Wolf Country Read online

  We have considered various possible interpretations of the event. If Mary had not stood up, we might have known what the wolf intended — an experimental error on her part. Likely the wolf had been sleeping very close to the tent and, hearing movement, either thought it was a member of its pack or a deer. Its high, bounding leaps were typical of a wolf’s approach to both. Perhaps it did not know what had made the noise and would have responded appropriately at the last instant. Or, maybe being the same wolf that almost walked into us the day before, it was not at the head of its class.

  The incident was the stuff that reported wolf attacks are made of, but, of course, it was not.

  The trains were not the sole source of human-killed moose. With a change in provincial governments in 1992 came a political decision to give the Golden Lake native people hunting rights to moose and deer on the eastern third of the park. They are allowed to use trucks, all-terrain vehicles, and snowmobiles anywhere they wish. The decision was made without any consideration of its environmental and biological impacts. Conservation organizations objected, and so did I in the Toronto Globe and Mail. To the extent that land is used and wildlife exploited inside the park the same way it is outside, there is no reason to have a park at all. However, despite our objections, a new predator entered Algonquin’s large mammal system.

  One January day during the first winter of native people hunting the unsuspecting and relatively tame park moose, we followed the signal of Jack Pine 3 down a snowy logging road grooved with fresh truck tracks. Three kilometres along, the tracks stopped, and a crimson trail of blood led from there to a moose carcass. Its legs had been axed off at the knees and piled together, and its head and a gut pile lay nearby.

  More than one hundred butchered remains of moose, and possibly even more of deer, are laid out in the park each fall and early winter by native hunters. Undoubtedly the wolves welcome this unexpected food source, but it is unclear how it changes their pattern of movements in this season when they are adjusting to the onset of the annual deer migration. It further erodes the functioning of the park as a natural place.

  In mid-December 1995, graduate student John Pisapio flew the circuit of collared packs accompanied by Jenny, home from her grizzly research in Alberta. They reported Jack Pine 8 on mortality mode. On the next flight, John found Jack Pine 3 on mortality as well, about six kilometres from her mate. We had lost both alpha animals; as it turned out, the whole pack except Jack Pine 7 was gone.

  Snows had come early and heavy that year, so retrieving the dead wolves was not easy. On a grey, late-December day, Mary, Jenny, Michelle, and I tried to reach Jack Pine 8 with two snowmobiles borrowed from the MNR. The snow was deep, trackless, and powder all the way to the ground. We lost speed on the slightest rise, gunning to a snow-grinding halt where the snowmobiles commenced to dig themselves down. We lifted, shovelled, pushed, lifted, shovelled. Mary and Jenny even tried snowshoeing ahead to make a trail, and while that helped, even a slight mound of snow would edge the snowmobile off its centre of balance. When the driver tried to correct for that, it tipped farther until it capsized.

  We made only eight kilometres in six hours. By then it was dark and the temperature was dropping, chilling us in our sweat-soaked clothes. The wolf was still three kilometres away, so we turned around, with difficulty, and headed home — all the way home for Christmas.

  On December 28, cold and sunny, we returned to try again accompanied by forest technicians Tom Stephenson and Colin Fabian. With no snow over the Christmas period, this time the trail was broken most of the way. Where we left the truck, we could hear Jack Pine 7’s distant signal, and all the way along our old snowmobile trail we could see a fresh set of wolf prints, likely hers.

  We zipped down to Dusk Lake, crossed a bay, and parked, not trusting the ice any farther. Then we snowshoed across the lake and into the woods where I made an energy-draining miscalculation. A steep hill rose from the shore, difficult to climb in the deep snow. I was concerned that we might be following a deflection in the signal, but could not be sure until we got to the top. For almost an hour we struggled uphill, confirmed that we were going the wrong way, then made our way back down. Jack Pine 8 was in thick lowland conifers close to the lake.

  What we found was a shock. The wolf was on top of the snowpack, so he must have died after mid-December when the last snows fell. He was frozen solid, legs extended, but his body cavity had been opened, and, more significantly, when we turned him over we found that one shoulder and foreleg had been eaten off. Wolf tracks were there, one set leading out on the lake, the same set we had followed in from the main road. Ravens had been at the carcass too, and maybe a fox. No fisher tracks were evident, an animal that might be able to turn over a wolf carcass. We concluded that this was a case of wolf cannibalism.

  It is tempting to apply human values to nature, but ethics prohibiting human cannibalism are our own constructs. In a non-human context, especially when killing is not involved, cannibalism may be adaptive. Regardless of the cause of death, Jack Pine 7 had been left alone, packless as it turned out, and likely in a difficult situation. The deer had all left the Jack Pine territory, and the severe cold had driven the beaver into their lodges. Under such conditions, natural selection would favour cannibalism over starvation.

  We tied a rope to Jack Pine 8, dragged him back to the snowmobiles, lashed him on a sled, and trucked him home. In early January, John and Colin retrieved Jack Pine 3. They had to shovel for her; she had died in mid-November, just before the heavy snows.

  Veterinarian Doug Campbell performed the autopsies a few weeks later. Lying on the stainless-steel table next to Jack Pine 3 was the body of her mate. These two wolves were the only ones in the entire study for whom Doug, Ian Barker, or the other veterinarians could not determine any certain cause of death. Both wolves were in excellent condition with plenty of body fat. Neither wolf hosted any unusual parasites. Lab results for canine hepatitis, the only viral disease that would not have shown obvious symptoms, came back negative. Rabies checked out negative. Strychnine was negative. Antifreeze, sometimes used as a poison, leaves crystals of glycol in the kidneys that were not present. The only clues were a bruised leg with internal bleeding and some blood in Jack Pine 3’s urine. Rodenticide poisons cause both disorientation, which may have accounted for the leg injury, and internal bleeding, which may have affected the urine. By process of elimination, poison became a suspected but unconfirmed cause of death.

  After the deaths of Jack Pine 3 and Jack Pine 8, John made a special effort to aerial-track Jack Pine 7, the remaining collared wolf, and repeatedly confirmed that she was alone. In the summer of 1996, Mary and I drove through the old Jack Pine territory past Dawn and Dusk lakes. The forest looked the same, but the heart of the wild was gone, or maybe its soul. No wolf tracks embossed the sandy road. No use getting out to howl. No use turning on the receiver in hopes of hearing a signal. We missed the Jack Pine pack like you miss a friend.

  But there is more to tell, and it centres on the one remaining wolf.

  Jack Pine 7

  She was the daughter of Jack Pine 3. For a while, dispersal clearly was on her mind; she made forays into the territories of adjacent packs, but never stayed long.

  One cold March day in 1994 while the Jack Pine pack was still alive, we heard her signal well beyond her territory on land that once belonged to the Grand Lake East pack but was vacant. Carrying our snowshoes, we hiked the railway towards her. She was still ahead, down Stratton Lake, so we continued until we judged we were opposite her, then dropped down into the shoreline trees. There she was, by herself, trotting down the centre of the lake towards a dark object on the ice. When she got there, she nosed around it for a few minutes, then hoisted it up to reveal that it was the vertebral column and remaining ribs of a deer, picked clean. Carrying it in her mouth, she trotted to the far shore, disappeared, then a few minutes later re-emerged minus her booty and continued down the lake. Had she made the kill alone and was revisiting it, o
r had she made it with her pack, or was she examining a kill that other wolves had made? Anyhow, she was making no efforts to stay concealed.

  Whatever her plans to disperse, they changed late in 1995 when, at two and a half years of age, she became orphaned. Within a month the Pretty Lake pack, next door, realized the Jack Pine pack was gone and enlarged its boundaries to take in about one-third of the Jack Pine range. At first, Jack Pine 7 seemed to keep her distance from the invading Pretty Lake wolves, but then, one March day, she was with them. The Pretty Lake wolves seemed to have taken over not only Jack Pine’s land but the remaining wolf as well.

  Pretty 6, particularly, showed an interest in her, so much that by the denning season, in April and May, they were constantly together. They stayed mostly on the west side of the Jack Pine territory while the rest of the Pretty Lake pack stayed to the east. It seemed like his pack was giving him room to help re-establish a Jack Pine pack. At that time, he was at least a four-year-old wolf.

  That entire summer, Jack Pine 7 and Pretty 6 were inseparable. The field crew suspected they knew the location of the den, and in midsummer after the wolf pair had moved elsewhere, Mary and I took a bearing and hiked in. The sand that John had seen from the air and suspected was a mound in front of the den turned out to be only a patch in the middle of an old log landing still unclaimed by sweet ferns and grass.

  By late summer, it was clear that they had no pups. If they had mated and denned, it had been a failure. Still they were always together, by then claiming almost all the old Jack Pine territory, although they tolerated a few intrusions by the Pretty Lake pack and vice versa.

  Then, in December 1996, Jack Pine 7 lost her new companion under strange circumstances. John pinpointed Pretty 6’s signal on mortality mode coming from a dense stand of conifers just south of the recently abandoned railway. He made a trip to recover the wolf but could not find her even though the signal showed he was in the right place.

  On a cold, blustery day, Mary and I gave it a try. We hiked down the track and into the conifers until we got to a place where a few steps one way would put the signal behind us and a few steps the other way would do the same. We shovelled for two hours, eventually clearing a huge area right down to the frozen mosses. We both tried the receiver and repeatedly returned to the centre of our excavation. We pounded out frozen roots with the shovel and tore up rotten logs and still could not find the collar.

  Finally I climbed a spruce tree in the centre of our excavation, because the collar could be nowhere else. After breaking ice-coated limbs I saw it almost at the top, cradled against the trunk in a tangle of branches. When I reached it, my bare hands were numb. Mary gathered twigs and started a fire, and it took a painful ten minutes to thaw them out.

  The collar was still bolted up. No blood or tissue clung to it, nor was it badly chewed. Certainly a wolf had not deposited it in the tree. No human had climbed up because that was impossible without breaking branches. Our best guess is that a fisher was responsible, or a raven.

  Now Jack Pine 7 was alone again, for the second winter in a row. For a while she wandered outside the park, then back on territory. The day after we retrieved Pretty 6’s collar she was at Dusk Lake, and, close by, we were surprised to find four trespassing wolves from the Northeast pack. As it turned out, these wolves were doing more than trespassing; they were taking over the territory Could they have been responsible for Pretty 6’s death?

  Jack Pine 7 left the park again the next day, alone. In the farmlands, she formed an alliance with four other wolves of unknown origin, but she must have been thinking about home because in late February she returned to the southeastern fringe of her territory. John saw her there, lying on the ice of Loonskin Lake with a new potential mate, Travers 8, only two metres away.

  Travers 8 was a thirty-two-kilogram (seventy-pound) male, between three and five years old based on our incisor-wear index. He seemed like a suitable suitor. On the capture form, however, students Doerte Poszig and Jennifer Neate noted some scars, clotted blood, and new hair growing in various places on his body, as if he had been in fights at different times with other wolves. Since collaring, he had been wandering to the west beyond our study area. This was the first time he had showed up all winter.

  But tragedy struck again. The night after John saw Jack Pine 7 on Loonskin Lake, she travelled more than fifty kilometres out of the park. Travers 8 did not accompany her. We pieced together the events after a long snowmobile trip to retrieve his body.

  Travers 8 must still have been on or near Loonskin Lake with Jack Pine 7 when three wolves appeared and attacked — that must be why Jack Pine 7 left again so soon and travelled so far so fast. The three wolves chased Travers 8 in a straight line for three kilometres — that, in any event, is how we interpreted the tracks leading from the kill site. They ran across frozen beaver ponds, down through thick conifers littered with broken branches, up one near-vertical ridge until finally, in a log landing dotted with young red pine, the chasing wolves flanked him. They killed him with little struggle. A later autopsy showed that one wolf had grabbed his throat, another his chest. His lung collapsed and he was dead.

  Every mate of Jack Pine 7’s seemed to die mysteriously. Who did it? We cannot be sure but again suspected the Northeast pack. The following day, John found them from the air at Greenleaf Lake only four kilometres from the kill site. For some time they had been focusing much of their activity in this southeast corner of the land they had usurped from Jack Pine 7.

  Why hadn’t the Northeast pack accepted Jack Pine 7 as the Pretty Lake pack had done the year before? The answer may lie in some subtle difference in social context. Or perhaps the Northeast wolves are just aggressive by nature. In Yellowstone National Park, biologist Doug Smith tells of the Druid pack that seems to have an inclination for killing wolves from other packs rather than passively defending its land.

  During the remainder of the winter, the crew occasionally found Jack Pine 7 with one or two other wolves outside the park, twice at deer kills. When melting spring snows brought the deer back into the park, she returned too, possibly alone. She stayed clear of the Northeast pack in her former territory, crossing the Petawawa River that had formed her western boundary and settling next to her usurped land in a very small wedge of Travers pack land, as if hoping not to be discovered. Then, in July, she went off the air. If she had died, we would have heard her signal on mortality mode. Either her collar went dead prematurely or, landless, she dispersed. We still have her frequency programmed on our receivers, hoping to find her.

  In summer 1997, students Lou Chora and Willie Hollett recollared the former Northeast pack wolf still in the Jack Pine territory, his new land. They collared the other three wolves as well, one a daughter confirmed by genetics, one an unrelated adult female, and one the lactating alpha-female, and they found her den. Back in the Northeast territory itself, north of the Petawawa River, there was another pack, and it also produced pups. So, apparently the Northeast pack had split, one part staying, the other taking over the Jack Pine territory. Here was a new social twist in the wolf’s wide array of adaptive strategies. Although we had recorded permanent pack-splitting at Grand Lake, that case only involved re-allocation of land within the pack’s territory This time, part of a pack went in search of a new territory and appears to have used force to get it.

  Now, a new, unrelated Jack Pine pack holds the land. But that is not all; across a broad sweep of central Algonquin Park, in other surrounding packs, original Jack Pine genes live on.

  TRANSIENT KINGDOMS

  Turf Wars

  The territorial imperative is deeply ingrained in the animal psyche, especially in birds and mammals, including us. Because of it, we nail up no-trespassing signs, build fences, arm nations, and fight wars. Often, in both individuals and groups, it is an expression of selfishness and aggression — not a value judgement but a biological truth. Always, it has survival value.

  In its simplest terms, territorial behaviour confines the
movements of an animal, or a social group such as a pack of wolves, to a particular locality where it enjoys exclusive use. But that definition hides complexity.

  Considerable research and debate centre upon two competing ideas about the function of territorial behaviour. According to one theory, it acts to space animals out so that resources are shared equitably by all members of a population. According to the other, it acts to limit the size of a population to the “haves” — the bigger, stronger, or the first there — who exclude the “have-nots.” Those excluded from prime habitat either die or produce fewer young. Both outcomes are prejudicial to the future of their genes.

  The population-limiting function makes more sense, because in times of severe resource shortage, a system of merely parcelling out available resources may spell doom for all. But it is difficult to obtain field evidence to establish territorial exclusion, a good example of simple experimental difficulties that sometimes restrict what science can explain. You have to first find individuals that are clearly excluded from the population; secondly, determine that the aggressive behaviour of territory holders caused the exclusion; and thirdly — the acid test — determine that if those territory holders were not there, the excluded animals would become territory holders and breeders instead.

  In only a handful of studies have these requirements been met: song sparrows in British Columbia, white-crowned sparrows in California, magpies in Australia, red grouse in Scotland, and a few others. So, which of the two possible functions of territories predominates is still not clear.

  A defining feature of territorial behaviour is defence, which implies aggression. Not all aggression is overt: ritualized, passive aggression may serve the same evolutionary function, although from the observer’s point of view, it is harder to detect. It is safer for an animal to defend land with posture, bluff, and ferocious appearance than to get in a fight and risk being killed. On the one hand, passive aggression explains the evolution of much that seems excessive and flamboyant in nature: gaudy colours, crests, plumes, horns, antlers, and dramatic display behaviour. On the other hand, some expressions of aggression are exceedingly subtle, such as a direct stare or tail or body position.