7 Basin, died in August 1997.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Basin 3 Foys, alpha-female in the Foys Lake pack, had a deformed hind leg that caused a permanent limp.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Basin 4 McDonald, alpha-male of the McDonald Creek pack, was the largest wolf of the study at 44 kilograms (97 pounds).
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Redpole 3 was born in 1991 into the Redpole pack. He was still with the pack when recollared in 1996.
CATCHING AND COLLARING WOLVES
John weighs Mathews 11, an adult male shot the following March (1997).
CATCHING AND COLLARING WOLVES
Mary with Jocko 4, whose collar failed.
Graham Forbes with Annie Bay 3, a long-lived wolf, grandmother of Jocko 11, 12, and 13.
Our field crew, summer 1988, included (left to right) Carolyn Callaghan, Graham Forbes, Harry Vogel, Jenny, Mary, and Michelle.
TRACKING WOLVES
Mary prepares for a telemetry flight with volunteer pilot Hank Halliday.
TRACKING WOLVES
A typical Algonquin landscape, viewed from the air. Sec Lake is in the foreground.
TRACKING WOLVES
Mary radio-tracking.
Another Algonquin scene. A beaver dam caused the Bonnechere River to widen where we often camped.
Jenny howls to locate the Nahma pack, summer 1988.
WOLF COUNTRY
A typical summer rendezvous site.
WOLF COUNTRY
Basin Depot pack’s den in 1996 was used only once, then flooded out by a beaver dam the following spring.
Poplar and red maple take the place of pine after the area has been logged in the Bonnechere Valley.
The growth of red maple is slowed by moose and deer browsing.
A young bull and cow moose make an appearance.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
A young wolf in the Foys Lake pack, born in 1990, daughter of Basin 3 Foys.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Jocko 11, a yearling male, son of Jocko 10, born in 1996.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
McDonald 8 wandered widely for a year before returning to his natal McDonald Creek pack to become the alpha-male.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Jocko 13, a yearling female, daughter of Jocko 10.
WOLVES WE HAVE KNOWN
Jocko 10, alpha-male of the Jocko Lake pack, usurped his father’s dominant position.
Northeast of the Little Branch territory lay the land of the East Gate pack, so named because the extreme eastern corner of its territory extended just beyond the East Gate of the park — a mistake in judgement on the pack’s part. The East Gate wolves lived mainly in pine-poplar forests, not quite reaching the sugar maples to the west.
This pack was not remote. The park’s major highway bisected the northern quarter of its territory, and one major public campground lay within it. Thousands of people have heard the pack howl on wolf-howling nights run by park interpreters. These wolves have been tolerant of repeated human demands that they perform.
In 1987, the pack contained eight wolves, two of whom we radio-collared. Graham saw the pack occasionally from the air and, once, while ground tracking at Rock Lake found them on a deer. They spotted him watching from the barren lake-edge alders; agitated, they barked at him and ran back and forth trying to get a better look.
Occasionally they left their tracks in the snow up on Bluebird Lake to the northeast, and it took us a while to figure out that another pack hadn’t made them. Back in Pimlott’s days, a separate pack had lived there, but territories had shifted since then. W
olves don’t leave fences or land deeds, only tradition, which is sufficient unless too many elders die. Here, the original wolves had died, non-consenting subjects of a research decision in 1963 to kill them to assess the age structure of the population. Attitudes have changed; such a decision would be impossible today.
Or would it? It is still acceptable for wolves to be trapped if they step outside the park. In the fall of 1988, a young radio-collared East Gate male dispersed to the northeast, perhaps looking for a mate. He was snared four months later in Alice Township, eighty kilometres away. Then in March 1989 the whole East Gate pack ventured just beyond the park to the edge of the town of Whitney — a fatal move. Four of them strangled in neck snares. When the ice broke up on Bluebird Lake that spring, only three East Gate wolves remained.
Late in April, these survivors found a highway-killed moose that road workers had dragged into the trees. We set traps, hoping to collar a remaining wolf and follow its fate. One evening we sat in our truck on the shoulder of the highway near the carcass listening for howls. Wood frogs were calling from the lake margins and a saw-whet owl repeated its single note from a distance. Warm air was sending lingering ice tinkling on its way. Suddenly we were aware of a tap-tap-tap — wolf toenails on pavement. The wolf walked right past the truck, intent on the moose meat it knew was in the trees. We watched its shadowy form climb the bank and disappear.