Praise for Among Wolves

“This book, compiling Gordon Haber's lifetime dedication to studying and protecting wolves, is an immensely important addition to the literature. He knew each one as an individual, observed the disruption of social bonds every time a pack member was killed. Gordon was a hero, and I am sure the wolves howled when his plane crashed—animals know.”

—Jane Goodall, PhD, DBE; founder of the Jane Goodall Institute; UN Messenger of Peace

“Among Wolves is a bargain price for a ticket on an incredible-boots-on-the-ground and camera-in-the-cockpit science journey over thousands of miles with the late Dr. Gordon Haber. From his daily diary and remarkable pictures of years of hard-nosed research in and around Denali National Park, you will learn about and see into the lives'—and deaths—of America's most iconic and misunderstood wildlife: the wolf and its family. Your heart will reach out to the stories of bonding between mates and families as they raise pups and travel in groups to hunt and survive in a brutal landscape and environment. You will laugh at the teasing ravens after your heart goes up in your throat reading about and seeing the encounters of competing for food with brown bears. And your heart will be saddened by the human encounters where, tragically, too often those entrusted by the public with ethical and scientific management have failed. Author Marybeth Holleman, an Alaskan who knows the country, will take you on a white knuckle trip that will thrill you, sometimes make you angry and would have made Gordon Haber proud. This book is a powerful, moving, and fascinating read. An education and wildlife adventure all in one. Enjoy the ride.”

—Tony Knowles, governor of Alaska 1994–2002

“Among Wolves is an important contribution to wolf literature and a fitting tribute to Gordon Haber. Artfully framed by Marybeth Holleman, Among Wolves captures the passion, brilliance, and clarity that was Haber. But most important of all, this compelling, accessible volume showcases Gordon Haber's life's work among the wolves of Denali National Park.”

—Nick Jans, author of The Glacier Wolf and A Wolf Called Romeo

“This fascinating compilation of iconoclastic wolf biologist Gordon Haber's science, field notes, and photographs is deeply enriched by Marybeth Holleman's insights into the man, his wisdom, and the sociopolitical context for his work. This courageous book eloquently reminds us of the critical importance of understanding wolf culture.”

—Cristina Eisenberg, author of The Wolf's Tooth and The Carnivore Way

“I first met Gordon in Denali in 1976 and had a great relationship with him through my fifteen summers in Denali. I always admired his dedication to field work and his fierce advocacy for wolves…. Now the findings of his ground-breaking, long-term field research on wild wolves are available to everyone in a very readable form. Marybeth Holleman has done a great and valuable service in preserving Gordon's legacy for other wolf researchers, wolf advocates and everyone that cares about wolves and wildlife. I highly recommend this book for any one who really wants to understand wolves.”

—Rick McIntyre, naturalist, wolf researcher, and author of A Society of Wolves and War Against the Wolf

“Our relationships with other animals are challenging, complex, frustrating, and paradoxical, and far too often our selfish and uninformed interests trump theirs. Predators such as wolves often receive the most negative attention by people who conveniently blame them for all the wrongs in the world and who also ignore scientific research about these magnificent animals and their essential role for maintaining the integrity of diverse ecosystems. Dr. Gordon Haber focused most of his life on learning about wolves and trying to protect them from being wantonly and horrifically killed. He called attention to how their ruthless slaughter destroyed not only individual lives and the way in which pack members lived and thrived but also the health of the ecosystems in which they evolved. He recognized wolves as individuals and as members of family groups and unrelentingly worked on their behalf. His passion was contagious, and whether you agree or disagree with his unbounded advocacy, this book is essential reading for learning about these most remarkable animals.”

—Marc Bekoff, author and editor of The Ten Trusts (with Jane Goodall), The Emotional Lives of Animals, and Animals Matter

AMONG WOLVES

Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal

Dr. Gordon Haber and Marybeth Holleman

UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS

FAIRBANKS, ALASKA

SNOWY OWL BOOKS

an imprint of the University of Alaska Press

© 2013 University of Alaska Press

All rights reserved

University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haber, Gordon C.

Among wolves : Gordon Haber's insights into Alaska's most misunderstood animal / by Dr. Gordon Haber and Marybeth Holleman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60223-218-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60223-219-8 (electronic book)

1. Haber, Gordon C. 2. Wolves--Alaska. 3. Naturalists--Alaska--Biography. I. Holleman, Marybeth. II. Title. III. Title: Gordon Haber's insights into Alaska's most misunderstood animal.

QL737.C22H315 2013

599.77309798--dc23

2012049307

Text design by Dixon J. Jones, Rasmuson Library Graphics

Layout by Natalie Taylor

Printed in the United States

for the wolves

CONTENTS

Color plates

INTRODUCTION

Scientist and Advocate for Alaska's Wolves

The First Two Years of Life of an Alaska Wolf

CHAPTER 1

My Good Fortune: Working among Alaska's Wolves

Snapshot: Savage River Wolves—Gary Baker

Snapshot: Flying Gordon—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 2

The Heart of Wolf Society: Wolf Family Bonds

Snapshot: First Snow—Johnny Johnson

Snapshot: A True Field Scientist—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 3

A New Biological Year: Attending Young Pups

Snapshot: Teklanika Den—Karen Deatherage

CHAPTER 4

It Takes a Family: Raising Pups Cooperatively

Snapshot: Son—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 5

Going with the Flow: The Daily Lives of Wolves

Snapshot: Just One More Turn—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 6

Why Wolves Howl: The Many Social Values

Snapshot: A Sign of Intelligence—Johnny Johnson

Snapshot: Passing By—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 7

Hunting Traditions: Wolves, Their Prey, and Scavenging

Snapshot: Pups at a Sheep Kill—Priscilla Feral

CHAPTER 8

Toklat's Switch to Hares: Survivors Seize an Opportunity

Snapshot: Toklat's Hare Hunting—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 9

Companions and Competitors: Ravens, Bears, and Other Wildlife

Snapshot: Wolves with Bears—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 10

Natural Fearlessness: Wolves and People in Denali National Park

Snapshot: Dr. Gordon Haber—Jonathan B. Jarvis

Snapshot: The Hamburger Drop—Johnny Johnson

CHAPTER 11

Park Wolves in Danger: The Denali Buffer Solution

Journal Notes: State-Snared Wolves

Snapshot: This Guy Is Hard Core—Joel Bennett

Snapshot: Mortality Call—Barbara Brease

CHAPTER 12

Science Gone Awry: Alaska's Wolf-Killing Programs

Journal Notes: Snowmachine Hunt

Snapshot: Wolf Summit—Priscilla Feral

Snapshot: Picking Pilots—Troy Dunn

CHAPTER 13

Endangered Species: The Problem with Delisting Northern Rockies Wolves

Snapshot: Scientist as Advocate—Rick Steiner

CHAPTER 14

Toklat's High Value: The Case for Unexploited Wolf Groups

Snapshot: Last Phone Call—Barbara Brease

Significant Findings of Gordon Haber's Wolf Research

EPILOGUE

From Bad to Worse: An Update on Haber's Wolves

References

Acknowledgments

Index

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery.

—LOIS CRISLER

INTRODUCTION

SCIENTIST AND ADVOCATE FOR ALASKA'S WOLVES

IN OCTOBER 2009, ALONG THE EAST FORK RIVER IN Denali National Park, Dr. Gordon Haber's research plane crashed into the mountains. In one tragic moment, the life of Alaska's most renowned wolf biologist came to an abrupt end, and Alaska's wolves lost their fiercest and most knowledgeable advocate.

Gordon Haber first came to Denali in 1966, a twenty-four-year-old eager to experience Alaska's wilderness. He landed a summer job as a ranger-naturalist at Eielson Visitor Center, but it was the wolves that kept him there. For the next forty-three years, until the plane crash took his life, he devoted himself to learning all he could about the wolves of Denali National Park and Preserve. Among Wolves: The Work and Times of Dr. Gordon Haber reveals how Dr. Haber came to devote his life to Denali's wolves, how he survived adventures in the wild and in the halls of Alaska's institutions, and—most important—what he learned about the lives of wild wolves.

Dr. Haber's work with Denali's wolves expanded on the work of Dr. Adolph Murie, renowned author of The Wolves of Mount McKinley. Their combined work provides more than seventy years of continuous research on some of the world's most famous and most often seen wolf families—one of the longest predator-prey studies in wildlife science. Haber's wolf research is as groundbreaking, intimate, and thorough as Murie's, but he didn't stop there: Haber also spent much of his adult life trying to protect Denali's and Alaska's wolves. As early as 1972, he wrote a report explaining why the state of Alaska should establish a buffer zone along the east boundary of the national park, in the sliver of state land called the Wolf Townships or Stampede Trail, to protect wolf groups most often seen by park visitors from being hunted and trapped there in winter. The debate on this buffer has been one of the most controversial wildlife conservation issues in Alaska.

Driving Questions, Significant Findings

Two questions drive this book. First, what truths about the lives of Denali's wolves, and the impacts of human exploitation, did this detailed, long-term research reveal? And second, what compels individuals to stick to their work and ideals when they are continually met with resistance from all sides—not just hunters and trappers, but also state and federal officials, and even other wolf biologists? At least part of the answer to the second question, said Johnny Johnson, who first met Haber in 1968, when both worked as rangers in Denali, is that “Gordon loved a good debate.” Haber's pilot Troy Dunn once asked him, “Gordon, why do you argue so much?” Haber replied, “How else can I make sure I'm right?” Therein lies the essence of a true scientist. But a larger part of the answer to the second question comes from the answer to the first—from what he observed, day in and day out, in his field work with wolves. This on-the-ground experience provided Haber with a level of understanding about wolves, and about the larger ecosystem of which they are a part, that few others have possessed.

His most significant finding was this: the basic social structure of wolves is their family group, within which some individuals have critical roles. By fragmenting these family structures through indiscriminate hunting and trapping, humans do far more damage than just killing a few wolves. Removal of particular individuals can cause the extinction of unique behaviors critical to the function and cohesion of the family group, ultimately leading to its disintegration. Alaska's predator management—from the controversial aerial predator control program to the trapping of individual wolves along national park boundaries—is harmful not just to wolf populations, but to the very moose, caribou, and sheep that Alaskan hunters wish to multiply. In essence, hunting and trapping of wolves is harmful to the ecosystem itself. This understanding drove Haber's desire to seek justice for a species that he said “enlivened the entire landscape.”

Haber's wolf work didn't stop at Denali's boundaries. He spent several years studying wolf-moose interactions in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan; he was a National Park Service scientific advisor for the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and remained involved with debates about hunting wolves outside Yellowstone's boundaries; he was a scientific advisor to the Alaska Wolf Management Planning Team; and he studied the wolf-caribou interactions of Alaska's Fortymile caribou herd east of Fairbanks, in particular certain family groups that ranged between Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve and state lands. He became a world-renowned wolf expert, but all of it was rooted in the intricate social dynamics he learned from Denali's wolves, especially from the Toklat and Savage River family groups.

The fundamental driving question of Haber's research was a clear continuation of Adolph Murie's: How do wolves and their prey behave and interact without interference from humans? He gathered information on wolf-bear-ungulate interactions to better understand the stability dynamics of the ecosystem as a whole. He was a leader in wildlife systems research, attempting to synthesize observations within a coherent systems framework. But because of the high numbers of Denali wolves trapped and hunted along the edges of the park boundaries in the Wolf Townships, he also strived to understand the effects of such exploitation on their social systems and the ecosystem in which they lived.

That he chose Denali National Park for his primary research is significant. The combined results of a century of research by Haber, Adolph Murie, and the National Park Service biologists have made Denali's ecosystem the best understood of its kind anywhere in the subarctic. Knowledge of Denali's wolves goes back even before Murie, to Charles Sheldon's natural history observations of 1906–1908 and the experiences of Frank Glaser, Alaska's first “wolf man,” who befriended and informed Murie at the beginning of his research. Haber believed that this continuous research—and the focus on the entire system, rather than on single species—was vital not only to the preservation of the Denali ecosystem, but to understanding similar ecosystems worldwide. He wanted his research to provide a lens through which people could marvel. This book exists to help fulfill that vision.

Commitment to His Calling

Haber's passion for wolves, wilderness, and northern ecosystems grew from a childhood spent in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and the wilds of Ontario. One of three children, Haber was always, says his sister Mary, bringing home wild animals that he'd rescued from surrounding bits of wildlands. During construction at his Detroit elementary school, a bulldozer destroyed a skunk home, killing all but one kit. Haber brought it home, and for months the family had a “pet” skunk.

His love of nature was fostered from the age of four, when the family spent summers at a cabin on Lake Huron, Ontario. On the shores of the lake, the family built a log cabin from trees off the lot, just as Haber would do later on his own land adjacent to Denali National Park. At the age of eighteen, for a writing assignment about his life's goals, he wrote that time at this cabin had developed his “strongest characteristic—a love of the outdoors.” Looking toward his adult life, he wrote, “I am decided on one factor, this being that I intend to live the major portion of my life either in or near the outdoors.”

During undergraduate studies at Michigan Tech, Haber answered President John F. Kennedy's call to hike and keep physically fit. Haber joined the national hiking craze for fifty-mile hikes—President Kennedy's revival of a marine fitness standard of hiking fifty miles in twenty-four hours made famous when Attorney General Robert Kennedy completed one himself. Twenty-year-old Haber hiked fifty-three miles of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula in eighteen hours, walking through a blizzard, minus-twenty-degree weather, and waist-high snowdrifts. In what now seems a foreshadowing of his passion for canids, he was accompanied for several miles by a band of coyotes that barked and trotted ahead of him.

The next year, he worked as a fire control aide at Isle Royale National Park. For saving his supervisor, who was being electrocuted by fallen power lines, he was awarded a Valor Award by then Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. The courage and single-mindedness he displayed in earning the award would be summoned many times as he did the work that called him in the hostile political climate of Alaska's wildlife management. For example, he continued to advocate for wildlife conservation policies based on his research despite the Alaska Board of Game and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) constantly rejecting his proposals. Not only did the state ignore his research, but many trappers and hunters openly despised him for his findings. And yet he continued.

He kept his life simple: a truck filled with his photography equipment and laptop, a small apartment cluttered with research papers and books in Anchorage for a few months a year, a storage unit with more books and papers and photographs, and a log cabin on thirty-three acres overlooking the Nenana River near the entrance to Denali National Park. His research notes were meticulous. In his cabin, he left behind three large boxes full of Rite in the Rain pads filled with notes taken from 1966 onward.

Consummate Field Scientist

Haber was a consummate scientist, making every conclusion based on hard data and having little patience for those who anthropomorphized wild animals, especially wolves. He strived to help others understand that wolves are sentient, interactive, social animals with real intelligence, not just data points or numbers in a scientific paper. About the systems thinking he espoused since completing his PhD dissertation in 1977, he wrote, “There is a critical need to look more at entire ecosystems rather than at the individual populations or species that comprise them. Natural systems are far trickier than we have supposed, and by looking primarily at pieces of these systems instead of the whole, we are easily misled by this trickery and end up overharvesting to the point where recovery may not occur for years or even decades.” Haber concluded that many of Alaska's moose and caribou populations were in this exact predicament.

His approach and methods were, to some, old-fashioned. Others, such as National Park Service biologist Tom Meier, admired Haber for “doing really tough and grueling work.” Rather than dart and radio-collar the wolves and then, from the comfort of a warm, dry office, chart their movements into a computer-generated set of data points, Haber studied wolves the way Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees, George Schaller the Himalayan bharal and snow leopards, and Dian Fossey mountain gorillas. He went into the field, to where they lived, and observed them; he hunkered down in a blind, he hiked or skied across tundra, he transected the park in a small plane in subzero weather. He spent large, uninterrupted periods of time among wolves.

In summer, he worked on foot, backpacking in to blinds to observe established dens and rendezvous sites. He was patient, sitting for nine or more hours a day, hoping for a chance to observe the wolves at the den, to record the emergence of the year's new pups, to document subtle interactions between family members. Winter required a different method, since the wolves traveled almost constantly. In the early years, he traveled into the park by snowshoe or skis, searching for wolf tracks. Later, he used a small fixed-wing aircraft, spending three to ten hours a day on flights. He flew low over Denali's tundra, looking for and then circling close overhead as the wolves padded across tundra, chased moose, and had stand-offs with brown bears. All the while, the wolves went about their daily lives, unconcerned by the large noisy bird overhead and unharmed by the scientist in that bird who devoted his life to learning about them.

His field notebooks show meticulous minute-by-minute observations not just of wolves but of every aspect of Denali: thunderstorms moving through, the timing of wildflower blooms, clusters of ptarmigan in fall, the scent of willow in springtime. In these notes he leaves behind an untapped wealth of information for scientists, naturalists, and lovers of wilderness. He recorded not just data but the wildness and beauty all around. There is no other such set of comprehensive scientific field notes collected over several decades from Denali National Park. This scientific approach—observing the study subject in the context of the entire ecosystem, and using nonintrusive, slow-paced, on-the-ground methods—may be increasing in popularity as researchers recognize the complexity of wildlife social dynamics and ecosystem interactions.

Piloting Dr. Haber

Haber's winter flights required exceptional piloting both because of the conditions around North America's highest peak and because of the difficulties of finding and then staying with wolves. Pilots had to fly at low altitudes over quickly rising terrain where turbulence and downdrafts were common. Gary Baker, who worked in Denali National Park during Haber's first summer and went on to make his living as a commercial pilot, said, “The weather up there gets your attention real quick.” Recalling a time he flew his own small plane near Mount McKinley, he said, “I went up from eight thousand feet to thirteen thousand feet quicker than you can blink. It was like riding an elevator, that altimeter just spinning.”

Haber worked with some of Alaska's best pilots, including Don Sheldon, Chalon Harris, and Troy Dunn. When he crashed to his death, it was with a new pilot who had flown with Haber only twice before. After flying over a ridge, the pilot reversed direction, ran into turbulence and downdrafts, and slammed into the mountainside. The plane caught fire and the pilot, badly burned, hiked out to the road and survived; Haber's ashes were identified in the charred remains. Two days before, Haber had told a friend he was worried about the new pilot's skills.

Groups, Not Packs

As he studied wolves, Haber increasingly realized how wolf social behavior paralleled early human social behavior. He became convinced that these close parallels offered opportunities for humans to learn more about themselves, such as the origin of human aggression; efficient forms of social organization, behavior, and governance; and dominance in relationships. Perhaps the most intriguing parallel was between human and wolf family structures. Early on in his research, he realized the importance of the thread of temporal and familial continuity to every aspect of a wolf's life. This initial idea was so rich that it propelled his research for the rest of his life. As he collected decades' worth of information on the same wolf groups, his convictions about the significance of individual wolves and intact wolf family groups grew.

As Haber said in a 1991 interview in Alaska magazine, “The wolf just isn't one animal. It usually can't survive for long alone. It is ten or twenty animals—typically an extended family—all acting as one in order to survive. Most biologists still take a superficial, numbers-based view of what constitutes a healthy wolf population. They say that you can harvest 30 or 40 percent of a wolf population annually, and it will rebuild to the same level every year. The problem is that wolves have complex societies. It takes a long time, at least several generations, for a family group to reach its societal cruising speed.”

At some point, to more align his words with his conclusions, and in recognition of the power of language to influence people's attitudes toward wolves, he stopped using the word “pack” and instead began referring to them as “groups” or “family groups.”[1] The very term “pack,” he realized, carried connotations about wolves that his observations and field work had simply proven to be false. He concluded that the word “pack” fed the popular and yet erroneous public misconception of wolves as being vicious, malevolent dangers to humans that were little more than indiscriminate killing machines. The term “pack” also seemed to support the caricature by trappers and hunters that wolves were “a snarling aggregation of fighting beasts, each bent on fending only for itself,” so bloodthirsty that they killed for the fun of it. Essentially, the term “pack” gave the impression that wolves operated with the indifference and volatility of a gang of hoodlums, rather than the deliberate social cohesion and highly evolved cooperation that he observed during decades of field research.

Standing Up for Wolves

Every so often Haber landed in the news: In 1994 he recorded a video of a trapped wolf, the leg bloody where the wolf had tried to chew himself free.[2] This video helped close down the state's “saturation snaring” predator control program, even though the state continues to teach this method to trappers, which Haber likened to “the land-based equivalent of high-seas drift-net fishing” for its indiscriminate killing and lingering deaths.

At the 1993 Wolf Summit convened by Governor Walter Hickel, Haber met Priscilla Feral, director of the international animal rights group Friends of Animals. From that meeting until he died seventeen years later, Friends of Animals funded Haber's research. Feral kept a hands-off approach, according Haber complete control over his research priorities. Said Johnny Johnson, “Those were happy years for Gordon because he didn't have to worry about funding. He could do the work he wanted to do.”

In 1997 he freed a snared wolf, for which the trapper sued him. The wolf was wearing a radio collar from the Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve and was snared just outside the park boundary.[3] The snare holding the wolf was surrounded by caribou carcasses; such baiting is illegal, so Haber contacted ADF&G, who said they'd free the wolf. When they did not, he contacted them and freed it himself. ADF&G later denied this agreement, however, and claimed Haber's actions were illegal. The state investigated both the trapper and Haber but declined to file any charges. Haber offered to pay the trapper a thousand dollars for the wolf, more than twice what the trapper would have made from the pelt, but instead the trapper sued and won a total of $190,000. Because he was under contract with them, Friends of Animals paid the fine. Still, this deeply affected Haber, said his friend Johnny Johnson, because he could have lost everything. The trial was held in the trapper's hometown of Tok, where sentiments against Haber had been running high for a long time. During the trial, a man stood up and yelled that they should take Haber outside and tar and feather him.

Fearless Dissenter

Though he advocated for wolves in political and institutional realms, Gordon Haber was, above all, a scientist—one who never forgot the initial sense of wonder, curiosity, and excitement that drew him to study wolves. He was never afraid of drawing conclusions from his research, or of voicing those conclusions. He was always an independent scientist, receiving funding from a variety of government and nongovernmental sources. Very few scientists today have the kind of academic freedom that Haber had—most work either for corporations or for academic or government institutions, all of which place limits, whether covert or not, on what scientists do and say.

Dr. Haber was a classic dissenter: a renowned wolf expert considered by many worldwide to be a hero but considered by many in Alaska—state officials and biologists, trappers and hunters—to be a thorn in their side that would not go away. At least in Alaska, as he said in a 1991 interview, “I do disagree with just about everyone in the business.” Dr. Haber was so openly reviled that when his death was reported, some hunting and trapping blogs lit up in celebration.

The history of science is strewn with those whose ideas are at first ridiculed but ultimately turn out to be correct, such as that Earth revolves around the sun, organisms evolve, and MRI can locate cancerous tissue in the human body. In all fields of endeavors, dissenters have been despised, ignored, and persecuted, but their insights and conclusions have often been essential to change and innovation. Haber's insights into the social dynamics of wolf family groups have yet to be broadly accepted; when they are, it will change not only wildlife management, but also the way we relate to wolves at every level.

Dr. Haber worked from what Mahatma Gandhi called satyagraha: holding to the truth, speaking truth to power. He did this, time and again, regardless of the consequences to him personally and professionally. But as voltaire wrote, “Those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing the new road.”

Book Structure and Sources

The primary chapters of Among Wolves are written by Haber himself, compiled and edited from his articles, blog, reports, scientific papers, field notes, and a book proposal. Fueled by his passion for communicating what he'd learned about wolves, Haber was at ease writing for a wide array of audiences.[4] The first chapters describe what Haber learned about the wolves themselves, and later chapters reveal how he applied research conclusions to management and exploitation issues in Denali, Alaska, and the western United States.

While this book's material is drawn from Haber's numerous scientific publications, this is not intended to be a scientific document; for readers who want more data and details, Haber's papers are available through his blog (www.alaskawolves.org) and at the Alaska Resources Library and Information Service (ARLIS) in Anchorage, Alaska, where all his materials are archived. This book provides an overview of his career among Denali's wolves, a sense of his character and life in the field, firsthand accounts of his observations of wolves, his conclusions from those observations, and his recommendations for changes to wildlife management.

The book also includes Haber's photographs. Most were taken while in flight, so that motion and distance make some photographs less sharp, but they record the daily lives of Alaska's wolves as no other visual record has, including behaviors never before documented. One series of photographs shows a young wolf teaching pups how to safely cross a river. In another set of aerial photographs, a wolf group skirmishes with a brown bear.

In Haber's own words and photographs, we learn what his prolonged observations of wolves have to teach us: how family group members work together, assist one another, teach, learn, and communicate; how territory and hunting knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next; how other animals, including prey, competing predators, and other species, interact with wolves; how the presence of humans affects wolf families; and how human hunting and trapping alter the family structures, social behaviors, traditions, and integrity of wolf groups.

From those who knew him best and longest, we learn about his character—what helped him endure, not only working in a challenging wilderness, but working among colleagues and officials with whom he often disagreed. Though many in Alaska openly despised him, many others hailed him as a hero, and a friend. Haber's friendships were enduring, many of them formed in his first few summers in Alaska. During the years that Troy Dunn flew for him, said Dunn, a sort of competition arose between him and Johnny Johnson over who would get to have Haber over for Thanksgiving dinner. These stories by friends and colleagues make up a sort of oral history of adventures in Denali National Park from 1966 to today. As well, this medley of voices provides a glimpse of Haber's larger community and parallels his essential point about wolves—that they, like humans, can fully exist only in community.

Finally, though Gordon Haber may have lived in a simple cabin without indoor plumbing, he also appreciated any new technology that would help him reach a wider audience with his message about the value of unexploited wild wolves. For this reason we have included tweets he sent out in the last year of his life, along with excerpts from his field notes and journal notes—brief windows into the days he spent in his beloved Denali, among the wolves.

The First Two Years of Life of an Alaska Wolf

Late February/Early March

Alpha female and alpha male engage in courtship and mating.

Early/Mid-May

Pups are born in their natal den—as many as nine pups in a litter.

Late May/Early June

Pups emerge from the natal den for the first time. The rest of the family group cuddles, cleans, and plays with them.

July

Pups are weaned and spend more time out of the den. Adults may take pups on short walks. Adults hunt at night and return in the morning to a welcoming chorus-howl, bringing food from distant kills.

July/August

To prepare pups for winter travel, adult wolves may move pups between dens and rendezvous sites or to nearby kills.

Late September/October

Pups leave dens behind and begin their nomadic winters, traveling regularly with older family members.

September through November

Pups are in “hesitation and fear” stage of traveling and hunting and need constant help and prodding from adult wolves. Pups begin learning hunting traditions and territories.

December/January

Pups progress to the “foolhardy boldness” stage of hunting.

February/March

Pups stand by as alpha pair mates, and then help prepare the natal den for the next litter of siblings.

May

Now a year old, pups progress to the third stage of hunting skills: contributing effectively to the group, albeit with less skill and more hesitancy than experienced adults.

May/June

Yearlings eagerly await the appearance of the new siblings, who have been seen up to now only by the mother and any other females who are cooperatively nursing.

June

New pups emerge, and yearlings play with them, perhaps also pup-sitting them while other, more experienced adults go off to hunt. Yearlings also help on hunts to provide for pups.

September

As the family begins their nomadic ways again, yearlings help the new pups navigate streams and other first-time adventures.

September through May

In their second winter, yearlings continue to learn hunting skills and territories, including boundaries and prey locations. They remain less adept at hunting and scavenging than adults.

June

With another round of siblings, the two-year-olds help even more, perhaps even lactating and helping to nurse the new litter.

September

Entering their third winter, the two-year-olds have learned their territory and have become competent hunters, able to fully assist and support the family group. Some may disperse to other areas, but most try to stay with the family group.

1 In the following chapters, where excerpts from his earlier writings have been used, “pack” has been replaced with “group.”

2 See his journal entry on this event at the end of chapter 11.

3 See a photograph of Haber freeing the snared wolf in chapter 12.

4 Throughout these primary chapters, editorial choices have been made to stay true to Haber's own style and voice.

CHAPTER 1

MY GOOD FORTUNE: WORKING AMONG ALASKA'S WOLVES

THOUGH HE PUBLISHED THE MATERIAL IN THESE CHAPTERS OVER A PERIOD OF forty years, Dr. Haber's formal work in wildlife biology began in 1963 during his undergraduate work at Michigan Technological University, where he received a National Science Foundation Research Assistantship. He quickly immersed himself in the wilds of Isle Royale National Park, assisting in research on geology, bats, and wolf-moose interactions, and in summer working as a fire control ranger. Perhaps through his work on Isle Royale, Haber recognized the importance of studying unexploited wild wolves in concert with their total environment. This was the systems methodology that he espoused and spent the rest of his life encouraging agency managers to adopt, thus placing him squarely and irrevocably engaged with longstanding wolf management issues in his adopted state of Alaska. The last several chapters of this book take up the most significant of these policy issues.

Haber also recognized the great value of long-term research on continuous family groups—and the Toklat wolves he studied, along with the community of chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall, are the world's two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups in the wild. In this chapter, Haber introduces us to his work in Alaska, to his study areas, which he calls “some of the most beautiful wilderness areas on Earth,” to his methodologies, and to his observations of the wolves themselves, animals that, he says, “enliven the landscape.” As some of his experiences remind him, however, it's not always clear who's observing whom.

My Good Fortune

AN OLD-TIMER ONCE SAID THAT WHEN YOU SEE A WOLF, HE HAS already seen you twice. With few exceptions, when I was observing wolf homesites in summer, I think the wolves eventually knew I was in the area. However, in most cases, I observed them with a spotting scope from far enough away that they showed no concern.

But in the summer of 1991, the Toklat wolves didn't just ignore me.[5] The first time they checked me out that summer, I was sleeping soundly at 5:00 a.m. About ten of them, including the alpha male and female, surrounded my tent only fifty feet away and proceeded to wake me abruptly with their gruff barks and accompanying howls. They had discovered me as they were returning home from the night hunt, and after a few minutes of expressing some displeasure through their barking and howling, they headed off to the den. Throughout the rest of the summer they continued to ignore my presence while they were at the den but checked me out fairly often on their travels to and from.

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June 26, 2009

The forest+subalpine route that I hike to/from den full of old+new wolf, bear, lynx droppings, esp in forest. Nice to share with them.

I consider it my good fortune to be able to spend my “work” days as a scientist observing many kinds of wild creatures primarily in what is unquestionably one of the crown jewels of the planet: Denali National Park and Preserve. All wild animals interest me, each in their own way and for their own important ecological role. But years ago it became obvious from thousands of hours of direct observation that wolves stand above the rest in their unusual intelligence, emotional depth, expressiveness, sensory abilities, physical prowess, and especially their family-based social systems.

My interest in wolves, wilderness, and northern ecology began during three years I spent in Isle Royale National Park, an island wilderness in Lake Superior, Michigan, famous for its moose-wolf relationships. To most young outdoorsmen, however, the ultimate call of the wild is in Alaska. In 1966 I found my opportunity to answer this call, working during the summer months as a ranger in Mount McKinley National Park. At the same time I began a long-range wolf study, one I intend to continue indefinitely.

Since then, I've been studying up to eighteen different groups of wolves, all in some of the most beautiful wilderness areas on Earth. The fieldwork takes place primarily in two areas of Interior Alaska that add up to the combined sizes of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. One of these areas, about eight thousand square miles, is centered on the northern half of Denali National Park and Preserve. The other, about fifteen thousand square miles, is two hundred miles northeastward, in the Upper Tanana–Fortymile–Yukon–Charley region of east-central Alaska.

Denali has been a study area since 1966, Fortymile since 1993; I observe twelve to fourteen groups in the Denali study area and four in the Fortymile. I chose these two study areas because of their importance in generating a range of information about wolves and prey, and because of Denali's longstanding world class biological and visitor-viewing values, and Fortymile's use by state and federal officials as a proving ground for major new forms of wolf control, including agency-facilitated public hunting and trapping. Other areas, such as Game Management Units 20A and 13 just east and southeast of Denali and near the village of McGrath to the west, are added temporarily from time to time, usually when wolf control is proposed and/or carried out, and there are opportunities to meet conservation objectives. This research provides the only major nongovernmental source of scientific information on wolves, prey, and related human activities in these areas.

These groups of wolves (including singles and pairs) are under observation via aerial radio tracking, snow tracking, ground observation, and other means. During the summer months, I do much of the fieldwork on foot, observing the wolves at their dens and other homesites and carrying out various surveys of their prey. In the winter, however, the wolves use no fixed homesite and move almost continuously through the rugged terrain of their large territories. Consequently during this part of the year it is necessary to observe them from a small ski-equipped plane, a Super Cub, circling low overhead for three to ten hours a day.

I am able to stay very close, circling fifty to one hundred feet away for hours at a time, day after day. The wolves habituate to my small aircraft as if it were a large raven, and either ignore it or sometimes howl along with the engine sound. Flying amidst Denali's majestic white peaks and along river bottoms, often only five to ten feet above the ground, looking up at the adjacent treetops, or landing on skis in winter, is exhilarating and dangerous, especially being out at forty to fifty below zero in winter. But it is the best way to observe these wolves over such a huge area.

Thousands of hours of scientific observations later, I remain in awe at what I see in Alaska's wilderness: Wolves enliven the northern mountains, forests, and tundra like no other creature, helping to enrich our own stay on the planet simply by their presence as other highly advanced societies in our midst. Equally fascinating are the underlying patterns of complexity in the way they interact with other wildlife at broader scales, and the functional similarity between these systems and many other kinds of systems throughout the biological and physical worlds.

Long-lived Denali Groups

Wolves occupy virtually all areas of suitable habitat under natural conditions, with their territories abutting each other in a tight mosaic much like the rocks of a well-masoned stone wall. In the Denali region, group territories range in size from two hundred square miles, where there is good habitat and prey abundance is relatively high year-round, to two thousand square miles, where prey abundance is relatively low.

For the first seventeen years, most of my research in Denali was on two family groups: the Savage River family, with a home range of about six hundred square miles, and the Toklat family, with a home range of about a thousand square miles. These two territories provided a good contrast in terms of habitat and prey characteristics.

The Toklat wolves have occupied most of the central thirty to forty miles of Denali's ninety-mile road corridor for well over half a century and have been under scientific study since about 1939. This is the group that Adolph Murie made famous in his 1944 classic, The Wolves of Mount McKinley, based on his 1939–1944 observations, the first scientific study of wolves in the wild.

When I arrived in Denali in 1966, Ade, as friends knew him, told me he had observed Toklat regularly enough subsequent to his 1939–1941 observations to be confident that the wolves present in the same area in 1966 were a later generation of the extended family he had observed and written about. He also felt this group had occupied the area for at least the previous decade. Given this, my research of this long-lived family group now represents one of the most intensive studies ever undertaken in the wild of the same known groups of a large predator and its prey.

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July 5, 2009

Checked 14 Denali wolf study groups on research flight yesterday—poor vis in W+N areas of park/preserve due to smoke from 2 lightning fires.

And yet, throughout the years I've often wondered who, really, was studying whom. On one trip to observe the Toklat wolves at their den in the summer of 1991, I was sitting dutifully at my spotting scope when suddenly I felt like I was being watched and turned to see the alpha male standing in the open only seventy-five feet away, quietly and calmly studying me. Almost immediately after my eyes met his, he circled to my downwind side, still maintaining a distance of about seventy-five feet, and scented the light breezes for a minute or so. Then he circled a quarter mile away through some trees and trotted off to the den without a hint of concern.

On my second trip that summer, I noticed that a two-foot-diameter spot near my campsite, where I had urinated regularly, was all scratched up. The wolves had visited after I departed from my first stay and responded in kind to my “scent post” by one-upping it with a scent mark of their own. Naturally, I urinated profusely over the same spot again, and sure enough when I returned for my third visit the site was scratched up even more violently than the last time. My nearby presence as a spy on their intimate affairs may have been difficult enough for them to swallow, but evidently it was just too much for them to ignore my scent marking as well.

Understanding Unexploited Wolf Populations

There is no shortage of information about the biology of exploited wolf populations and unnaturally disrupted and reformulated family lineages. There is pitifully little information about what happens under natural circumstances, especially over long periods of time, despite the fundamental importance of this kind of information from both basic and applied standpoints.

A better understanding of longevity among family lineages—beginning with the areawide patterns of persistent and shorter-lived groups that can be expected under natural conditions—requires observing individual groups until they end, and then distinguishing between the possible natural and human causes. It also involves information about the durability of key social relations (for example, how long certain individuals maintain alpha and beta ranks and roles, related divisions of labor, and pair bonds) and other aspects of stability (for example, how group sizes respond to prey changes).

The high value of long-term observational field studies such as this is that they can describe a broad range of interacting variables in a complex systems context. That is, by doing field work for an extended number of years, we can learn not just about wolves but about the entire ecosystem of which they are a part.

How do wolves and their prey get along without interference from humans? Are there major differences in the degree and sophistication of cooperation in well-established, nonmigratory versus exploited, migratory wolf populations? These questions must be answered before we can gauge the effects of our influence on the natural processes and hope to solve many of the complex wildlife management problems we face.

In many ways the social organization of wolves is surprisingly similar to what anthropologists have pieced together as the social organization of early man. The well-defined dominance order and disciplined manner in which duties are assigned and carried out, the presence of different generations of the same family living together, the prolonged dependency of the young, the group effort in raising and training them, the cooperative effort of many individuals in hunting large prey—in these and other respects, wolves, like our own human ancestors, have developed a highly effective means of coping with a wide variety of ecological conditions. Perhaps by more intensively studying—not persecuting—a species so similar in behavior to that of our ancestors, we can learn much more about ourselves.

Wolves are fascinating as individuals, but what I find unique is the beautiful, interesting, and advanced social structure of an intact family group. Fragmentation of a wolf group through hunting and trapping disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic.

In a wolf family, as in other advanced societies, the basic social framework is programmed in the genes, but important details are “tuned” via learning to fit available resources, differences from area to area, and changes over time, thus providing the society with much flexibility and adaptability. These details are so adaptive that they last for generations—families thereby develop traditions. Learning never stops; hence these traditions can be updated and enriched as local conditions dictate. The result of this collection of traditions can be viewed as culture. This is one of the primary reasons why wolves once successfully colonized such a large portion of the earth—the entire northern hemisphere and the subcontinent of India.

The behavior of all social vertebrates and many other animals is shaped to varying extents by learning and tradition across generations, as a supplement to inherited behavior or behavioral predispositions. But learning and tradition are of special importance in wolf society. One need only consider the length of time young wolves remain dependent on older family members—25 percent of normal life expectancy in Denali's family groups—which is as long as or longer than even in most human societies.

This is one of the hallmarks of an advanced society: prolonged dependency (or “neotony”) of the young enables the society to transfer large stores of accumulated past learning to each new generation. This capability together with their highly developed divisions of labor and other forms of cooperation places wolves and a few other species at the pinnacle of vertebrate social development.

Longlasting Traditions

Wolf populations in Interior Alaska may have enjoyed some of the longest-lasting traditions and richest cultures for wolves anywhere—at least until the onset of major human interference in the 1900s—because this region escaped the Pleistocene glaciations that virtually wiped the fauna clean in other regions.

Field notes #71

September 1999

4:25—801 crosses the road right in front of me,[6] 30 ft away, at E Polychrome right at the “cave” above the road. I had stopped there and was struck by the marmots whistling back and forth to each other all across the area—obviously in response to 801, who was just coming down from those rocks. As she crossed the road 30 ft away, she seemed to slightly favor one of her front legs or paws—ie, a very slight limp. She ignored me—looked rather tired in the 60° sunshine.

Modern wolves probably have a continuous history of at least a million years in Interior Alaska—far longer than humans anywhere in the New World. They, along with their much larger, more powerful, less social cousin, the dire wolf, were likely a part of the everyday scene when this region escaped the great Ice Age glaciations that repeatedly descended across most of North America for tens of thousands of years at a time—when Interior Alaska was a refuge from the ice, a land of cold, grassy steppes and tundra with herds of woolly mammoths, giant bison, mastodons, horses, caribou, musk oxen, antelope, elk, sheep, and even camels. This remarkably diverse fare of grazers provided well for the wolves, and for the huge lions, saber-toothed cats, giant short-faced bears, grizzly bears, and wolverines.

Then, about fourteen thousand years ago, the surrounding ice sheets retreated and the Alaska climate turned warmer and wetter. Over the next few thousand years the steppes gave way to tundra and boreal forest. Humans had already arrived from Asia via the now submerged plains of Beringia and were spreading their deadly new spear point technologies across the land. The combined impacts of these habitat and hunting changes were severe, and by about nine thousand years ago most of the great Ice Age creatures had disappeared from Alaska. But the wolves remained, subsisting on moose, caribou, and mountain sheep, which continue today as their major prey.

I often wonder for how many decades and centuries, indeed millennia, some wolf groups were able to persist in Interior Alaska, where the species as a whole has survived for so long. It is questionable as to whether the Savage River and Toklat groups existed before the early decades of this century, which leaves the distinct possibility that it took fewer than four to five generations to develop the impressive hunting techniques and other traditions I began observing in the 1960s.

Wolf populations crashed throughout most of Interior Alaska from about 1906 to 1925, owing to a combination of diseases spread by sled dogs and poisoning by market hunters. Most wolves inhabiting the eastern half of Denali as of the mid-1920s were likely first or second generation of the Savage River and Toklat, which then persisted until the winter of 1982–1983 and through the present, respectively, despite periodic hunting, trapping, poaching, and other losses.

Doubtless wolf groups were eliminated now and then by humans well before our impacts of the twentieth century. But few other regions of the Earth have provided so many lengthy intervals for wolf groups to develop in such an exacting environment with such diverse, largely nonmigratory prey and so many other large predators, including some of the most formidable prey and competing predators that wolves have faced anywhere. This has presented the species with an ideal stage for high orders of cultural evolution, and for extreme forms of kin-selected altruism.

If the sophisticated traditions of the Savage River and Toklat developed in only four to five generations, what fascinating twists did groups that grew to be much older in earlier times develop? We can only guess at the incredibly rich traditions these marvelous learners could have developed.

I feel privileged and enlightened to have witnessed the ways of the Savage River and Toklat families so intimately. Still, I can't help but wish I could have conducted my study a hundred years earlier, on wolf groups that had enjoyed much longer histories. I do not lament for the wolves that began succumbing when modern man arrived here in force near the turn of the century, any more than those early miners, hunters, and trappers did—or, I would guess, than did the humans who hunted this region eight to twelve thousand years ago. But I do feel a sense of loss when I think about the exquisite cultural adaptations some of these older groups must have developed. We deserve more sympathy than the wolves do, for unwittingly erasing such quality from the land and dulling our surroundings that much further, thus diminishing what is so vital as nourishment for our creativity and humaneness.

Snapshot: Savage River Wolves

Gary Baker

After coming to Alaska in 1966, Gary Baker always called it home, though as an airline pilot he traveled the world, from the Canadian High Arctic to South America's Amazon. Two retirements later, he resides in Moose Pass, and misses reminiscing with Gordon Haber

I met Gordon when we were working in the park in 1966. For a long time, I lost track of him, but then I bumped into him in Anchorage at Café del Mundo. We instantly recognized each other and began reminiscing about the park. We had hiked all over that park; we'd covered it from stem to stern.

One time I said to him, “Do you remember, Gordon, when I told you about the wolves at Savage River?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

And then the next time he saw me, he said, “I checked my notes. It was July 1966 you told me about the Savage River wolves.”

He really became attached to that Savage River pack. The whole park, what's happened to the wolves, it's a real sad story.

In 1966, I got out of the army and headed to Alaska for adventure, and landed a job working as the only bartender at the old McKinley Hotel. I'd close the bar at midnight, and the hotel concessionaire would solicit me to drive one of the three old Bluebird buses as a fill-in driver for the 4:00 a.m. departure into the park. Gordon was a seasonal ranger, and he'd give a seminar in the basement of the hotel right across the hall from my four-table bar.

He was always so enthusiastic; you had to hear one of his seminars. Just picture this young guy straight out of college, full of life about what he was pursuing, and delivering it with both barrels. One woman in the crowd was so impressed with his presentation that she offered to fund his graduate education. He never lost that enthusiasm.

Everyone knew Gordon wanted to see wolves. Bill Ruth, another ranger who was a friend of Gordon's, was involved in trying to find wolves for Gordon. So was Charlie Ott, Joe Hankins, Adolph Murie, Louise Murie—all these people who had been in the park a long time were looking for wolves for Gordon. It was a real changing of the guard, that summer, and they all worked with Gordon.

Joe Hankins lived at Igloo Creek every summer, and he'd take his Leica camera and bring young people out with him into the park, but only if their boots were properly oiled. They had to have good footwear. Hankins spent so much time around wildlife that they got to know him. I remember seeing him standing in the middle of a herd of rams. And he spent lots of time showing Gordon around.

After one of my early morning bus trips, I searched out Gordon. I told him I'd seen wolves at the Savage River, right in the middle of the valley near the rock formation that looks like an Indian head—that's why they called it Savage.

Well, Gordon almost ran me over getting out the door, saying, “I gotta get out there, do you think they're still there?” I'm not sure how he got out there, vehicles were so hard to come by; he must have commandeered an old Park Service truck.

But Gordon found those wolves. And that was the first time he saw wolves in the park.

Snapshot: Flying Gordon

Troy Dunn

Troy Dunn retired from the U.S. Air Force after a twenty-three-year flying career. The desire to both learn about Alaska's wolf ecology and help Gordon's field work brought the two together in 1999, and a close friendship resulted. Troy logged more flying time with Gordon than any previous pilots. Since they routinely flew on holidays, Gordon spent many holidays and Super Bowl Sundays with Troy, his wife, Jackie, and their three dogs at their North Pole home.

I flew an A10 in the air force, one of Gordon's favorite planes. Gordon liked that I was a military pilot, because we're highly trained aviators and are the best at low-altitude work. We're comfortable looking for things while we're flying, employing the airplane as a tool, so that the actual flying of the aircraft is second nature. We look at the total environment—wind, sun angles, shadows—all to figure out if we stick our aircraft into a particular location, to ensure we can make it back out.

Gordon and I used a Cessna 180 and Piper Super Cub. Some might say that the Cub is best for this type of work, but the 180 was Gordon's mount of choice while flying with me as we operated much more efficiently with it. The 180 handles the turbulence better, and ours is equipped with safety-and performance-enhancing modifications. Gordon sat in the back, and we took the right front seat out. This gave Gordon more room, and it also gave me a better view out the right side as that is the direction we usually orbited.

On a rare occasion we took a friend or family member out with us, and they could take maybe one or two turns before getting sick. Gordon could take it all. He needed to know who the individuals were, their colorations, whether they were male or female; he could tell during mating season which wolves were mating by the spot of blood on the female wolves' backsides. This is the level of detail for which Gordon strived.

Often we'd come in on the telemetry location and not have a visual of the wolves. I would fly a box pattern around the signal, and then keep cutting that box in half, until we knew the signal was coming from a fairly small location. Gordon kept turning the gain down on the receiver making the signal quieter and quieter; this way we could hear the signal peak. Then finally one of us would see something; sometimes we couldn't see anything more than a leg sticking out from under a bush, but we'd find them. I'd come home and tell my wife, “You wouldn't believe where we found wolves today.”

Once we were flying in the upper east branch of the Teklanika River, and it was snowing pretty well. The Toklat family was up there just sleeping, but Gordon wanted to stay there as this was his main study group. The wolves were sleeping just off a big rock wall, just sheer gray rock, but it was snowing hard enough that it would disappear as we flew away from it and it would slowly reappear as we turned back upstream toward it. We weren't in any danger of hitting it, but there were some eerie moments because every time we turned upstream, it was just white, then this gray just starts appearing, like a ship emerging out of fog. I said to Gordon, “This is eerie, this snow and these rock walls.” And Gordon was like, “Yeah, yeah.” But he wasn't paying attention; he was just looking through his camera at the wolves.

Gordon had no limit. It could be forty below zero and he would still want to go check on the wolves. “Oh, let's just go,” he would say, and he'd tell me the old-timers did it back in the day. But I'd needle him, tell him how fuel doesn't atomize very well at those temperatures. I knew we would be OK if we had to spend a few nights out in the wilds as I'd been through all of the air force survival schools, and I knew Gordon was more than up to it as he already spent more time sleeping out at minus forty than most others, but my concern was the aircraft itself. Although our aircraft is highly modified to operate safely in these extreme conditions, there still must be limits and a time to wait for better conditions.

Gordon was a stickler for keeping his gear in good shape—his sleeping bag and foam mat, his backpack and camera. Once he had to hike back into the park road and ended up spending the night in fifty below temperatures, so he knew his bag was important. He was meticulous with his telemetry equipment; on really cold days, he would tuck the receiver inside his many layers under his jacket until we got in the plane. He never wanted to leave the telemetry cables in the aircraft until I convinced him that we were doing more damage by removing them after every flight than if we just left them in place in the aircraft.

But he always wanted to go out. We spent half the year on straight skis which made maneuvering the 180 in tight places on the ground a challenge. Gordon always jumped out with me to help me pull the tail of the 180 around. At thirty below that frigid prop-blast from the running engine made the end of my nose numb in seconds. True to form, Gordon, however, would jump back in the 180 and exclaim, “Damn, that was refreshing, wasn't it?”

Another time, we let down into Fortymile on a beautiful clear day. Even before I looked at the thermometer, I noticed the inside windows frosting up. So I said to Gordon, “This is too damn cold. We don't need to be playing around down here.”

“Yeah,” said Gordon, “I think you're right.”

It was one of the few times he agreed that it was too cold, and it was forty-five below zero.

5 The Toklats are called East Fork by the National Park Service; as well, the Toklat West group is called Grant Creek by the National Park Service.

6 Haber used number or letter combinations to refer to individual wolves.

CHAPTER 2

THE HEART OF WOLF SOCIETY: WOLF FAMILY BONDS

HABER CAME NORTH TO ALASKA AS SOON AS HE FINISHED HIS UNDERGRADUATE work, and never left. He started as a seasonal interpretive ranger in Denali National Park and then began his graduate work on predator-prey relations with Denali's wolves. Haber's long-term research on continuous family groups allowed him to observe many alpha pair bonds from beginning to end. He found the closeness of these bonds, and of all the family bonds, to be central to the group's survival in the demanding environment of the far north. In fact, said Karen Deatherage, Haber was so convinced of the significance of the group that he avoided taking and didn't like photographs of single wolves. “He said that wasn't who they were,” she recalled. “They weren't just individual animals, but a highly social, efficiently coordinated group.”

Over the years he came to know and admire the roles of many individual wolves within family groups, such as LT, the beta male of the Savage River family group, and the Toklat female who, having lost her mate to a darting accident, showed Haber just how deep and irrevocable pair bonding can be. Haber concluded that not only are wolves highly social, but that wolf family social ties are unsurpassed. As Haber realized how trapping and hunting along the park's eastern boundary in the Wolf Townships was destroying these intimate long-term bonds and thus also destroying the entire family group structures and traditions, he stepped up his own advocacy, with both the state and federal governments, for a protective buffer. And he continued observing each succeeding generation of Denali's wolves.

WOLVES ARE PERHAPS THE MOST SOCIAL OF ALL NONHUMAN vertebrates. A group of wolves is not a snarling aggregation of fighting beasts, each bent on fending only for itself, but a highly organized, well-disciplined group of related individuals or family units, all working together in a remarkably amiable, efficient manner. Their elaborate, highly advanced social behaviors may be the most advanced of all animals besides humans.

Wolf social organization is based on two unusual evolutionary strategies among vertebrates: cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting. There is also strong evidence for a third evolutionary strategy—prudent predation—in the way nonmigratory wolves exploit moose, at least in many subarctic areas. Decades of field research indicate these strategies operate primarily through sophisticated interactions and interdependencies within family-based groups, especially longlasting multiple extended families. The end result is the formation of longlasting traditions, passed from one generation to the next.

The intimacy between wolves in a family group, which enables them to cooperate closely, also means that each is keenly aware of the identity and presence or absence of others. From what I have seen, the intimacy of a family group is often comparable to, and sometimes exceeds, the degree of intimacy found within a typical human family. Wolves will go to great effort to remain with their families.

In 1992, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced it wanted to kill wolves via helicopter shooting over a more than ten-thousand-square-mile area within the range of the Fortymile caribou herd, public outcry was so strong that the idea was dropped. Instead, three years later, ADF&G announced a relocation and sterilization plan to reduce wolf numbers in that area. Wolves were darted from the air, stuffed into undersized crates, and flown off to unfamiliar territory hundreds of miles away. Some showed tremendous family affinity by struggling all the way back home over weeks and months, only to be chased down by the ADF&G helicopters again and hauled off to more distant locations.

One such returnee, a male of the Granite family group, finally gave up and died alone in a dark crate, after again being chased to exhaustion, snatched from family members, and transported hundreds of miles away. ADF&G promised a necropsy, but nothing was said about the ordeal involved in such captures, or that this wolf had already struggled back home from an earlier relocation, which to many Alaskans would have been reason enough to let him be.

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June 17, 2009

Raw, wild beauty at the den tonite with the wolves howling a great chorus for me as rolling thunder from a passing storm shakes the valley.

Life within a family group, which in most cases is an extended family of pups, parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins, is replete with rituals, divisions of labor, and other variations in behavior that adapt them to a variety of changing conditions. Each wolf has its own personality, and the ability of each to express many humanlike emotions becomes obvious after one watches the same individuals for even a short time. The Toklat alpha female in the photographs on page 40 and Plate 2 from 2008, for example, was often more assertive, even toward her mate, than many alpha females I've observed.

Although there is considerable freedom for individual expression, the group adheres to a well-defined framework of a dominance hierarchy—a kind of pecking order—in which each wolf knows its position, and there are few if any instances of pronounced strife. The result is an exceptionally harmonious way of life. In more than forty years of watching wolves in the wild, only once have I seen fighting among adults of an established group, and even in that case, none of the wolves were wounded.

Most important, however, this highly developed social organization seems to result in an efficient division of labor, with top-ranking adults assuming the most important responsibilities. The alpha male, for example, takes the lead for hunting and mating, but the beta male will lead in other group activities, including the care and raising of pups. Usually, so long as the family remains intact as a single unit, the only matings permitted are between the alpha male and female.

It is when a family group fragments, such as in areas where wolves are subjected to shooting and trapping pressures, that one expects to see an increase in the number of matings and thus an increase in the number of young produced. With such fragmentation, other pairs are able to get away with mating—something that wouldn't have been permitted in the presence of the original alpha pair. This means that the hunting, trapping, and aerial killings by which humans have tried to reduce wolf numbers are instead most likely to increase them.

Wolf Pair Bonds

Wolves are monogamous, something that is relatively rare in the animal world—and their reproductive bonds are at the heart of wolf social organization. These bonds easily rival or exceed typical human marital bonds in their strength, and the bond between primary alpha breeders is the most important relationship in a group.

Courtship and mating, which lasts ten to fourteen days beginning in late February to early March, may well be the most significant wolf social event each year. Courting wolves commonly “snuggle” while walking and lying together. This behavior probably has the same adaptive value as the snuggling, hand-holding, arms-around, and related contact of human courtship.

These close emotional ties and physical contact are not unique to sexual activities, however. The Toklat male and female from the 2008–2009 observations shown in the photographs on page 40 and Plate 2 maintained similar high levels of emotional attachment and physical closeness year-round, and so have most of the other alpha and lower-ranking pairs I've observed.

Family activities turn somewhat erratic as the top echelon becomes wrapped up in sex. The previous year's pups are clearly bewildered at this strange behavior of the top adults. Though a beta male may show interest in the alpha female, producing a triangle, the alpha male shows strong, clear authority over all others and is extremely assertive toward the beta male in particular, whom he keeps in almost constant submission, even though the two otherwise work together closely.

For just as often, the beta male can be a helpmate. Virtually all family members help the parents, but the most noteworthy of the reproductive altruists I have followed over the years was LT, the beta male of the Savage River group. Although he probably never fathered a litter, LT performed most of the major duties of fatherhood. He involved himself in reproduction beginning almost with the twinkle in the alpha male's eye by staying close to the alpha pair during their courtship and mating. During mating, the male mounts, thrusts, and then slides off locked, standing back to back and/or side by side with the female. Most ties last for ten to fifteen minutes, and during this time there is commonly much mutual face licking and other affection. LT's presence afforded a measure of protection to the alpha pair during their copulatory locks, when they could have been vulnerable to attack by trespassing wolves.

My 2008–2009 observations of the Toklat family of Denali National Park during the annual sexual activities in late February and early to mid-March illustrate the close bond between the alpha male and female. They also provide an indication of the intensity of courtship behavior and some of its ritualism.

The light tan female and charcoal gray male were the parents of most if not all others in the Toklat group by this time. Both were in their prime at five years of age. Courting wolves also largely keep to themselves during courtship but usually do not separate very far from the other family members. During my observations, all the others—mostly their one- to three-year-old offspring—are within a hundred yards or so. (See next page and Plate 2.)

On February 28, just prior to the most intensive sexual activities, the mother tolerates some face licking from one of the younger wolves. But three days later, her response is very different. By March 2, the alpha female stands close to the alpha male, showing she is receptive, but he isn't quite ready. They remain touching, but look away, almost as if trying to convey nonchalance amidst what amounts to a high-key tense interaction that requires considerable synchrony.

Meanwhile, seven of the other Toklat wolves about a hundred yards away seem restless. One of the young wolves approaches in a submissive, seemingly innocent way. Bad decision. The female, who is perhaps a little on edge, immediately jumps the approaching wolf and reprimands it for several minutes. The young wolf's intrusion doesn't seem to matter much to the male, although the mild interest that he does express suggests it might be a female that the older female is treating as potential competition. The young wolf undoubtedly suffers hurt feelings but not any obvious injuries.

Toklat Family Tragedies, 1997–2007

Some of the behavior I observed when a wolf lost a mate, using examples from Toklat's recent history, further illustrate how closely and almost irreversibly wolves can bond.

In February 1997, the second-ranking Toklat male died in a snare just outside the northeast park boundary in the Wolf Townships. A month later, his mate, the second-ranking female, with whom he had produced at least one previous litter (simultaneous to the alpha pair's litter), instead of simply mating with another member of the group, left Toklat and joined another group. She then disappeared after dispersing again two months after that. Had these two survived in the Toklat family they likely would have assumed a more important role, given the aging Toklat alpha female's reproductive failure in May 1997 and death in April 1998.

The next Toklat alpha pair began producing litters in 1998 and maintained one of the closest, most efficient bonds I have seen in forty-three years of research. In March 2001, the male died in his prime during a National Park Service radio-collaring accident, a week after mating with the female, who likewise was in her prime.[7] Two adult sibling males from two hundred miles away showed up at the natal den in early June shortly after the female had produced her dead mate's new pups.[8] One of them soon became the new Toklat alpha male, and both helped raise the unrelated dead male's pups without any obvious difference in effort or affection between the mother and her seven older offspring. During the next breeding season, in March 2002, a three-year-old daughter bonded with the newcomer alpha male and they became the primary mating pair. The male also copulated with her mother—at the same location, two hours later, with the daughter's apparent enthusiasm and cooperation.

A month later the mother separated from the others and for the most part remained alone, probably of her own volition, while continuing to range within the established Toklat territory. An adult male from thirty miles away was with her for a few days but then left. She did not enjoy much hunting success on her own. In May, she occupied the same natal complex that she and her dead mate had used for their first litter in 1998. She produced one or two pups, but they died inside the den soon after birth; she was in advancing stages of starvation by that time and probably wasn't lactating much if at all (these details were determined from a later necropsy). I watched her dying alone in early July, so weak and emaciated that she could no longer stand for more than a few seconds at a time.[9]

Meanwhile, her daughter, other offspring, and the new alpha male attended five pups at the natal den the family had used since 1999 (and in certain earlier years). However, following a midsummer move to a rendezvous site, they lost the entire litter, apparently to a marauding bear. They produced surviving litters in each of the next two years, in 2004 with help from a young newcomer female who became the pups' primary attendant during the homesite period.

In late January 2005, this alpha female was caught in a trap and a snare just outside the northeast park boundary. Her GPS radio-collar locations, necropsy results, and other information indicated that she probably struggled for two weeks while caught, until the trapper shot her and took her away on February 11.[10]

The male left the trapping area with the nine others on February 11, apparently having remained with or near her during most if not all of her two-week, midwinter ordeal. They went fourteen miles straight to the natal den where he and the female had produced most of the others in 2003 and 2004. There they cleaned out the burrows despite the several feet of snow cover and even though the normal courtship-mating and denning periods were at least two weeks and two and a half months away, respectively. I observed this same behavior in the neighboring Margaret family: after that alpha male died in a snare in the same general area in February 2004, his mate did virtually the same thing, traveling to their established natal den ten miles away.

The Toklat male retraced the fourteen miles almost straight back to the trapping area the next day, with such a rapid pace that at times the others lagged a mile or two behind. His demeanor was unmistakable and seemed almost obsessive. He was clearly intent on finding his mate. When we left, he was sitting alone atop a high plateau, howling over and over again in obvious distress toward the trapping site a few miles away. He continued returning to the trapping area through mid-March, and two more wolves of the group were caught there: a 2004 pup and the newcomer female attendant.

After essentially separating from six remaining young wolves back inside the established territory, he mated with another female (probably also one of his young) between March 8 and 12. But his focus seemed to remain on the dead female. Overnight on March 12 he went twenty miles back to the trapping site, again with the same unmistakable, almost obsessive behavior, moving so rapidly that the female with whom he had just copulated could barely keep up.

He and the above female became separated a few miles east of the trapping area by March 17. She ended up dispersing seventy miles southwestward and eventually joined the Eagle pair, though with no indication that she produced any pups.

The Toklat male began a monthlong series of travels primarily back and forth along the east park boundary, at least fifteen miles from his surviving young and established territory. He joined an unrelated female in the east boundary area in late March or early April. Hunters shot this female while the two wolves were together just outside the southeast corner of the park on April 8 or 9; he was lucky to escape.

On April 12, he returned to the Toklat territory for the first time in a month but remained for only a couple of nights and apparently did not reunite with his six surviving young. By April 14 he was back along the east park boundary, fifteen miles outside the Toklat territory. Three days later a hunter shot him outside the southeast corner of the park, near the area where hunters shot the female he was with nine days earlier. Now all that remained of Toklat were the inexperienced six yearlings and two-year-olds.

Snapshot: First Snow

Johnny Johnson

Johnny Johnson, one of Alaska's most renowned wildlife photographers, first met Gordon in 1968, when they both worked in Denali National Park. Johnny was a park ranger and budding wildlife photographer and quizzed Gordon often about the wolves. After Johnny settled in Anchorage, their friendship endured; Gordon frequently spent Thanksgiving dinner with Johnny and his wife, Peggy.

In the fall of 1971, when Gordon was at the Sanctuary cabin doing his research, my fiancée and I and another couple flew out to the far west end of the park, to a place called Porcupine landing strip. Because I had been a ranger, we had access to a cabin out there. Our plan was to hike one hundred and forty miles back to park headquarters.

But it was one of the wettest falls on record, so it took us a lot longer to cross the rivers. By the time we got to Wonder Lake, it had started snowing. We ended up splitting up because the other couple wanted to move faster. It was a big trip, about thirty-six days total.

By the time we got to Teklanika Flats, we were traveling in about a foot of snow. We were hiking along the road and saw a snowmachine coming along in the distance. It was Gordon. It was really good to see him. He gave us a ride to the Sanctuary cabin, and we had a big spaghetti feed.

We were sitting at the table, warm and full, with a light snow falling outside. Then all of a sudden this big black wolf walks right by the window, less than thirty feet away. Gordon jumps up and says, “That's the leader of the Savage pack! Let's go outside.” We were all pretty excited. We went outside, but of course by then he'd disappeared.

We stood there in silence with the light snow falling, and then heard the pack up on the ridge, howling. Everything else was so still and quiet, and there was just that chorus of wolves howling. It was just beautiful. And a great experience to have with Gordon.

Snapshot: A True Field Scientist

Troy Dunn

Gordon knew every historically used den in the park and in the Fortymile area. I'll bet he was one of the few people left that knew all those sites, because most biologists don't take the time to get out there and find them. We'd always check them; there were some I'd never seen used, but Gordon always wanted to check them just in case.

The Toklat alpha female, the one involved in a ten-day moose standoff in Upper Riley Creek, split off from the group a few weeks later. There wasn't any animosity that we could see; she just left the family group. She ended up starving to death, died right past Eielson Visitor Center on the east side of the Muldrow Glacier. A few days before she died, she ran into a group of hikers. We saw her before the hikers did. When they did, they stopped, and she circled around them in a wide arc and just went on her way. Here she was starving to death, and she didn't go after those people. At the time we saw her later near the den, we still did not know she was starving; Gordon and I just saw her curled up. On the next flight she was in the same spot, dead, and we reported the location to the park service. They retrieved her body and performed a necropsy, and that is how we learned of her starvation.

She used one of the old dens off the upper East Fork the spring before she died. That's why Gordon always checked every one of those dens. The dens were so elaborate, with multiple entries. We'd watch a pup pop in one hole and then pop out another hole. And what a history. Gordon knew all about that.

That's typical of the type of science he did: He was a true field researcher. He wasn't just counting numbers of wolves; he was watching the interactions of individuals within the family group. He was paying attention to their entire territories, to the whole ecosystem. He knew it wasn't just a matter of, oh, we've got ten wolves, so we're OK.

Individuals matter. Killing off an alpha wolf is like going into someone's house, taking their mother or father out, and dragging them away. If people treated their families as well as wolves do their families, it'd be a much better world.

The Swift Northeast wolves lived out on the flats of the Kantishna Hills. Gordon said it was a terrible place to raise pups because it's dry and there's not much prey. We watched their den site and saw they had four pups, but only one survived into the fall. But it wasn't a whole lot bigger in fall than it had been in May. Gordon said, “That pup isn't going to survive winter.”

We tracked them all winter long, and it was still there, still small but there. The family, about six wolves, would travel through snow up to their chests, and they'd always go real slow and have that little pup sandwiched in between them. That pup did survive into the spring, and finally got big enough we couldn't differentiate between them. It was such a testament to how well they take care of each other.

Before I flew with Gordon, all I could do was read something to learn about wolves. Now I could go to ADF&G meetings and say, “This is what I've seen with my own eyes. I've seen it over and over. What you're trying to feed the public isn't correct.”

That's what we're missing, now that Gordon is gone. Someone who can stand up and say, this is the truth about wolves, and I know this because I have seen it.

7 See chapter 10 for more on these radio-collaring deaths and chapter 14 for more on the fate of the alpha female.

8 These two siblings were originally from the Fortymile area, and, as part of a predator control effort, had been relocated by ADF&G. These two then traveled at least one hundred miles to reach the Toklat territory. Read more about predator control in chapter 12.

9 See more about this wolf in chapter 10.

10 See a photo of this trapper taking her away and more on trapping along national park boundaries in chapter 12.

CHAPTER 3

A NEW BIOLOGICAL YEAR: ATTENDING YOUNG PUPS

AS SOON AS HABER ARRIVED IN THE PARK FOR HIS FIRST SUMMER AS A RANGER, he recruited everyone he could to find him wolves—including some of the most illustrious figures in the park's history. He spent time with and learned about the park from people like Ginny Wood, Celia Hunter, and Joe Hankins, who, remembered Gary Baker, “dressed like a bum and lived at Igloo Creek every summer, but on his death made the largest individual donation to the park in its history.” Johnny Johnson recalled listening to news of the first moon landing in 1969 at the East Fork cabin with Haber, Adolph and Louise Murie, Charlie Ott, and Bill Ruth—for whom Ruth Glacier is named. “They all worked with Gordon,” said Baker. “He was such a young enthusiastic guy.”

Haber treasured his time as a park ranger; his uniform, clean and pressed with the name tag on the shirt, was found in his storage shed after his death. But he quickly left his ranger days behind to begin his research on Denali's wolves, research that provided the material for his master's thesis from Northern Michigan University in 1969 and for his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1977. He devoted himself to learning everything about the wolves, including each and every den site, some of which, he concluded, are thousands of years old and were also used at intervals by early humans. Early in his research, he climbed through some of these dens to map the “honeycombs” of passages and burrows and the aboveground acreage used by the wolf families for resting, eating, and play. He also concluded that pup-rearing involved such high levels of cooperation that essentially all the wolves “act like parents.” This prolonged dependency of the young, which for Alaska's wolves is as much as 25 percent of their natural life span, is, Haber pointed out, “a hallmark of advanced societies.” Such cooperative rearing extends even after the pups become able to follow their family members when their nomadic ways resume in the fall.

ONCE THE SNOW IS GONE IN SPRING, LIFE BEGINS TO REGENERATE in Denali. As a new biological year is under way, adults of many kinds are attending to young born in May, including wolf pups. The wolf courtship and mating activities of late February and early March bear fruit and lead to another cooperative effort from the adults and older offspring in raising the new pups.

Raising new pups at the den is a social glue for wolves—without which individuals seem more likely to split apart and disperse—at a time of the year when some of the young adults are already predisposed to disperse. Well-established extended family groups of wolves display impressive cooperation during hunting and other activities, but it is as cooperative breeders that their sociality is most highly developed.

In Interior Alaska, wolf pups are born in early to mid-May and usually do not emerge from the natal den for the first time until late May or early June. They develop rapidly and learn much after their first emergence. It becomes clear when observing them closely in the wild that they are far more intelligent than dog pups of the same age.

Nevertheless, typically they are unable to travel regularly with the older family members until at least late September or October, sometimes even early November. The older wolves may move them between dens and rendezvous sites or to nearby kills as of July or August, but for the most part they provision them at fixed sites until they are about five months old. So the older wolves must make a basic lifestyle change: each family group forgoes its nomadic hunting ways until late September and focuses its activities at fixed homesites.

Later in the fall and over the winter, the pups still depend on the older wolves but travel continuously with them throughout the established territory and on any extraterritorial forays or migrations. This routine continues until late April to early May, when dens are occupied again for the birth of new pups. In areas where wolves subsist primarily on moose and mountain sheep, and likely on similarly difficult prey, the young require two to three winters of learning from the experienced adults in order to become proficient hunters.

Prolonged dependency of the young, a hallmark of advanced societies, facilitates the transfer of large amounts of learned information across generations. With a period of dependency equaling 25 percent or more of their normal life span, wolves that hunt the most challenging prey rival or exceed the dependency that is typical in human societies. In other words, each new biological year brings much more than just a regeneration of numbers. The pups represent another opportunity for families to extend and refine sophisticated behavior that not only contributes in important ways to their success but also sets the species apart from many others and makes it so interesting.

Ancient Birthplaces

Given the importance of new pups, it's hardly a surprise that a “den” is not just a hole in the ground. Well-established dens consist of a network of burrows and chambers excavated at least ten to twenty feet into the ground. Paul Elbert, a Fairbanks wolf hunter who spent much of his time searching for and digging up active wolf dens in Interior Alaska, told me in the late sixties about a number of very old dens to the north and northeast of Denali. At several sites, entire hillsides or bluffs had been honeycombed with interconnected burrows up to thirty feet long. Deep inside were at least one and often several large chambers that were as large as six to eight feet in diameter and three to four feet high—“big enough for a man to kneel up,” he said.

They also include a well-structured aboveground layout of play areas for the pups, rest areas with beds and lookouts for adults, areas where the entire group socializes (especially for hunting departures and arrivals), interconnecting trails, and more, all of which may be spread over an area of up to fifty acres.

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June 30, 2009

Another den visit with Toklat family. Bunch of adults+excited, yipping pups howled a great rollicking 4-min chorus for me from pond area.

Both dens and rendezvous sites are situated in strategic, sometimes fortress-like, locations: most are elevated, on a prominent bluff or ridge with commanding views, so that the wolves are less likely to be surprised by intruders and can use their extraordinary eyesight to pick out potential enemies and prey from afar. Burrow entrances, and the sites in general, commonly face southward, allowing for earlier thawing in spring. Almost always there is a river, creek, or pond within a few hundred yards, and soils are well drained. Most sites are also found in areas of relative prey abundance.

Virtually all of the homesites are very old; several being used at present are known to have been used periodically since the 1920s and looked old even then. All of the fifty or so homesites I have examined since 1966 are well worn. Most likely go back at least a century or two and may date back thousands of years. Given that Interior Alaska escaped the Pleistocene glaciations and that modern wolves have probably been here for at least a million years, some homesites may date back far longer than even thousands of years.

Wolves are intelligent hunters—they choose homesites for most of the same reasons as do human hunters, and we would predict use by both species alternatively, at some sites. This in fact has been the case at three known human campsites in Denali that date back three to ten thousand years: Teklanika, Highpower Creek, and Lower Toklat.

Each family maintains many homesites—I have counted thirteen for the Savage River family and at least thirty for Toklat–Wonder Lake families. Typically a family uses at least several sites in sequence each summer. Many established homesites are arranged in clusters, so that when based at one of the sites in a cluster, the wolves can visit or move to one or more other sites. This pattern appears to be related to prey changes, temporary fouling of a site, training for the young via short moves between safe destinations, and disturbance by aliens, especially humans.

Tweet

June 15, 2009

Weather improved so went to den for the evening. Wolves resting out of view but did howl real nice for me. Heard female call pups to nurse.

Usually within days if not hours after the sexual activities in March, and sometimes even before, the pair and others go to an established natal den where they may work together for hours cleaning it out, despite any lingering deep snow and even though they won't occupy the den for another couple of months. Sometimes the wolves mate right at a den. This suggests that they are able to associate their sexual activities with the birth of young several months later.

All the wolves are involved in preparing the den, demonstrating reproductive altruism—and LT, the beta male of the Savage River group, was again a diligent helper. During the sixty-three-day gestation period, the wolves continue to evaluate and clean out a number of their established dens, but with a growing sense of urgency during the last week or so. I was able to follow the Savage River group closely during this final period and was struck by LT's unswerving determination to find a suitable den, even though he was not mating.

As the group traveled from site to site with LT leading and the female following directly behind, sometimes alternating the lead with him, he always seemed to be pressing the pace. Most of the others, including the alpha male—the father-to-be—stopped often for play and frequently lagged several hundred feet behind. The female behaved with an urgency similar to LT's, by joining him in examining the burrows at each den site and by arousing the group from any rest period afterward. Nonetheless, it was LT who left me with the strongest impression that he had an objective and wasn't about to be slowed in reaching it.

This was in the winter of 1970–1971, one of the most severe winters ever recorded in Denali, when snow cover lingered well into May. Over the course of several days, the Savage River family scouted virtually the entire east-west band of homesites in their territory. With lingering snow preventing moose from returning to this area, the wolves demonstrated their knowledge of their territory and prey patterns, as well as their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions: they made a shift in the final week before the pups were born to a site that provided the best access to caribou migration.

The homesite that stands above all others as my favorite is one of Toklat's oldest and most elaborate. It anchors a cluster of at least six other sites within eight miles. It was occupied in 1966 when I began my research and is known to have been used in at least nineteen summers since the late 1950s, as well as in earlier years of the century.[11] There is no doubt in my mind, nor was there any in Ade Murie's mind when he examined it with me in 1966, that it has been used by wolves for a much longer period—for centuries if not millennia, although perhaps with a break during the wolf population low in 1906–1925.[12] If there was ever a candidate for a truly ancient site, this is it.

Covering an area of five to ten acres primarily of spruce forest, it sits along a glacial river. The braided channels form a gravel bar over a mile wide in a beautiful valley surrounded by five- to six-thousand-foot mountain peaks. At larger group sizes, adult resting areas at this den site have extended to include more than fifty acres.

In 1966 and 1967, I crawled into the underground network and mapped it in detail, shown on the next page. Each of the two major chambers contained enough underfur from two different adults to cover about half its floor with a soft lining—indicating that in that year, two females had birthed together, producing the thirteen pups I had observed, and each had pulled some of her own fur to provide a bed lining for the newborn pups. All of the burrows and chambers were free of kill remains, fecal matter, debris, loose dirt, and water. Over the years the only changes were when a major river channel washed away part of the south side; the wolves later renovated by excavating a higher entrance on the south side.

Another significant den site, mapped on page 57, is one that was used alternately by both Savage River and Toklat family groups—and previously by humans. In 1960, geologists found artifacts and other evidence of early human activity here and concluded that it was used as a campsite, game lookout, and possibly for human habitation beginning about twelve thousand years ago, until it was abandoned about eight thousand years ago.

Wolf occupancy of this site clearly extends over at least several centuries. It is likely to have remained beyond the reach of glaciers during the last ice age, and thus could have been used by wolves and other hunters before the date of first known human occupancy. There are remnants of at least twenty-four burrow entrances here along a forty-foot section of slope, with old trails extending eastward. In fact, one of these early wolf-fox-human trails may have evolved into the present-day Teklanika Campground trail.

The Pups Emerge

In late May and early June, the older wolves eagerly await the first emergence of the pups. Up to that point, usually only their mother and perhaps a cooperatively nursing female have interacted with them.

During the winter, the top female generally plays an active, aggressive role in helping to detect and capture prey. But during the spring and summer, when the wolves hunt nightly from a den site, her duties are more domestic. Most of her time is spent at the den caring for pups. After late May, however, when her young first emerge from the den, she begins to turn some of the pup-tending duties over to one or two subordinate male or female adults or yearlings. Occasionally, she even leaves the pups with a babysitter and lightheartedly trots off with the other adults for a fling on the nightly hunt.

When the pups finally come out, the other adults and older siblings dote over them with obvious affection. They cuddle and clean them, and lie down and let them crawl all over their heads and bodies.

This begins to wear off in a few weeks as the pups grow big enough to tug and chew a little too much with their razor-sharp pup teeth and become too insistent with wolves that have just returned from a hunt and want some sleep. The affection still shows but is more controlled and comes with some reprimands.

One or two adult attendants always remain close to the pups, but the other adults rest in areas separate from the pups' play areas. In 2007 I observed the seven Lower Savage III pups flopped out together in some brush, resting on a hot afternoon—with a few quizzical looks at the airplane circling above. Their parents were likewise resting, at a comfortable distance about a hundred yards away. These pups were being raised by only three adults, which is impressive not only because there were seven of them but also because they were so large for their age; obviously the older wolves were doing a good job of it.

Field notes #74

May 2000

355 appears on bluff above burrow. Looks down intently at burrow, then trots straight down to lower burrow. Sticks his head and shoulders inside for 15 sees, then pulls out and immediately 5 pups burst excitedly out of that burrow after him—they jump all over his face and under him, tails wagging excitedly. He then walks to the ledge between upper & lower burrows about 15 ft to the N where 801 often nurses and walks up and down, allowing the pups to follow and swarm all over him with excitement, which he obviously enjoys. As they jump & climb all over him he tries to clean several of them licking their backsides and faces.

As the pups grow they range farther, but reprimands teach them to avoid the areas where adults rest. At one homesite, the adult resting area was in a heavy patch of willows about one hundred feet south of the burrow complex. Many times I watched pups stare intently at this patch when older wolves were there, but they were always hesitant to venture over to it. Once, while the alpha male rested in those willows, two pups did timidly enter, but after a minute or two came running back out with their ears back and little tails tucked beneath their bodies.

Sometimes, however, the adults are playful with the pups. I once watched a high-ranking male return from a hunt and go straight for the pups with his tail wagging. He began nuzzling and licking them affectionately, then he gently picked one up, with his jaws almost entirely around its little body, and carried it off to the rest area. He was simply in an affectionate mood and wanted to play with the pup for a while.

The extreme cooperation that one sees among family members and occasional newcomers in raising young pups makes it largely meaningless to distinguish between parents and nonparents at this time of the year; they all act like parents. This cooperation includes nursing the pups, which continues until the pups are about a month and a half old. Mothers nurse each other's pups interchangeably. Non-mothers also lactate, sometimes even one-year-olds, despite the fact that wolves do not normally become sexually mature until they are twenty-two months old.

In 2009 the Toklat wolves produced at least nine pups. At least two and probably three females nursed them! the dominant female and two likely daughters, a large, submissive young adult and a two-year-old. I saw nipples on the third female and am fairly certain that a female I observed nursing alongside the dominant female on one occasion was not the second large female.

I also observed some interesting displays of extra affection by dominant and other family members for the lactating females and by the lactating females for each other. Ranking individuals who would normally assert their dominance seem more inclined to act affectionately toward these females at this time of the year, especially with kissing and unmistakable body language. There seems to be an understanding of their importance in the early care and provisioning of the pups.

This cooperative pup care seems a very adaptive evolutionary trait, as more than a single lactating female likely ensures more reliable early nourishment for the pups, especially when there are many of them. This could translate into early growth advantages and help compensate for periods of potentially leaner provisioning over the next several months, after the pups are weaned, when most of what they eat depends directly on the day-to-day foraging success of the older wolves. The presence of more than one lactating female probably also allows the dominant female and others more flexibility to forage away from the den during the first month and a half and thus stay in better condition. It seems a win-win adaptive strategy.

The pups continue nursing into late June or early July, by which time they are also beginning to eat meat. Lower-ranking adults and yearlings begin attending them closely, often staying alone with the pups as the rest of the family hunts. This frees the mother, who is generally a more experienced hunter than any of the young helpers, to join in the hunt. This is another example of apparent altruism, since the helpers forgo not only the hunt but also the chance of obtaining food.

Helping involves enduring much harassment from the pups, and frequently when one helper is spelled by another, it shows obvious good spirits. But I have also watched helpers continue to attend the pups when it was possible to take at least a short break. In 1991 at the Toklat natal den I watched as the alpha female nursed two pups. Three other adults came out of the adjacent rest area and milled around submissively. One of these, a male who attended the pups alongside the primary helper, lay down right next to the alpha female and licked the pups while they nursed. Afterward, the other wolves disappeared but the male helper continued to lie with the pups, licking and cleaning them as they romped and climbed on his head and body.

Another interesting observation I've seen many times at the natal den involves passing prey. The adults do need to guard very young pups from nearby potential predators such as bears, hawks, owls, eagles, and ravens. But when resting, adults will often ignore nearby prey. I've seen moose and caribou walk right through or near a homesite with wolves present but flaked out in the daytime heat. In one case a cow moose nearly stepped on a resting Savage River wolf, but both moose and wolf ignored each other, although the pups were scared as hell and ran for the burrow. In another case about fifty caribou walked casually by the main East Fork den with more than fifteen wolves present, but the wolves merely howled briefly and then ignored them.[13]

Snapshot: Teklanika Den

Karen Deatherage

Karen Deatherage first met Dr. Haber in 1998 when she worked for a wildlife conservation organization. With Gordon's invaluable data, she and others fought for over a decade to protect Denali's wolves from trapping and hunting outside the park boundaries. She was working as a park ranger at Denali National Park the summer she spent time with Gordon observing the wolves at the denning area.

It was a beautiful afternoon in June 2009 as I accompanied Dr. Gordon Haber to the Teklanika denning area for wolf observations. I had heard so much about this special group of wolves over the past eleven years, so I was unspeakably excited as we drove the park road.

Gordon counted snowshoe hare as we followed the dusty road to the Teklanika River. It had been an extraordinary few years for hare population growth, and he wanted to document his sightings. During aerial surveys, he said, he'd observed the surviving Toklat pups, whose parents had been killed, eating along a ground that literally moved with hare. He didn't believe these young, inexperienced wolves would have survived without that boon of the hare population.

After we parked, Gordon did what he had done for forty-three years. I knew I was witnessing the routines of a scientist who, like the wolves, depended upon customs to succeed. There was exactness, an order in every detail of his actions, despite the disarray of research logs, equipment, and clothing in the vehicle.

We set out on the trail he had made to the denning observation area. Gordon was acutely aware of each and every detail along the path, including the tiny new spruce tree I was asked to walk around. He took notice of every change since his last trip and said to keep guard of the “attack goshawk” who almost scalped him during a previous hike. Wolf and bear scat was scattered along the trail, and he asked that I leave it undisturbed. He pointed out how the animals had started using the trail he'd made and he enjoyed seeing their sign. As we entered the forest, he quietly said hey bear, hey bear. He shared a terrifying story about a bear he ran into who seemed a lot more interested in him than he should have been.

He looked at his watch and said it normally took him exactly thirty-eight minutes to get to the viewing area. He didn't stop to drink water and didn't put on bug repellent, despite the growing mosquito swarm. For Gordon, it seemed, suffering led to character, and he took every opportunity to build it. As I was dripping with sweat, mauled by mosquitoes, and dying of thirst, I explained to him that I had enough character and did not need to suffer. I stopped, and he graciously allowed it, but didn't drink any water or put on repellent himself. It took us forty-two minutes to get to the site. He grinned and said, “Not bad for the first time out.”

When we arrived, he reached up into an old spruce and pulled down a dark green trash bag covering a folded seat-pad. He had left it in that tree all winter long, and no animals had bothered it. We sat in this spot to view the denning area across the river. We had no collar data, no signal equipment, and no dart guns. This was pure observation, just as Adolph Murie had done in wolf research back in the late 1930s.

This year, the wolves had moved to a brushy area of the denning site, and he said it might be hard to see them. He explained that denning sites are not simply holes in the ground, but can encompass up to a thirty-acre area. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out with a low deep wolf howl, one of the most unique I've ever heard. The wolves answered immediately.

Then he said, “We'll listen here for a bit because when she nurses, the female makes a different call for her pups.” Then we heard the strange cooing. I had been unaware that wolves make a distinguishable sound when calling their pups to nurse, and this was it.

We saw movement in the willows, as one black and two gray pups emerged. They were tiny, fat balls of fluff. They quickly disappeared, and then returned, followed by their four siblings. There were eleven adults in the group at the time, and Gordon had previously sighted seven pups. The breeding female came out and settled down to nurse.

I noticed more movement in the brush and saw another black pup, followed by a gray. Gordon caught sight of the gray but missed the black. I told him I was sure there was another and he became very animated. He asked, “Are you sure there were two? Are you sure it was a different one?” “Yes,” I replied, “yes, I am very sure.” He never saw the second black pup that night but took me for my word. A few days later he confirmed that there were indeed nine pups.

Two subadult wolves came out of the brush, one of which had also nursed the pups during an earlier observation. Gordon referred to this as a unique altruistic relationship. This female was lactating, though she had not yet reached sexual maturity. It was a remarkable response he suspected was due to the large litter. Then the other subadult began nursing the pups, impressing Gordon further.

By then it was early evening, about the time wolves typically leave for a hunt. We watched two wolves go down to the river and cross in front of us. Unlike a dog, who will paddle and fight a current, these wolves used their back legs almost like rudders and their front legs for stability, almost effortlessly letting the river carry them across.

Accompanying Gordon to the denning area was a life-changing experience for me, for which I am extremely grateful. While it's important to observe wolf population trends and territories, it is critical to understand the culture of wolves. Gordon's distinctive work, including these observations of the multiple lactating females and unique river crossings, gives us an important view of family relationships and social adaptations that complete the picture of this fascinating and intelligent species.

11 This den was still in use as of 2011.

12 The reasons for this period of low wolf numbers are unknown. Murie concluded that, since it coincided with the massive introduction of dogs for transportation, it may have been due in part to epizootic disease.

13 Read more about wolves ignoring prey at dens in chapter 5.

CHAPTER 4

IT TAKES A FAMILY: RAISING PUPS COOPERATIVELY

IN THE EARLY 1970S, WHILE STILL AT WORK ON HIS PHD, HABER WROTE A TWO-part series for Alaska magazine, one of his first forays into reaching a broader audience to debunk myths and provide field-tested insights about wolves. At that same time, he also wrote a scientific paper about the need for a buffer to protect park wolves and had his first oped in the New York Times, helping to make him nationally renowned and initiating his lifelong advocacy work. Beginning in 1978 and until his death in 2009, Haber was an independent scientist, finding funding from various sources but always making his own decisions about what to study and how. He was one of the first to introduce systems theory to Alaska, a method that would manage Alaska's wildlife not just by the numbers of a particular species, but by the species' interactions with their total environment. At the time, and in many ways to this day, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game managed only by individual species population counts, ignoring the wider implications of their roles in the ecosystem.

All of Haber's conclusions were firmly rooted in his thousands of hours with Denali's wolves, in which he recorded nearly every aspect of their daily lives. After long days at blinds watching wolves at their natal dens, he followed them as they began to teach the pups about their world. He recorded all the ways in which pups gain advantage by being raised in an extended family, including how adult wolves engage in deliberate teaching, and how yearlings, in particular, develop some of the closest bonds with the new pups. Haber was thrilled at every observation of cooperative pup-rearing, from the hard work of provisioning growing pups to the complexities of teaching them to hunt their large and dangerous prey—a process, he concluded, during which the pups go through four distinct phases. On his last flight with Troy Dunn, his pilot of ten years, and during the last summer of his life, Haber observed an event, said Dunn, that so excited him “he was like a little kid”: a Toklat yearling's incredible commitment and intelligence in helping three pups cross the Sanctuary River.

WOLF PUPS LEARN FAST DURING THEIR FIRST FEW WEEKS OUTSIDE the den. Watching so many litters develop, from ground observation at dens and at rendezvous sites, I've seen the pups begin solving problems on their own during this early period, such as learning to negotiate their way through complex terrain features near the dens. They do so in surprisingly creative ways and learn quickly from their mistakes.

The most important learning for the pups comes later, however, beginning in the fall, when they no longer need to be fed and cared for at homesites and can travel continuously with the older wolves. During the summer months, from May through September, all the wolves stay close to the den. However, the rest of year they are fairly nomadic, traveling constantly throughout their range and sometimes making extraterritorial forays. So the first couple of years of a wolf's life are filled with crucial learning. Young wolves remain dependent on adults of the group in almost every way until they are about a year old. It isn't until they are about two that they become capable of taking care of themselves, particularly in their ability to hunt.

For those who don't disperse to other territories to join other groups or start a new family, young wolves learn important hunting skills, details of the established territory (homesites, good hunting areas, travel routes, etc.), how to navigate stream crossings, how to respond to bears, and other behavior from the older wolves. This is especially critical in groups like the Toklat that rely heavily on the most challenging prey, moose and sheep. They actually require this two- to three-year period to learn from older, more experienced wolves; if they are denied this, then their very survival is at stake. Much of this learning amounts to traditions that are refined over time, behavior that helps adapt the group to the specific resources and other conditions of its area.

Provisioning Growing Pups

Prior to weaning, all of the wolves dote over the new pups, letting them tumble over them, bite their tails, and otherwise play on them. However, this behavior subsequently wanes and is accompanied by disciplinary action, largely because of the rambunctious food begging of the rapidly growing pups. By about halfway through the busy homesite period, the pups are still completely dependent on the older wolves, but have, in the space of six weeks, more than doubled in size.

Provisioning this growth is hard work for the older wolves. They depart from the den or rendezvous site sometimes in groups, often individually, forage up to twenty miles away, and return in a day or two, usually bringing something back for the pups in their jaws or in their stomachs to be regurgitated. With four to ten pups competing, it is impressive that the pups are usually all about the same size and that litters of this age and older typically enjoy a high survival rate. After eight to ten hours of rest, the adults head back out again.

Like spokes on a wheel, the adults' forays radiate in many directions. The homesite is a veritable beehive of activity, the hub where little mouths are always waiting to be fed and the adult hunters regularly come and go. A kill can mean numerous trips back and forth from the den or rendezvous site, though after mid- to late July, the adults might also move the pups to a kill that is not too far away and does not require crossing a major river.

Wolves also have some intriguing ways of communicating information about the location of kills to the rest of the group. Years ago, a radio-collared Toklat killed a caribou by himself while other adults rested at the den, eight miles away. After returning to the den and regurgitating for the pups, the first wolf rested. With the first wolf still resting at the den, several other adults soon departed and went straight to the kill, likewise returning eventually to provision the pups. The adults at the den understood that there was more to be transported from where the first load originated and pinpointed the location eight miles away, perhaps by back-scenting the first wolf's route.

Successful hunters return with various prey items in their stomachs, from combinations of small mammals and birds to caribou or moose meat (sheep are uncommon prey in the summer). When they kill a caribou or moose, they usually come back with sides bulging like a barrel. They also carry carcass portions in their jaws, including forequarters or hindquarters, heads, and, in the case of a young calf, the entire animal, testifying to the wolves' powerful neck and jaw muscles.

Pups mob returning hunters. They leap and nibble excitedly at a hunter's mouth and nose, triggering regurgitation of whatever is in the stomach. When a hunter comes back with sides bulging, the result can be several piles up to twenty pounds each. These disappear in seconds, and sometimes a pup sticks its mouth inside the adult's mouth and intercepts some of the goodies before they hit the ground. This usually comes out with a chunky consistency, sort of reminding me of the warm, chunky tuna sauce I used to look forward to on toast as a kid. Occasionally, returning hunters regurgitate over a period of several hours, coughing up a pile or two initially, then again with continued food begging from pups much later.

The pups can be quite insistent at this age, such that adults with nothing more to regurgitate must sometimes reprimand them, usually with a harmless—albeit scary—growl or snap, and by briefly pinning one or more to the ground in open jaws. Learning discipline is an important part of growing up for wolf pups, just as it is for human children. I once watched three Toklat pups start to approach their mother, but she was trying to rest and gave them a little warning. The ears of the first two pups pinned back a little, and both were acting rather tentative, indicating they were getting the message. It's a good thing. Pups can be quite the rambunctious pests at this age, just what an adult who has been out hunting for them all night doesn't need.

What's interesting is that, unlike human children, the pups are less likely to get pushy with either of their parents than with the other adults, some of whom are older siblings. Not surprisingly, yearlings (twelve- to sixteen-month-old wolves) seem to identify easily with the pups. Sometimes they temporarily regress to puplike behavior while romping with pups; in one case a yearling even attempted to nurse with the pups. In fact, yearlings develop among the closest bonds with the new pups and spend long periods attending to and playing with them.

Tweet

June 21, 2009

Among the flowers blossoming along the hike are lupine, cinqefoil, harebells, monkshood, moss campion, labrador tea, wild roses. Delightful.

I've always thought it's easier for pups of this age to relate to and learn from brothers and sisters only a year removed from the den themselves. This is an important benefit in addition to the care and protection the yearlings provide. Their close care of the young pups is one of the manifestations of the wolves' sophisticated cooperative breeding behavior, in this case a form of “helping” that also amounts to a division of labor.

Puppy Walks

Wolf pups continue to develop rapidly throughout the five-month homesite period, first at the natal den, then typically at a series of “rendezvous sites” after late July. These rendezvous sites are usually less traditional than dens and do not have burrows. There are many opportunities for the pups to explore and learn while still at the natal den; a well-established den often consists of twenty to thirty acres or more of adult rest areas, pup play areas, trails, and other features in addition to the burrow complexes.

Although the pups learn primarily by watching as adults go about their normal routines and then trying it out themselves, I have also observed indications of deliberate teaching, particularly of two- to three-month-old pups. At least a dozen times I've watched older wolves of the Savage River, Toklat, and Wonder Lake family groups lead young pups on a leisurely one- to two-hour excursion from the den. These walks seemed to have no other purpose than to better acquaint the pups with the “outside” world. Sometimes it was the young helper in attendance who led them off, but more commonly it was their mother or another high-ranking adult.

Seldom do older wolves allow pups of this age to venture far from the safety of den burrows, so when summoned for these walks, the pups romped about with great excitement and investigated virtually every bush, rock, stick, butterfly, or new smell they encountered along the way. The older wolf always seemed relaxed and stopped often to wait for them, as if enjoying their activities—a notable departure from the agony parents and helpers usually display when subjected to this puppy ebullience at the den.

From the pups' timid behavior in the fall, just after homesites are abandoned, it's clear they have much to master about the outside world. By exposing them to even these short walks at a young age, the adults better prepare them for the shorter moves from one homesite to the next, and then for the fall transition to continuous hunting. Denali wolves move their pups unpredictably, especially in August and September. While these moves seem to be motivated primarily by hunting opportunities, I have seen wolves move pups because of human disturbance via hiking activity. I strongly suspect that homesite moves are also made to provide the pups with major new learning experiences and gradual training in cross-country travel.

Four Phases

As the pups learn what they'll need as cooperative hunters, they progress through four fairly distinct phases: hesitation and fear, overreaction, effective participation with guidance, and, finally, fully effective participation.

The phase of hesitation and fear lasts for about a month or two after homesites are abandoned in September. As the pups begin to travel with the group on its hunting rounds, it becomes obvious how dependent they are. Almost anything that is unfamiliar to them can pose a problem. Adults may have to coax young from the opposite bank of a foot-deep river for fifteen or more minutes before they build up the courage to cross. At this stage of their development young wolves are likely to bound off after the nearest raven or ptarmigan, wasting energy on creatures that are of such little consequence as potential food as to attract barely a glance from experienced adults. And they are afraid of moose and other large prey.

In October 1970, four adults of the Savage River group had given up chasing a mature bull caribou when the bull pulled away after about 150 yards. The nine pups were running excitedly behind the adults, and when the adults stopped, they continued bounding after the fleeing caribou with tails up—but only until the caribou stopped and looked back at them. Then the pups slammed on the brakes, put their ears back and tails between their legs, and fled back to where they came from. When the caribou resumed running, the pups again raised their tails in self-confidence and continued their “pursuit.” The caribou again stopped, and the pups came to a screeching halt and ran back. This routine happened at least four times for about ten minutes and almost a mile, even though the pups had soon fallen a half mile behind. The adult wolves, meanwhile, watched with casual interest from the slope where they had given up.

Later in their first winter, the pups enter the second phase and begin to take chances with large and dangerous prey. They seem to go from one extreme to another! from a relatively timid reaction to everything, early in the first winter, to an almost foolhardy boldness by midwinter. During this period of overreaction, spanning the next few months, they become exceptionally bold, often to the point of not only wasting energy but taking dangerous risks.

They persist after moose when adults have given up, frequently approaching closer than adults, often barely avoiding the quick, deadly strikes of the front hooves. They pursue sheep into treacherous rocks and steep ledges where older wolves hesitate to go. Behavior toward small mammals and birds shows the same overreaction. Ravens in particular run the gullible pups ragged and often seem to go out of their way to tease them, sometimes for hours at a time.[14] And by eight months old, any fear about new situations and objects disappears, and overflow ice, deep snow, steep ridges, or a protruding stick are likely to instead trigger intense play.

It isn't until they are about a year old that they enter the third phase, in which they find a happy medium and begin to contribute to the hunting effectiveness of the group. They regain some caution, although they still persist longer than adults when prey is tested. Most of the exuberant, playful reactions to other situations and objects have tempered by this age, though they are still more playful than adults. And they are still very dependent. They are less adept at scavenging, being less successful at finding winter kills. They are also less efficient at testing prey and are most inept at handling moose and sheep, both of which require considerable finesse to capture and kill. Especially when hunting moose, younger wolves usually join in after initial maneuvers by the adults, and they usually attack at a safer position near the rear of the moose.

Field notes #1

Summer 1979

11:10 am—4 ewes & 1 lamb visible up on Igloo Mtn behind ranger cabin—there may be more than just one lamb, since the ewes are lying down in rocks. However, if there are more lambs, there are only 1 or 2 more, since at least one of the additional ewes definitely doesn't have one.

In 1971 I watched all nineteen wolves of the Savage River family surprise a band of eighteen sheep. The wolves had spotted the sheep from a mountaintop five miles away and then approached them undetected by a series of seven- to eight-thousand-foot knife ridges. The final approach required a climb out of a steep, narrow gorge to a high plateau where the sheep were feeding, which allowed the wolves to appear suddenly in a line over the top edge, a mere one hundred feet from the sheep. The wolves stood motionless for a few seconds, looking at the sheep; the sheep, so completely surprised that they froze where they stood, looked at the wolves. Their only escape was to run directly through the line of wolves.

After a few seconds of suspended animation, most sheep dashed straight into the wolf line, which quickly became a chaotic mixture of thirty-seven wolves and sheep. Six large rams, weighing about two hundred pounds each, led this dash, running into a section of the wolf line including six yearlings. The yearlings seemed hesitant to confront the rams and two were bowled right over when they tried. Most sheep escaped through this section, but the beta male, LT, met one of the rams head-on and hauled him down by the neck. Most of the other wolves quickly joined him and began ripping away and eating.

Meanwhile, several young wolves continued chasing a few straggling ewes in circles on the plateau; within a few minutes, all except one had given up. The persistent young wolf finally caught a small ewe and held her by the nose but was unable to wrestle her to the ground. The other wolves were too occupied at the ram carcass to notice, so the young wolf struggled for all it was worth to hold on to the ewe. Finally, LT and an adult female saw what was happening, and ran to the younger wolf's aid, quickly dispatching the ewe.

Field notes Denali #21

July 1989

The first time the wolves brought the caribou to bay, it looked like they might get it. The lead wolf was holding him and trying to grab the nose and within a few minutes 2 trailing wolves arrived—a good-sized tan and a smaller tan that looked like a yearling—it was the less-experienced wolf mentioned earlier. During the first “at bay,” the 2 larger wolves were working together to try to hold the caribou where it was (in the river) whereupon the 3rd wolf arrived. However, within perhaps 20–30 seconds this 3rd wolf began trotting away, to the South, along this channel. This looked very strange to us, but I assumed that wolf might be going to position itself upstream in order to cut off this escape route.

Not until they are almost two years old, or about the age of sexual maturity, do wolves reach the fourth phase and become effective hunters without guidance from older wolves. During the approximately two years of training that the young require to gain full skill at hunting, it is obvious that they closely watch and follow the moves of adults, learning as they go, with much trial and error during that first winter.

This prolonged period of dependency on the adults in proportion to their total life span provides the means by which knowledge can be passed from one generation to another. This is a general characteristic of intelligent animal societies, including our own. And as with the young in many primitive human societies, young wolves have the added advantage of being raised in an extended family, where the presence of many adults caring for them—not just one or two parents—exposes them to the broadest possible opportunity for learning.

It Takes a Family

Reproductive relationships are the strongest, most durable bonds in an established family of wolves, but the bonds between yearlings and the current litter of pups can be surprisingly important. When the pups are old enough to leave the den, and the fall forays begin, the close bonds between yearlings and pups remains strong, and in some instances appears crucial for the pups' survival.

Field notes Denali #21

July 1989 continued

Within a couple of minutes, the caribou did begin fleeing away, with the two larger wolves pursuing, and we thought the third wolf—who was ~100 yds away, about the route where the ’bou was running—would close off this escape route. But we were astounded to see it just run off farther to the south, leaving the escape route wide open. It was as if this young, inexperienced wolf had no clue whatsoever as to what the hell was going on—or perhaps it was a little afraid. In any case, the caribou got away and ran up the upper W branch of Polychrome Flats. The young wolf did eventually join in the chase, and ultimately helped a little in the final kill. But in general its ineptness and lack of experience was very obvious, compared to the other two wolves—it was likely only a yearling wolf, based on its size and body appearance.

During a late August 2009 research flight in Denali National Park, I watched as three females of the Toklat family moved three pups to a new location within the group's territory. The alpha female had produced nine pups in May, and both she and a larger female had nursed them into June. The third female, a fifteen-month-old yearling, is likely the same female who I believe also nursed the nine pups. The following photo sequence shows highlights of the yearling female's attentiveness to the pups as observed on the late August flight. They also convey a good sense of the wolves' intelligence, expressiveness, and emotional depth. Photo directions vary, because we are circling.

Snapshot: Son

Troy Dunn

One of my favorite wolves was an alpha male Gordon called Son, because he was the son of a prior alpha couple. First time I saw him, he was just a little black pup. The whole Toklat family was together; the adults, subadults, and pups were on a Sanctuary River sandbar, eating a caribou kill. The pups were tucked under some brush several feet away. Also on that caribou was an adult grizzly, so here we had the Toklat adults on one end of the remains of a caribou and on the other mere feet away this grizzly. Amazingly, everyone was leaving everyone alone.

As we watched, another bear showed up: a subadult grizzly that was about a half mile downstream caught a whiff of the caribou, and started on a dead run upriver. When this subadult bear got within sight of the big bear and the wolves, it acted just like a teenager. It jumped into the water, pounding its paws and slapping the water; then it sat in the water with its feet up and bobbed back downstream, out of view.

The adult grizzly started ambling off upstream. Suddenly, that little black pup came out of the brush and walked right behind the bear, following it. We wondered, what's that little pup doing? It was like that little wolf was thinking, OK, bear, hit the bricks, as if he was pushing him off that kill. The bear didn't turn around, but the adults saw what was happening, and two of them flanked the little pup, one on each side as escorts. The bear didn't care, didn't turn around, and walked off across a small section of water where the pup and escorts returned to the caribou.

Gordon said to me, “That pup has the makings of an alpha male.” And then years later, that pup did become the alpha male. Way back then, Gordon could tell.

14 See more on ravens and wolves in chapter 9.

CHAPTER 5

GOING WITH THE FLOW: THE DAILY LIVES OF WOLVES

IN A POETIC RESONANCE WITH THE CABIN HIS PARENTS BUILT ON A WILDERNESS lake in Ontario, Haber bought some land and built a cabin on the banks of the Nenana River just outside the park entrance. Haber's childhood experiences at the cabin on Lake Huron, said his sister, Mary, fostered his love of nature and wildlife and were his first steps toward his life in Alaska with Denali's wolves—wolves who, he soon learned, may have lived in a nationally designated wilderness but were not well protected.

In the winter of 1982–1983, the Savage River family group, who, along with the Toklat, was his primary study group for seventeen years, disappeared. Haber concluded they were all killed by illegal hunting, possibly aerial hunting. He wrote a series of papers on aerial wolf hunting in Alaska, and he continued advocating for a protective buffer and a more enlightened attitude toward and management of Alaska's wolves. In 1987 the National Park Service began radio-collaring a few members of each wolf family. Haber was initially opposed to it and remained concerned about its effects, as explained in his critique of the collaring deaths described in chapter 10. However, he also began using the collaring frequencies to find wolves by air in winter, thus allowing him to follow many more wolf groups than he would otherwise have been able to, and to gather more definitive evidence about hunting and trapping deaths.

He continued to observe their daily lives, finding nothing boring, not even, recalled his pilot Troy Dunn, when all the wolves were doing was lying about “flaked out” in the midday heat. It was important to Haber to record more than just the big events of the wolves' lives in order to truly understand these animals. He didn't just record hunts, for example, but also recorded the time spent gearing up for a hunt as well as times when wolves ignored prey that walked right by them. He observed how much, and the ways in which, wolves play; he observed when and why they howled. He was enthralled by their skill in maneuvering through their environment, compared, sometimes, to his own.

WITHIN THE FAMILY GROUP, WOLVES' LIVES ARE HIGHLY COOPerative and harmonious, and demonstrate an unusual depth of emotional attachments. For example, I never observed a feeding order, not even when as many as nineteen wolves ate at a small kill. Their daily lives are filled not only with raising pups and hunting but also with much socializing among each other and navigating their vast territories.

Group socializing is a big deal for the family group. In summer these ebullient romps and howl-alongs are associated with hunting departures and arrivals, and they take place at prominent pup areas of the homesite, allowing the pups to join in wholeheartedly. In winter, socializing happens as they travel.

Playtime

In watching wolves for any extended period one is impressed with the amount of play that takes place. Play sessions are often spontaneous and can start for almost any reason. It seems that the family is never too hungry or tired to take time out for play. If a half hour passes without at least some play, it is an unusual half hour in the daily routine of a wolf family group.

Play often involves only some members of the group, although I have recorded intense sessions of rough-and-tumble play where the entire group participated for as long as forty-five minutes. In December 2002 I watched nine wolves play for over a half hour on a frozen lake in the Denali region of Alaska. Four other wolves of this family group were resting at the scant remains of a moose the wolves killed a day or two earlier.

In winter, wolf families of this region eat a significant meal of moose, mountain sheep, or caribou on average once every few days. They obtain these meals while hunting over distances averaging fifteen miles per day, including periods of rest. About half their meals come from kills, and on average 5 percent of their winter encounters with moose result in kills. The other half of their winter meals are scavenged (animals that died from other causes); the majority of the moose they eat are scavenged. They dig many of the scavenged meals from beneath the snow—from as deep as ten feet into densely packed drifts and avalanches—and must expend additional effort gnawing into the frozen remains. So a good meal is usually a hard-earned, happy event. And over the next day or two, before they begin hunting again, almost anything is likely to trigger another bout of spirited play, such as an opportunity for a wide-open run in fresh powder snow.

Field notes #134

June 2006

7:25–8 am (Stampede II) Wolf sleeping out in front of den with one black pup. Wolf returned from a hunt, very distended belly obviously from eating. She arrives at 7:35 am going straight to den in trees along bank. Initially she does not see #930 and black pup. Four pups 200 feet out on bar. But a few minutes later she comes out of trees, followed by three tan pups toward the others. The black pup sees her and comes to meet. #930 remains flaked out, not responding in the slightest. The four pups get her to regurgitate again, probably several times. Later the black pup and one tan nurse briefly while she is laying down, though she is not accommodating them much—doesn't seem to want to nurse.

Individual wolves, especially young ones, often seem to run just for the joy of it, even after an unsuccessful hunt. I once watched a young adult Toklat wolf unsuccessfully pursue caribou. This yearling and at least two others were resting with pups at a rendezvous site when a band of caribou strolled by, following the gravel bar of a nearby river. The other wolves ignored the caribou, but this wolf took off after them, chasing for about twenty minutes over various routes adding up to five miles as the fleeing caribou split into various subgroups and individuals. All the caribou eventually pulled away, but the young wolf continued running across the tundra. Even without hunting success, I'm often left with the impression that wolves simply enjoy running. It is an almost effortless loping and bounding, a thing of beauty to watch.

There are variations of play that can best be described as games. In “tag,” wolves run about attempting to pull on each other's tails. Once the game gets going and a few tails have been pulled, it is amusing to watch how the participants begin to keep their tails tucked securely between their legs. “Ambush” is another game, in which one wolf runs ahead of the group and crouches close to the ground or behind a low bush, waiting like a cat to pounce on the others when they near.

Field notes #134

June 2006, continued

2:30 pm—All seven pups (5 black and 2 tan) appear in the open and romp and play. Then 830, who had been resting ~ 100 yds away, comes to them. They mob her, food begging. She does not regurgitate. Several times 1–2 pups try to nurse and each time she reprimands them by snapping at them—definitely is not nursing any longer. She then lies down and allows them to climb all over her etc. Lots of this and pup-pup play.

3:30 pm—830 howls & looks to the S side of bar ~200 ft away. Apparently that is where 429 is resting. Then the pups look that way. 429 appears, & comes to pups & 830—pups mob him—he snaps at them but they persist.

Play can benefit members of a social group in a variety of ways. One important advantage is that it enables members to maintain a close familiarity with one another, which favors close cooperation. It isn't coincidental that wolves are at the same time probably the most playful, as well as the most socially cooperative, of nonhuman animals.

In the following photographs, fourteen wolves of the Swift Northeast family travel in the usual single-file manner on October 18, 2008, with the alpha male leading. However, the afternoon sunshine and fresh powder snow are irresistible to the younger adults and pups, and many of them break into frequent bouts of play along the way.

Heat of the Day

Wolves have extraordinary sensory abilities with their noses, eyes, and ears. Their senses are supersharp when they are alert, especially at times of hunting departures and arrivals and while hunting. Just the opposite is true when they are resting during the day, particularly in summer heat. While at their summer homesites, they hunt at night when it's cooler, and sleep during the day.

They often rest in fortress locations, such as along the high rock bluffs at the Toklat and Teklanika dens, where they can see or hear approaching intruders while remaining concealed. Nevertheless, they can be completely surprised. I have walked inadvertently into sleeping wolves, where pups detected me and showed great curiosity before the adults awoke. It takes a lot to stir adult wolves into any major action on a hot, sunny day. A wolf suffers conspicuously in such heat, even in its “lightweight” summer fur coat. It wants little more than to flake out in some spruce or willow thicket and scrape its bed a little deeper, to get at the cooler dirt below. An intruder enjoys its best chances of approaching a homesite closely under these conditions, although the most threatening intruders—bears and other wolves—are themselves unlikely to be prowling around on a hot day.

There are times when wolves are simply not in a hunting mood, notably on a hot day after a tough night on the trail provisioning growing pups, as noted in the previous chapter. As in familiar predator-prey scenes from the East African plains, the wolves often ignore nearby prey, and the prey seem to likewise ignore the wolves. Sometimes the wolves and prey step by each other so closely with such aloofness that it seems like a game. I've seen as many as forty caribou move casually by a den less than two hundred feet away from as many as fifteen adult wolves, and all the wolves did was raise their heads for a brief, disinterested glance, maybe begin a twenty-second chorus of howls, but then with sleepy-eyed yawns drop back to sleep.

Perhaps the most astounding of these encounters was with the Savage River family in late July of 1981. A National Park Service photographer and I were watching from my usual observation point about two hundred yards away. Most of the ten adult wolves had been sleeping for a half hour after some intense socializing following the return of hunters. One high-ranking male arose to a sitting position, looked around for a minute, then dropped back down to resume his snooze. Two other adults stretched out nearby.

Suddenly, three adult moose—a large bull and two cows—appeared on the ridgeline 150 yards from the den. They continued ambling downslope, apparently unaware that they'd just stumbled into a wolf family at rest. At seventy-five yards the wolves still had not responded, but now the moose were stopping every few seconds and acting skittish. The bull and a cow ambled over to some willow, and then headed off to an area of good willow browsing about a quarter mile to the north. One cow lingered to browse on willows, and then walked to a brush-filled gully where at least two wolves rested. She browsed for about fifteen minutes with no response from any of the wolves resting not more than fifty feet away.

Meanwhile the two pups had awakened from their nap and were sitting together at the burrow entrance, staring incredulously at the strange monster standing in the willows less than a hundred feet away. It took them only thirty seconds to decide that they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with this huge creature, and they darted right back into the burrow. Then the cow walked within thirty feet of the burrow; she was acting quite uncertain, as if she could smell the fresh wolf scent all around. Then she resumed browsing.

At this point, the high-ranking male wolf, who was resting on an open willow bench thirty-five feet away, sat up and looked toward, but not directly at, the moose, as if he didn't wish to acknowledge her presence, although he appeared to be looking at the burrow area to satisfy himself that there was no imminent danger for the pups. Then he dropped back down, his head flopping off to the side. The moose, meanwhile, kept looking in the opposite direction and acting as if she hadn't seen him—even though he was clearly visible at such close range—or any of his family members. She continued to browse with wolves all around her. The male raised his head for one more brief, sleepy-eyed glance, then lowered it and closed his eyes.

Field notes #133

June 2006

5:05 pm—I see a grizzly w/3 yearlings rooting directly below eroded bluffs below S side of den area. Casual behavior.

5:20—same. still no wolves—bears rooting same area.

5:30—same—bears still in same area but working slowly upstream.

6:55—still don't see wolves—the bears have just climbed up the S gulley and are now in the trees at top of bluff, at S end of den area. It looks like they are foraging in a grassy area there—no indication they are after the wolf pups or even know this is a wolf area.

7:07—I hear 840 in den area, probably toward S end, in bear area. A raven flies from my side of valley and drops down into the trees behind the bluff.

Shortly thereafter, the cow ambled back up the ridge and disappeared over the top. A few minutes later the male wolf rose, walked to the main burrow, looked it over for a few seconds, then returned to the bench for more sleep. The two pups poked their heads barely out of the burrow entrance for another apprehensive look toward the willow patch where they'd last seen the moose, then pulled back abruptly.

But there can be exceptions, regardless of the heat. On a hot morning in August 1966, a yearling cow moose wandered right into the midst of at least ten resting wolves at the den and promptly got herself killed and eaten. And on another hot day in June 1973, at least a dozen older wolves were

asleep at the Toklat den. Since not much else appeared to be happening in the area, I reclined for some midday sleep myself, at my campsite on the opposite side of the valley. I had been sleeping soundly for about an hour when I awoke to the clickety-click of caribou hoofs running along the gravel bar, only seventy-five feet away. No sooner had I raised my head for a fleeting tail-end glance at the large bull caribou than I heard the duller thuds of wolf paws hitting the gravel at a full lope. Neither the wolf nor the caribou saw me. The wolf—a large adult male—chased with his tongue hanging almost to the ground but with his eyes fixed on the caribou like the infrared detectors of a heat-seeking missile. The chase disappeared quickly around a brushy bend, preventing me from watching the outcome, although my later searches of the area failed to find any evidence of a kill.

Social Travel

Winter, when wolves don't stay at a homesite, is a different story. The Savage River and Toklat family groups traveled in winter on average fourteen and a half miles per day, and as much as twenty-five miles per day. Wolves clearly like to travel—there is an obvious joy in their distinctive and poetic loose-gaited trot.

In winter they hunt throughout their territory, visiting most prey areas at least once every few weeks. On these far-flung winter travels, it became obvious to me that the adults know their huge, rugged territories intimately. They use the same routes regularly, moving deliberately to strategic passes and negotiating long, complicated sequences of high, interconnected knife ridges without the slightest hint of uncertainty or trial and error. There is no doubt in my mind that these established family groups traveled their territories largely on the basis of an exceptionally detailed knowledge and memory of the terrain and its plant and animal life. This kind of spatial acumen develops as a family group tradition and enables successive generations to become increasingly tuned to their territory and its specific resources.

During this more nomadic time, some two- to three-year-olds will decide to leave the family and disperse to other areas. This occurs mainly when the family group is large and prey is scarce. Family groups of seven members can have just as good hunting success as family groups of twenty members, and I've never observed any aggression or feeding order at kills, even with twenty wolves. Instead, this dispersal happens without animosity or aggression and is rather a two-way slackening of bonds, along with a tendency of subordinates approaching sexual maturity to show a desire to wander off on their own for varying periods of time.

Tweet

June 11, 2009

Love the hike in and out. Attack goshawk waiting for me again tonite at 10 pm on hike out as I dropped down from the subalpine into forest.

Seasonal food supplies can also affect the family group structure. Before the Denali caribou herd's last decline in the 1970s, the Toklat family group had an abundance of food in summer and a dearth in winter when the caribou migrated away. So in winter, they often split into two or three groups. This winter splitting was temporary, however; in spring, as pupping time grew close, the groups rejoined into one large family again. As the caribou herd declined and the difference between summer and winter food supplies was less, winter splitting was less frequent.

Winter travel along the borders of their territory also includes intergroup strife. The Savage River and Toklat groups sparred regularly, with hostilities sometimes beginning as a series of short tit-for-tat trespasses along the same segment of the territorial divide. Occasionally this was preceded or accompanied by some back-and-forth howling, and not uncommonly there was considerable reciprocal scent marking over the other's marks. Sometimes these probes escalated into deeper raids, hot pursuit, and fatal fights. In fact, deaths from intergroup fighting probably constitute 10 to 20 percent of a family group's total natural (non-human-caused) winter losses from death and dispersal.

While these two well-established groups clearly did not accept trespassing strangers, groups will adopt newcomers at times, particularly when they've suffered hunting and trapping losses. The Toklats, after the collaring death of the alpha male, allowed two new males to join their group, and one became the new alpha male. And in 1989, a two-year-old male from a small, unstable group west of the Toklat territory was accepted into the Headquarters group. At the time, the Headquarters consisted of only two adults and their five pups of 1988 and was in the process of colonizing a large vacancy created when the Savage River family was decimated six years earlier. Headquarters had a long history of exploitation and unusual losses; in 1986 it had been reduced to only two wolves.

The 1989 newcomer seemed to enjoy good odds of mixing into that group the day he was accepted; he instantly became the second-ranking male. However, after only a year he left and tried to raise pups with a young female at a den just northeast of the Headquarters territory. Apparently this was unsuccessful, and by March 1991 he was associating with four wolves twenty miles farther northeastward, where there was even more hunting and trapping activity. He was accidently killed at that time by a drug overdose during attempts to replace his radio collar.[15]

In the following photos from March 2009, the Toklats are starting out after a period of sleep. It is late morning and they have just started out in the typical single-file travel formation. But it often takes at least a couple of starts for the wolves to really get going.

Crossing a River

Wolves are characteristically mellow in their demeanor, much more easy-going than most of the dogs I've known. One of the ways this behavior serves them well is in crossing raging glacial rivers. They don't struggle and paddle furiously as a dog is likely to do but instead relax and play the angles and currents intelligently, easing across while riding the flow somewhat downstream, often appearing even to enjoy the task. Two hundred miles northeast of Denali, I have documented summer wolf crossings of the mighty, muddy Yukon River where it was almost a half mile wide. At least twice, radio-collared wolves that were denning on the north side of the Yukon crossed to the south side to hunt and were back at the den within a day or two.

Wolves can swim deep, swift, broad rivers during the warmer months—I've observed this at the Yukon and the Nenana, among others. But they avoid getting soaked when it's cold enough for their fur to freeze, and for other cold-related reasons. And in fall and spring, especially at lesser rivers and creeks, they use ice bridges and narrow gaps between frozen areas that they can jump.

In my wilderness travels, I've had my share of accidental close encounters with assertive grizzly bears and irate mother moose with young calves. But my most apprehensive moments have come during river crossings—including a couple where I lost to the current and almost didn't make it out. So it is with particular interest that I observe the masters.

My pilot and I watched a demonstration of the skillful, relaxed way they do it during an August 2008 research flight in Denali, when the Stampede alpha pair crossed the Toklat River in flood stage. Normally a glacial river flows as a series of braided channels on a wide gravel bar, with a lot more gravel showing than water. But after many days of rain, sections of the gravel bar had turned into broad, fast-flowing sheets of water, deepest where the main channels had been.

As we came upon the radio-collared Stampede male and female on a hunt fifteen miles north of their den, they were already partly across the river and about to take on the worst of it. We watched in awe, while circling above, as the wolves made their way downstream on a shallow portion of the flooded gravel river bar, with deep channels on either side.

The female was leading and seemed to be making most of the decisions. As they continued along the shallows toward the convergence of the main two channels, they appeared to be studying the right-side channel and anticipating a helpful deflection partly across the left channel by the force of the current from the right channel where it veered into the left channel at a downstream narrowing of the river. Their pace was deliberate, without any indication of wanting to cross upstream.

First the female plunged in and was quickly submerged, with only her head above the current. A few seconds later the male followed, and we watched as their heads were barely above water in the dangerous standing waves. There was no indication of panic or struggling. They seemed remarkably relaxed, crossing at an angle and riding the current. We took note of the angle of intersection of the two channels and the more concentrated current of the channel originally on the wolves' right side, and realized that they had correctly anticipated an advantage in crossing here.

They were safely across within a couple of minutes, less than two hundred feet downstream from the convergence of the channels. The female looked back briefly, but they did not stop to rest. There was one more easier channel, and she led across that one, too. On the west side of the Toklat they rolled around in some gravel, shook themselves off, and then continued on their way as if it had not been any big deal.

Snapshot: Just One More Turn

Troy Dunn

When it came to wolves, Gordon was like a kid. It didn't matter what the wolves were doing, even if they were just lying around, lounging on a hot day (“flaked out,” as Gordon called it). He always was excited to see them. And we did see some pretty amazing things.

Once we saw a group of wolves coming up one side of a mountain, and a different family group coming up the other side. They hadn't seen each other yet, and Gordon said to me, “Oh, geez, we can't leave, we just gotta stay here.”

Well, there are only so many hours you can stay airborne. I'd configured our Cessna 180 specifically for Gordon's work so we could stay airborne for eight hours (we planned for seven). But there's still a finite amount of fuel, so when the propeller is turning, it's like a football game with the clock ticking.

“OK,” I told him, “all I ask is that, if we're gonna spend the time here, don't ask me if we can go out to McGrath, too.”

“OK,” he said, “just one more turn.”

So many times, he'd say, just one more turn, again and again, sometimes literally twenty times. He had such a difficult time pulling himself away from those wolves. I have to admit I had a hard time leaving as well, but we always had many more family groups to observe. Many times we would return to a particular location on the way back in to check on the progress of a particular activity the wolves were doing.

One time we watched wolves trying to cross a section of open water when it was thirty-five below. None of the wolves wanted to jump in that water at that temperature, so they were going up and down the stream. Then one found a tree-fall across the water, and howled to the other wolves. They all came running, and all crossed over the fallen tree. It was problem solving, working together, using the tree as a bridge.

Gordon just never lost his sense of wonder. He was always curious about why things are the way they are. Not just wolves, but whales, old trees, forest fires, everything. He'd see some lenticular clouds over Denali and say, “That's really neat, why don't we take a shot of that?”

One thing that really got his goat was naming something after a person. He said no natural feature should ever be named for a person. He had a name for anything that didn't have a name, based on his experiences there: Ass-kicker Canyon, Mudslump Valley. Once I said we should name a particular pass “Haber Pass.” He said, “No way. I call it Misery Pass,” and then he explained how he'd spent a few wet months there back in the late 1960s.

My last flight with him was one of the standouts; that's when we saw the Toklat pups crossing the Sanctuary River. It was the yearling with the bad front leg—she had been limping all winter long—who went in after those pups, especially the one bobbing downstream. To see that wolf go in that water and act like a block, using her body as a barricade so the pup could get footing on the bank, to see those wolves working together and coaxing the pups across that water for the first time in their lives—it was amazing.

Gordon never tired of these things. When the pups were crossing the stream, he was excited and wanted to keep them in sight, so he kept saying “turn, turn, don't lose them.”

“Gordon,” I said, “I can only fly this aircraft within the laws of physics.”

“Oh, OK,” he said. “Just do the best you can.”

“No, Gordon,” I said, “I'm going to do the worst.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

He didn't get sarcasm. At least not when he was watching wolves.

15 See chapter 10 for more on the effects of these accidental collaring deaths.

CHAPTER 6

WHY WOLVES HOWL: THE MANY SOCIAL VALUES

THE EARLY 1990S WERE A BUSY TIME FOR DR. HABER. HE WAS APPOINTED TO THE National Park Service's Scientific Advisory Panel for the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, as well as the Technical Advisory Group for Alaska's Wolf Management Planning Team. In 1993, he spoke at the Alaska Wolf Summit and there met Priscilla Feral, whose group, Friends of Animals, funded most of his research for the rest of his life. But no matter how busy, he continued to reach out to broader audiences with his insights about wolves. He appeared on TV and radio shows; he gave lectures worldwide; his photographs appeared in many National Geographic books and films. He didn't, however, confine his audience to adults. He created an educational program for use in grade schools and gave slide shows to schoolchildren in Alaska and British Columbia. In 1993, after another of his New York Times op-eds, children from New York sent a petition to Alaska governor Walter Hickel, asking for an end to predator control.

After the Savage River wolves disappeared, Haber recorded first the Headquarters, then the Sanctuary, then the Mount Margaret, and then the Toklat East family groups of wolves establishing in the Savage River territory, only to be trapped and hunted out of existence in the Wolf Townships. He continued to learn from these wolf groups, as well as the Toklats, and continued to describe the intricacies of their societies through exploring such things as why wolves howl. It's not, he concluded, anything to be fearful of but rather a way for wolves to greet each other, find each other, wake each other up, and grieve for their losses, especially of a trapped mate.

They howled, as well, with the circling of his airplane, but never did they run away. Troy Dunn, after years observing how the wolves reacted to their plane as opposed to other aircraft, began to wonder if the wolves had learned to distinguish Haber's plane from the others. When Gordon Haber crashed to his death, two people were hiking from their cabin near the park boundary, where they'd lived for twenty-five years. They couldn't see but could hear a plane circling. Then it stopped, and wolves began to howl. The couple was as yet unaware that Haber's plane had gone down but were struck by how the wolves continued howling longer than they had ever before heard.

WHAT LINGERS WITH ME MOST VIVIDLY FROM MY EXPERIENCES observing wolves in Denali is the singing of the wolves. For more than a quarter century, I have listened to wolves howl across these mountains, valleys, and tundra expanses, summer and winter, under almost every condition imaginable, and yet each time I hear another of their wilderness serenades it thrills and delights me just as much as it did the first time. To me, a chorus of wolf howls is one of the most beautiful sounds in nature.

Wolves howl for many reasons: to communicate with other group members, as a form of socializing that helps to maintain important bonds, to express a range of emotions, and to advertise their territorial boundaries. Given all we now know about them, there certainly isn't any longer a rational basis for humans to feel shivers of fear when wolves howl, contrary to one of the most persistent of all the many nonsensical characterizations and myths about wolves.

Cooperation

Cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting, the two major underpinnings of wolf social systems, involve sophisticated bonds among group members. These bonds are maintained by chorus howling, play, dominance interactions, and other common forms of socializing that have additional adaptive values and often appear in close sequences. Especially rich, intense combinations of these behaviors are likely to be observed as part of the socializing that takes place as wolves rev up to set off on a nightly hunt from the homesite, as well as when separated individuals and subgroups rejoin.

The howling at two of the Toklat homesites is of particular appeal because of the beautiful, wild mountain backdrop and because—up until the trapping and hunting deaths they've suffered since 2005—these choruses usually involved large numbers of wolves. The early morning return of hunters, usually sometime between 5:00 and 7:00, generate the most excited choruses. I don't worry about sleeping too late when I'm out here; a chorus from the den or somewhere nearby never fails me as an alarm. To be awakened by wolves, what a delight!

High-ranking wolves returning to provision pups at a summer homesite after a night or a couple of days away on a hunt clearly delight as well in the responses they get when they signal their arrival in advance with howling. They begin the call and response with a howl toward the homesite while still several miles away. I've listened to and watched wolves in these exchanges well before they could see each other. It was as if the returning hunters were anticipating and trying to intensify the excited welcome they were about to get, as a reward for the tough routine of hunting: heading out into the mountains to find a caribou or moose ten or more miles away, chasing it another mile or two, pulling it down if they're lucky, and finally each of them carrying at least thirty pounds of it over the long, difficult route back to the homesite.

Tweet

June 26, 2009

At den again tonite. Wolves still in idyllic pond area where cannot see them. Can hear their howling and see them going to/from area, tho.

One mid-June morning at 6:00 I listened as a raven called on the other side of the valley, but otherwise the morning was still and quiet under clear skies. Then nine Toklat hunters appeared on a high slope about a mile and a half southwest of the den, just above timberline. They stopped—some sitting, all looking intently toward the den—and they howled. Immediately this ignited an excited response from the mother and a young adult helper who had remained with the pups overnight. In a flash, both swung around to focus on the howls, and then howled together. The six pups shot out of a burrow and scurried under the two older wolves, their little tails wagging excitedly.

The distant hunters howled again, setting off an extended volley of yips from the pups as well as another response from the mother and helper. For the next ten minutes it was quiet, although the pups were now wide awake, play-fighting with each other, and jumping all over the two older wolves. The two continued watching intently in the direction of the returning hunters. Then came another howl, and quickly a chorus from all nine of the hunters, now deep within the forest about a mile from the den. The wolves at the den answered again, and there was more silence. Another howl with an ensuing chorus rose out of the forest, still closer to the den, and another burst of yipping and howling came in response.

Field notes #30

June 1991

3:40 am—Lots of “talking” between various wolves, a full chorus, as well as howling—quite loud and echoing in the trees—woke me abruptly.

5:15 am—I was awakened abruptly again, by the low, gruff alarm barking of several wolves fanned out in front of me 100 feet or so on the gravel bar and a similar distance from my tent on the E side as well. They have obviously spotted my tent and are somewhat upset. I remained motionless inside as the fairly low-key gruff alarm barking and howling continued for several minutes. Then these wolves began trotting toward the main den. I could see 5–6 of them—including the female and male; apparently they were just returning to the main den from the hunt and saw me or scented me in passing by the area.

5:30 am—2 female, 2 male, & 3–4 others arrived back at the den, to a greeting by a young helper—but no immediate howling (perhaps still wary because of me?) one by one they went to the top front end of the den point, where each greeted, was food-begged by, and regurgitated for the pups (and the helper?) and then immediately, one by one, each trotted off to the forest rest area behind the den point and disappeared. Then there was a major, 30 sec chorus howl. The 1 female stood at the original spot for the pups to nurse for 5 minutes, and once again, I can see only 2–3 pups.

Finally the nine hunters arrived, and all seventeen of the wolves were almost beside themselves with excitement. They jumped on each other and romped about all over the den area and adjacent gravel bar, whimpering, whining, tails wagging, rubbing noses, and licking each other's faces. One howled, and the entire group joined in for a nonstop thirty-second chorus. Then another howled, prompting a chorus that lasted, on and off, for over two minutes. By this time four hunters had regurgitated meat for the pups and mother, and another gave them a large chunk of a forequarter from an adult caribou. A half hour later, the pups were still active, chewing on the forequarter and playing with each other, but it was a long night for the adults, and they were now sleeping near the den.

Reunion

When individuals become separated, such as while chasing caribou, mountain sheep, or moose, they often get back together by howling, as well as by scenting each other's trails. One March, I observed the Toklat alpha male on his way to reuniting with four young wolves after a twenty-one-day separation.

I first observed him in the Lower Savage territory, some thirty-five miles northeast of the four young Toklats. The next day he was in the Stampede territory on his way back toward them, only about fifteen miles northward of their location by late in the day. His route extended farther west than was required for a direct return, likely because he was circumventing the Stampede wolves, who were on the direct route and only five or six miles away. The four wolves were resting on a high rocky ridge along the east side of the Toklat River valley, about a thousand feet above him and a mile and a half away as he came upriver and reached a point just downstream from their location. It was obvious that he knew they were somewhere in the area but not exactly where.

As he approached, he began loping excitedly, and then stopped several times to howl and listen while looking intently in their general direction. Likewise, they looked around intently in his general direction and howled but apparently did not see him. Ultimately he continued about a mile farther upstream until downwind of their scent in the brisk northeast wind, at which point he turned sharply and climbed almost two miles northeastward to their location. I was not present for the actual greeting, but when we returned shortly afterward, the five were curled up sleeping together near that location.

Expressing Emotion

Wolves call-howl to family members who have been trapped or shot. They howl in obvious pain and distress while still alive in traps or snares, and so do any other family members on the scene who might be trying to help them. It is not unusual for wolves to return to or remain near a location where close family members have been killed, even after a trapper or hunter has taken the dead wolves away. I've observed this with several family groups over the years, including the Savage River, Toklat, and Sanctuary. The emotions that I've observed on these occasions in the howling and other behavior of a wolf near a close mate who had just died were obvious and intense.

In February 2005, I observed the above male's father howling with obvious distress for his dead mate, the day after a trapper hauled her away from his nearby Savage River trapline. The next photo shows her being hauled away by snowmachine. The male apparently remained with her or nearby for most of the approximately two weeks that she struggled in a trap and a snare, both of which can be seen on the trapper's sled. The male returned to the trapping site repeatedly over the next few weeks. A hunter shot him just outside another area of the park a month later.[16]

Other than in distressful situations, and apart from the other adaptive values, wolves seem to howl in large measure simply because they enjoy howling. Essentially, wolves ignore our circling airplane, with one fascinating exception: when they are merely resting or lounging around, the sound of the airplane often prompts them to howl. As far as I can tell, the explanation is pretty straightforward. In essence they are singing along with a sound they like—not uncommonly, as in the photo on the previous page, while heads turn together to follow our orbits.

Energizing

Finally, wolves often howl just to energize each other. Wolves are among the most social of all animals, and one of the best times to observe their rich, expressive interactions is while they are revving up from sound sleep, preparing to hunt again. Like most people, wolves seldom jump up from sleep and head straight off to work or hunt in high gear. Typically there is a ten-minute or longer sequence of sleepy-eyed false starts and a building mix of play, roughhousing, dominance, chorus howling, and other socializing before the wolves finally depart.

During the summer months, they are most likely to do this pre-hunt socializing at the homesite. But during the rest of the year, when they travel more or less continuously without any home bases, they are likely to do it wherever they wake up. Probably the greatest value of this behavior is in helping to maintain the intimate familiarity that enables group members to cooperate closely. The following scenes from early April 2009 show the Toklat family of Denali National Park waking, socializing, and then starting off on a hunt over a period of almost an hour.

Snapshot: A Sign of Intelligence

Johnny Johnson

One thing that touched me the most, and touched Gordon a lot, too, was that snared wolf.

Gordon found a radio-collared wolf caught in a snare by the foot. It was baited in a way that Gordon knew wasn't legal. So they landed the plane and Gordon went up to that wolf and decided to cut it loose.

The wolf just lay there and looked at him as Gordon tried to get that snare off with his Swiss Army knife. It took him thirty minutes, and all that time the wolf was just looking at him, its face ten inches from Gordon's face. When it was free, Gordon just got up and left.

Later we found out that wolf had died from an infection from the snare. But the trapper filed suit against Gordon, and ended up winning nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

That really affected Gordon. He realized he could be sued and lose everything, his cabin and land, he could lose it all. It made him less aggressive, I think.

But what touched him, and me, was how intelligent that wolf was. It never tried to bite him, attack him, or even snarl at him while he was working that snare off. It wasn't aggressive at all.

That's a real sign of intelligence in an animal.

_______________

Note: See introduction. The collared wolf was from the Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve, and Haber believed he was acting under an agreement with Alaska Fish and Game. They later denied this, claiming Haber's actions were illegal. Because he was working as a consultant, Friends of Animals paid Haber's fine.

Snapshot: Passing By

Troy Dunn

We never frightened any wildlife. The only time I ever saw wildlife run from an aircraft was after they had been chased by a helicopter and darted. If any of them showed any skittishness, then we backed off. When we came in on a location where there were wolves, I always had the prop and power backed way down, trying to be as quiet as I could. Gordon and I strived for no impact to the wolves, and we went to great lengths in engine power management and maneuvering to ensure we met this goal.

Once we were watching a string of wolves walking down Clearwater Fork. Gordon wanted a good picture to document their colorations, so I dropped down while Gordon got his camera lens ready. As we passed by them they literally stopped in their tracks and looked at us, their heads turning to follow us. But they weren't scared, just this look of astonishment as we went by. Gordon and I burst out laughing as we both had the same thought; the wolves had the look on their faces as if asking, what the hell are they doing?

Another time at Stampede Flats, we were observing a group of wolves, and another aircraft came through. At the sound of the other aircraft (a Bellanca Scout), the wolves started running. Gordon and I were surprised so I asked the pilot what his RPM was, and it was the different high RPM and prop noise that scared the wolves. Then there was another time we were observing the remaining Copper Creek wolves. The group had just been shot up within the past two days by airborne predator control hunters, but they still didn't run from us.

At these times, I'd ask Gordon, “Do you think they recognize the sound of our aircraft?” But Gordon put it off; he just said he didn't know. Still, I always wondered if the wolves did come to recognize the sound of our plane, and knew that we weren't going to harm them.

16 More details on this story are in chapter 2.

CHAPTER 7

HUNTING TRADITIONS: WOLVES, THEIR PREY, AND SCAVENGING

IN 1992, UNDER GOVERNOR WALTER HICKEL, THE ALASKA BOARD OF GAME initiated extensive wolf control in three areas, including Fortymile, with a goal of killing 80 percent of the wolves in order to increase moose and caribou for human hunters. After Friends of Animals led a tourism boycott that resulted in more than seventy-five thousand letters, Governor Hickel halted the programs and called the 1993 Wolf Summit. The state then attempted a sterilization and relocation program; when that failed, the state replaced aerial methods with ground-based snaring, trapping, and shooting. In 1994 Haber video-recorded the results of the state's new program: a trapped wolf, its leg bloody and raw from where it was trying to chew it off and escape. This video gained international attention and helped persuade newly-elected Governor Tony Knowles to shut down the programs, pending scientific review. The Governor then commissioned a National Academy of Sciences study on predator control in Alaska. Meanwhile, Alaskans voted to ban the use of airplanes for predator control except in cases of a biological emergency. The stay was ultimately overturned, however, when the state legislature abolished the biological emergency requirement and reversed Governor Knowles's subsequent veto. Still, during his eight-year tenure, Governor Knowles held his ground and directed the Department of Fish and Game not to conduct any lethal predator control.

For Denali's wolves, it was their winter hunting routine—following the migrating caribou herd to the Wolf Townships just outside park boundaries—that put them in harm's way for private and state-sponsored trapping and hunting. As early as the 1970s, Haber set out to disprove many of the old trappers' myths about wolves being the culprits in low prey populations, such as the myth that they kill more than they could eat. He showed that wolves rely much more heavily on scavenging winter-killed animals than was previously thought—up to three-fourths of their winter diet. Still, the skill and cooperation with which families of wolves hunted is, Haber concluded, the clearest representation of their highly evolved cooperative traditions, traditions that amount to a distinct culture. Wolves aren't indiscriminate killers; they carefully test which prey to pursue, using subtle fitness cues. In winter, wolves pursued moose in only 5 percent of all encounters. And the loss of a family group, or of enough of its key members, could also mean the loss of unique hunting techniques, such as the Savage River family group's “storm-and-circle” method for testing moose. Haber photographed many astonishing sequences of wolves on the hunt, of which a small selection is included here. He also recorded what happens to the remaining wolves when all the adults are killed by humans.

ONE MARCH I WATCHED ELEVEN WOLVES IN HOT PURSUIT OF A cow and calf moose through deep powder snow. Long legs enabled the moose to negotiate the deep snow with greater ease than the wolves, who were leaping and diving through the powder with considerably less grace than a school of breaching porpoises. Deep snow favors the moose, but if one or more crusted layers develop, the odds can shift markedly: the much heavier moose would then break through the crusts and be hindered, whereas the wolves would enjoy firmer footing.

When wolves encounter a cow moose with young, it is virtually always the young that they target. But it is the cow moose that they test, because first they must separate the calf from her—a formidable task with a protective prime-age mother who can usually drive off a large group of wolves within minutes, even when she is defending twins. Most commonly an experienced moose mother faces a wolf group without fleeing, but in this instance the panicky calf began running almost immediately, leaving its mother no choice but to follow closely. After about five minutes the calf stopped, whereupon the cow was able to begin lashing out at the wolves with short, ferocious charges and powerful strikes of the large front hooves. Within a few minutes she convinced them to seek an easier meal elsewhere. There is nothing more fearsome than an irate cow moose protecting a young calf; I have been charged on various occasions myself—it is like a locomotive coming at you.

Wolves are master hunters, but by no means are they able to take down ungulate prey at will. They encounter many moose, sheep, caribou, and other species before finding vulnerable individuals. Wolves must rely on sophisticated cooperative pursuit, testing, and killing tactics because of the difficulty and danger posed by physically superior prey. They also depend much more heavily on winter kill than has been generally realized. In a sample of 2,666 miles of their travels over a series of mild, severe, and average winters, Savage River and Toklat killed moose in only about 5 percent of all encounters. When encountering herds of sheep, they were able to kill one about 25 percent of the time. And for all caribou herd encounters, they caught one about 45 percent of the time. They also scavenged rather than killed about three-quarters of the moose they ate and about half of all the moose, caribou, and sheep they ate combined. Experienced wolves are generally able to kill or scavenge something every few days in winter.

Tweet

June 26, 2009

In some meadows the yellow cinquefoils and pink wild roses are really out in profusion. Later I will stop to eat the juicy yummy rose hips.

Hunting Traditions

Traditions develop as successive generations continue to pass on their accumulated learning, enriching and updating it with current information regarding prey resources and local conditions. Each wolf family group develops its own unique adaptive twists and in the process becomes increasingly tuned to local conditions. For example, the Savage River family group specialized in prey driving and ambushing techniques that were effective in hunting the relatively abundant moose and sheep of its territory, and the Toklats used a decoy technique well suited for hunting caribou. The collection of traditions within and between family groups amounts to the formation of culture, and wolves are easily among the most cultural of all nonhuman animals.

Wolves respond to differing winter foraging circumstances across three large areas of Denali National Park. In the eastern area, where the Savage River and Toklat families lived, the wolves remain primarily within year-round territories where they are able to hunt sheep as well as moose after most caribou leave. In the central area where there are no sheep and lower moose densities, they migrate northeastward with caribou, resulting in high competition and strife with the year-round northeastern residents and other migrant groups, and increased likelihood of deaths by trapping and hunting. Even in the eastern area there were differences in food resources. The Savage River family group had a more consistent food base year-round, independent of caribou herd fluctuations, with a higher density of moose. The Toklat, on the other hand, were more dependent on the caribou, and thus more affected by herd population levels and by the seasonal migratory patterns.

As caribou populations dropped, the Toklats responded with changes in the very social structure of the group. Several decades ago when Toklat was still afforded a summer abundance of caribou within a larger territory, it featured a loose, often multiple-family social structure with frequent temporary even-aged winter splitting. Now, with low caribou numbers across the region year-round, Toklat still maintains about the same group size, with heavier dependence on lower but seasonally more stable numbers of moose and sheep—substantially within the old Savage River territory—and with a tighter, more Savage-like social structure in which there is virtually no winter splitting.

The basic searching routine of experienced wolves is to keep moving, testing as many prey as possible, checking out most major prey areas of the territory on average once every few weeks in winter. It usually doesn't pay to persist with the same prey for long periods. The outcome is commonly determined in the first few minutes and most energy expended once the prey is alert is largely wasted.

The wolves don't travel regular circuits, but by the end of winter will have searched most of the nooks and crannies of their large, mountainous territories and tested most prey at least once, thereby identifying and culling most of the weakest prey. Inexperienced wolves, in contrast, linger for longer periods with the same prey, cover much less ground, and therefore get much less to eat.

The learned cooperative hunting I've observed includes strategies that are widely used by many different family groups, such as “nose-to-hind-end” moose killing, coordinated distant setup and pursuit, driving prey into difficult escape terrain, and mineral-lick ambushing. Other tactics were apparently developed and used by only one group, effectively becoming family traditions. I observed unique hunting techniques for both the Toklat and Savage River family groups, both of which had the longevity required to develop hunting to fit their environments. Two techniques that were unique to the Savage River family group were the storm-and-circle testing for moose and the chase-to-alpha ambush for sheep. For the Toklats, the two predominant and unique hunting techniques used are a decoy technique well suited for hunting caribou and a waiting technique effective on sheep. Since the Savage River family group was killed, I have not seen their storm-and-circle testing of moose used again by any other group of wolves.

When the Savage River family group confronted a moose, they tested it before deciding whether to close in for actual physical contact. They began with a careful look from a distance, then they charged the moose, running hard, barking, and making all kinds of fuss. By attacking this way, the wolves may have been deliberately attempting to panic the moose, although it's also possible that they merely became excited and any “panic effect” this may have had on the moose was coincidental. Whatever the case, the wolves generally stormed to within five or ten feet of the moose, stopped, circled, and carefully looked it over for telltale signs of weakness. If the moose acted belligerently enough, the wolves left it within a few minutes, rarely pausing to look back and consider a second try. When they did decide, however, to close in for actual contact—displaying masterful finesse to avoid lightning-like strikes from the moose's deadly front hooves—they almost always succeeded in making a kill. This would suggest that they were able to judge subtle differences between the fitness of animals. As a result, the weakest moose tended to be culled from the population first.

Capture strategies beyond just a simple all-out chase include deploying individuals at several locations around the prey and ahead on an escape route before beginning a chase. The alpha male of the Savage River family would frequently lie in wait as the rest of the group chased the prey, usually sheep, to him. Driving maneuvers forced prey into difficult escape terrain such as deep snow or heavy brush or even over a cliff—the way Native Americans drove bison or Native Alaskans used rock cairn “drive fences” to funnel caribou. Decoys are also frequently used, and the Toklats were especially proficient at this in hunting caribou. Taking advantage of the caribou's natural curiosity, one wolf distracts the caribou by howling in plain view, while others simultaneously stalk from another direction.

The nose-to-hind-end killing strategy is used for moose, by far the most difficult and dangerous to kill. The alpha male grabs the moose by the nose to initiate the sequence—an extremely tricky and dangerous move—and the other wolves attack from the hind end. Large sheep and caribou are also killed in this way, especially when experienced wolves jump in to help younger wolves who didn't know what to do or were getting overwhelmed by two-hundred-pound rams.

This five-photo sequence of the thirteen Toklat wolves killing a moose in March 1973 illustrates the nose-to-hind-end maneuver. It is an obvious way for them to try to neutralize the dangerous strikes of the moose's front feet. The victim is a cow moose that I determined from examination of the remains and tooth analysis to be in poor condition and of extreme age—about nineteen years old. But it was still necessary for the wolves to mount two highly coordinated attacks over a period of more than an hour, illustrating why they usually avoid trying to kill a moose in prime condition. They ate most of the carcass in forty-five minutes, and then stayed with the carcass, feeding and resting, for nearly three days before leaving behind nothing but a pile of fur and a few large bones.

Senses, Strength, and Sociality

The intelligence and prowess that wolves display on the hunt fascinate me. Wolves rely on supersharp senses to locate prey. They have an incredible ability to detect via hearing and smell—even to the point of finding previously unused frozen prey buried ten feet or more under snow and ice, from miles away with the wind blowing in the wrong direction.

They are able to see prey at great distances, commonly five to eight miles away, even when prey are camouflaged and motionless. This is the most important of their detection abilities in the predominantly open terrain of Denali—although from atop high vantage points they commonly spot prey at great distances in forested areas as well. Groups routinely travel high ridges and peaks during winter, and experienced leaders stop them frequently to scan for prey in distant areas below. Once I watched the Toklat wolves pick out a band of sleeping sheep against a fresh snowfall, motionless white on white, from eight miles away.

They have excellent endurance, especially in ascending the steep ridges, hills, and mountains that characterize the Alaska Range in Denali, climbing them many times a day during winter, even in deep snow. Their amazing cardiovascular fitness, agility, balance, and grip allow them to climb and traverse steep, icy slopes where an expert human climber wearing crampons and using an ice ax would find the going nearly impossible.

But while wolves are impressive from a physical standpoint, they still must rely on their even more impressive intelligence and sociality to offset the natural advantages of size, speed, and strength that their prey enjoys. They have excellent reasoning ability—including making intelligent split-second line-of-scrimmage changes during chasing maneuvers as a group, when the prey zigs where it seemed that it was going to zag. They seem to have an uncanny sixth sense or intuition in coordinating ambush and attack, as family members commonly split miles apart to set up prey attacks from several directions.

Wolves that depend heavily on difficult prey, such as moose and mountain sheep in eastern Denali, require several years of learning from experienced adults in order to become proficient hunters. Much of the hunting, territorial, and related behaviors that I have observed in Denali amount to traditions that young wolves learn during their prolonged period of dependency, which in human terms equals at least a quarter of a normal life span.

I have seen several of these traditions disappear due to hunting and trapping losses. When the Toklats lost all their adults, the young had not yet learned the sophisticated sheep-hunting techniques, and so relied almost entirely on snowshoe hares for several years (see chapter 8). Storm-and-circle moose testing is a learned tradition that seems to have been unique to the Savage River family. I have not observed any other group use this tactic, before or since they disappeared in 1983.

Most Dangerous Prey

At normal levels of prey abundance, experienced wolves neither risk their safety nor waste their energy with a potential meal that does not show almost immediate prospects of success. They are especially selective when hunting moose, the most dangerous of their prey in Alaska. This selectivity with moose is demonstrated by the wolves' heavy winter scavenging, low killing success rates (less than 10 percent), cautious testing behavior, high incidence of old and/or debilitated victims in the kill samples, and by the failure of moose densities to increase following the loss of the Savage River family group.

Only about 5 percent of the wintertime wolf-moose encounters in Denali result in a moose kill. This rate increases during a deep snow winter, but not by much—it rose to about 9 percent in 1970–1971, the deepest snow winter ever recorded in Interior Alaska. Nor does the number of wolves make much difference, beyond a group size of seven; twenty wolves do not enjoy significantly better killing success with moose or sheep than do seven. Denali wolves usually test an adult moose in less than ten minutes, then leave without attempting to kill the moose about 95 percent of the time. They usually succeed when they do decide to try for a kill, generally within a couple of hours, and sometimes over several days.

One of Toklat's winter 2002 moose kills, on an extraterritorial foray into upper Riley Creek, far exceeded these normal limits. The Toklat wolves, unable to take her down, instead kept an old cow moose standing in the same spot, with little or no chance for her to eat or even lie down, for at least seven days starting on March 17. Four or five of the wolves left on March 21 and went back home, with no indication that any blood had been drawn yet. The alpha female and two of her older offspring remained and were still in a bloodless standoff with this moose on March 24. When next checked, on March 31, the three wolves were resting nearby and the moose was largely eaten, within the same twenty-foot circle where the standoff had taken place. Most likely she collapsed after days of standing in one spot and eating little or nothing. Killing her over the final few minutes was probably academic. The three wolves ate her almost completely by April 4 and returned to their territory by April 14. This was by far the longest standoff I ever observed.

Tweet 21

June 2009

No surprises on hike in+out of den; I miss the attack goshawk. Noisy wind increases odds of stumbling into moose or bear, so was xtra alert.

Usually adult moose are physically superior prey, so wolves must therefore encounter many individuals to find the smaller percentages that are vulnerable enough to capture and kill. In August 2007, we watched the three Lower Savage adults try to get a calf moose away from a cow moose. The wolves had no chance to take down the cow; she would have quickly stomped them into the ground, especially in the heavy brush that gives her an advantage because of her longer legs. Her ears were pinned back in agitation—an indication of her highly aggressive mood, not fear. The wolves instead focused exclusively on trying to separate the calf. The cow and calf were eating at separate locations as the wolves arrived. The cow had just detected the nearby wolves and immediately started toward her calf. There would not have been a chase and the wolves would have departed with minutes except that the panicky calf began fleeing and the cow had to then run to protect it.

We noticed that the alpha female in particular was not running directly toward the cow and calf moose but rather somewhat toward their left, anticipating they would veer in that direction. Wolves commonly project prey flight trajectories in this and other ways. The three wolves ran alongside to the left, just behind and to the right-rear of the cow, but to no avail. They could not separate the calf. This was an experienced cow; she was able to stay right behind the calf. When the calf finally stopped, it was no contest; the wolves almost immediately gave up and left.

Most of the moose calves still alive in the fall are likely to survive predation during the winter. The heaviest predation on calves, by both wolves and bears, occurs over the first month or so after birth in late May, and generally the survivors of this early culling are defended by the most capable mothers—who also offer the best protection during winter. In Denali National Park, 66 to 92 percent of the mortality recorded for moose up to sixteen months of age occurs before the first winter.

It is often assumed that twin calves, in particular, are an easy mark for wolves. But my observations of wolf-moose encounters in Denali over the past forty-three years indicate it isn't that simple: calves, including twins, that have survived their precarious first month or two are likely to be with the most capable mothers and thus also enjoy good odds of being protected from predators for the rest of the biological year (May–April). A September 2007 sequence shows wolves of the Toklat Springs family attempting to provide a meal for their six four-month-old pups with one of the four-month-old twin calves accompanying an adult cow moose. I am circling above in a small airplane, so the direction of the action varies from photo to photo, and there are some gaps. (See Plates 7–10.)

Caribou: Flight Paths

Wolves feature intelligent, innovative tactics in their hunting activities. One underpinning of this behavior is a knack for anticipating the routes of fleeing caribou, moose, and other prey. Whether several or more wolves are cooperating or one is acting alone, being able to visualize prospective flight paths before pursuit begins is important. Projecting flight paths can help, for example, when setting up an ambush or a maneuver to drive prey into difficult escape terrain.

Projecting the flight path after a chase is under way and correcting quickly for any errors is similarly important and can improve initially poor odds. I was able to photograph some of this behavior on September 27, 2008, while the Toklat alpha male and female chased a bull caribou for about three miles in Denali National Park. Several times the alpha male left the caribou's direct flight path with what appeared to be clear intent to intercept him at projected locations, and several times he made major “in-flight” corrections. In this case, the caribou still outmaneuvered and outran the wolves, and they gave up. Nonetheless, their moves illustrate that intelligent hunting involves much more than just speed and other physical prowess.

At first, the light tan Toklat alpha female led her charcoal gray mate as they snuck slowly through willows, catlike, with heads and bodies lowered, to within one hundred feet of the bull caribou. He was walking casually, still unaware. The wolves had first seen the caribou from at least a mile upstream and had run excitedly until a couple of hundred yards away, where they had downshifted into their stealthy final approach.

Seconds later, the caribou saw them and bolted into high gear, as did the wolves. The charcoal gray male veered somewhat to the right, apparently because the first bend of the river was to the left, then back right, and the caribou was running near the river. When wolves overtake a caribou near a river, the caribou often makes a last stand in the river, where it has an advantage because of longer legs. Thus the caribou's flight path is likely to remain near the river and curve at least roughly with the river bends. This provides opportunities for pursuing wolves to gain ground by cutting across the bends. However, this caribou thwarted them by crossing to the left side of the main river channel. They also crossed and quickly caught up, with the alpha male now running ahead of his mate.

The male wolf raced to and then along a side channel that eventually joined the main channel downstream. We noticed that he was focusing more directly on a projected point of interception, veering to the left, away from the caribou's immediate flight path. Obviously he thought the caribou would continue to follow the river and that he could intercept him where the river bends back to the left. His mate was lagging somewhat behind after crossing back to the right side of the river, perhaps hoping to keep the caribou on the male's side. The side channel provided a shorter route to the projected intercept, and the wolf initially gained on the caribou. But the caribou changed course, back to the right side of the main river channel.

The male immediately corrected accordingly and gained again on the caribou by powering across the several-foot-deep river in just a few leaps. The caribou ran somewhat to the left, along the left-right bend of the river. The wolf didn't follow the caribou; he aimed straight across the river bend instead, toward a projected intercept, where his mate rejoined him. But once again the caribou thwarted the wolves, beating them to the next bend. The wolves loped along somewhat beyond the bend but then gave up as the gap widened.

One January in Denali I was treated to a scene that could have been straight out of the Ice Age, as wolves and caribou once again did their age-old dance during a hunt on the wintering grounds. Sometimes the wolves end up with a meal, sometimes the caribou prevail. But always it is a fascinating thing of beauty to watch.

By midwinter, Denali caribou move northeastward to a traditional wintering area in flatter, more open terrain along the northern and northeastern park boundaries. There they forage primarily on lichens, mostly in scattered small groups. This represents an annual windfall for resident wolves such as the Stampede family. The wolves move almost constantly throughout the area, searching for and testing caribou until finding the next fresh meal or frozen winter kill. At the time of the photo on the next page, the Stampede family consisted of four adults and the four (now adult-sized) surviving pups from the litter they produced in May 2008.

Field notes #110

March 2004

5:45—the wolves reached the top and began picking their way along the jagged 5,000 ft rocky knife ridge with 60–70+° drop-offs on each side of the ~ 5 ft wide top. The sheep seemed to more or less anticipate that they were coming. The wolves were out of their view most of the way due to rocks, but then they appeared, less than 100 ft from the sheep. The sheep immediately ran down the opposite (NE) side of the mtn—a 70 degree or greater icy pitch—to some safe rocks perhaps 100 ft below—the wolves seemed to know it was futile. They ran the 100 ft or so to the top edge of the ridge, from which they peered down at the sheep. They made no attempt to pursue down this pitch—it was obviously way too treacherous for the wolves—suicidal for them but not the sheep. After loitering for a few minutes, the wolves began traveling at a normal pace northward down the relatively gentle north slope of Divide Mtn. Again the alpha pair was in the nose-to-tail mode. Due to light, we left them at the base of N Divide Mtn.

As we approached in the research airplane, the eight Stampede wolves were moving at a steady pace across the open terrain toward a group of ten caribou, including several calves, foraging just out of view in a creek bottom, several miles away. The wolves seemed to know exactly where the caribou were, but the caribou were oblivious to the oncoming wolves. The photos show what happened over the next ten minutes.

Knife Ridge Hunting

The experienced Toklat wolves seemed to know every significant sheep mountain in their nearly one-thousand-square-mile territory and checked most of these regularly throughout the winter. They could pick out sheep at almost unbelievable distances, especially when scanning from one high ridge or mountaintop to another. As mentioned earlier, I once observed them spot sheep from eight miles away; they intently studied the twenty white sheep sleeping on a slope against a fresh white snow cover from another slope, then they excitedly headed straight to the sheep, traveling with the wind, and caught one.

The Toklats developed impressive search-and-pursuit tactics that utilized the treacherous, rugged terrain to advantage, including various kinds of ambushes and, especially, surprising sheep from above, forcing them to flee downslope, away from the best escape terrain. One tactic seemed to involve deception. Usually the wolves left soon after a sheep fled beyond reach onto a narrow ledge, spire, etc. However, sometimes they waited quietly nearby, out of view, for up to a day or two. Unable to eat, drink, or often even lie down, the sheep would finally come out to a vulnerable location where the wolves were afforded an opportunity to ambush it. (See Plate 11.)

Just learning to negotiate the high, icy knife ridges, peaks, and slopes usually required extensive guidance from experienced adults. Alongside these skills, Toklat wolves displayed impressive physical prowess, regularly climbing up and down the steep mountains like they weren't even there. I typically recorded instances of them ascending a sixty-degree snow-covered slope with an elevation change of eighteen hundred feet in less than twenty minutes, with no rest stops, and then breaking into intense play at the top.

Several times pilots and I watched in disbelief as Toklat wolves literally skied, stiff-legged, straight down icy chutes, adjusting their upraised tails back and forth for balance. We watched three Toklat wolves do this while trying to intercept sheep that were fleeing below from several other Toklat wolves chasing from another direction. The three bounded over the top of a high, narrow, rocky ridge at a full run and jumped immediately—apparently without looking first—into the top of an icy chute and skied straight down the seventy-degree, three-thousand-foot run; they zipped down this chute faster than any Olympic downhill ski-racer I've watched. At the bottom they switched immediately to a full run, although in this case the sheep escaped to safety on a nearby ridge.

The Savage River family, Toklat's former neighbor to the east, developed similar sheep-hunting skills over its history of at least seventeen years. After the twelve Savage River wolves disappeared in the winter of 1982–1983, with indications of illegal aerial wolf hunting, three groups—Headquarters, Sanctuary, Mount Margaret—successively recolonized major portions of the Savage vacancy over subsequent years. However, each was also killed off due largely to human causes. And none hunted sheep or developed sheep-hunting skills to the extent I observed for Savage River—nothing even close. None of these groups have been able to last long enough, so there hasn't been enough continuity to facilitate the necessary learning. And since the losses that Toklat also suffered, it seems unlikely that Toklat's sheep-hunting skills will reappear anytime soon either, especially with the remarkable fine-tuning that the Toklats had developed.

The Importance of Scavenging

Denali wolves make the rounds through all of their territory regularly, particularly in winter, and test each moose at least once or twice a season. Small wonder that, based on standard indicators such as calf production, twinning rates, bull-to-cow ratios, stability of size, and other factors, the moose herd within eastern Denali is at least as fit a herd as has been reported anywhere. It seems the moose are well “managed” by the wolves.

A real test of the herd's fitness and the health of the entire wolf-moose relationship came in the winter of 1970–1971, one of the severest on record for Denali. Because of the deep, crusted snow and severe cold, moose were more vulnerable to both wolf predation and mortality from cold and starvation than in a normal winter. In addition, because of their weakened condition, only slightly more than half as many cows as usual produced calves the following spring. Yet the decrease in the size of the herd between my surveys of fall 1970 and fall 1971 was only 10 percent. The next year, fall 1971 to fall 1972, there was no further decrease.

What prevented a marked decrease in the herd during such a severe winter when there were plenty of wolves? Obviously, wolf predation did not increase as one might expect. To my considerable surprise, winter kills—the frozen carcasses of animals that died from cold or starvation—became an important source of food for the Savage River group. In fact, in the winter of 1970–1971, more than 40 percent of the Savage River family's total diet by weight was derived from winter kills. Even more surprising, during the following winter of 1971–1972, 60 percent of their diet by weight came from winter kills. For the Toklat family during 1970–1971, winter kills accounted for 59 percent of their diet, while in winter 1971–1972 the figure was an almost unbelievable 85 percent.

These estimates are not based upon wild speculation, for I have been able to follow both groups for long, continuous intervals during winter, obtaining a record of all fresh kills and winter kills utilized during each sample period. In the winter of 1970–1971, for example, I aerial-tracked the main Savage River family group for a total sample period of sixty-four days spread throughout the winter, one of the longest visual records ever reported of a wolf group's activities in the wild during one winter. These samples enable me to make reasonable estimates of what and how much the group ate for the entire winter.

Also, both families denned outside primary moose calving areas that summer of 1971, so although the moose calf crop was smaller than usual, fewer were taken by wolves and a higher percentage survived. As well, the wolves spent less time hunting moose the following winter. This trend effectively allowed moose to recover more quickly from the severe winter.

Scavenging of frozen carrion from prey that have died from cold stress, starvation, or other nonpredation causes is much underacknowledged but of great importance as a winter food source for Denali wolves. Especially during and immediately after a severe winter, wolves can become more like scavengers than like predators.

Trappers' tales of wolves wantonly killing prey and eating only the gut portions are for the most part just that—tales. Never have I seen wolves make a fresh kill and leave a significant portion of the carcass uneaten. To the contrary, when wolves are done with an animal, usually little except large bones, stomach contents, and some hide and hair remains. Often, even the hide and hair are eaten.

When a trapper finds a relatively intact but hollowed-out moose carcass with wolf tracks all around, it is almost certainly the remains of a winter-killed animal that wolves have fed upon, not a kill they made. During the coldest months, when wolves find a winter-killed adult moose, they are generally able to eat the softer gut portions but relatively little of muscle areas, which may freeze as hard as steel. When they finish, the carcass takes on a hollowed-out appearance, easily leading one to erroneously conclude that they killed the animal and ate only the internal organs. If the wolves are undisturbed, they will return repeatedly to a winter kill and eat most of the carcass as it thaws. I have been able to observe wolves in the act of finding and utilizing many such winter kills.

Tweet

July 5, 2009

Confirmed 9 Toklat pups on yesterday's research flight. Dom adults hunting 4mi (6 km) away; 2 young adults with pups at pond area of den.

Once a dozen or so wolves kill something, it gets devoured completely, and very fast. I've seen a twelve-hundred-pound moose mostly eaten within forty-five minutes. And in testament to their harmony within the group, I never saw a feeding order, not even when as many as nineteen wolves ate at a small kill.

I once saw a two-hundred-pound ram virtually disappear in twelve minutes—except for the skull, horns, hoofs, a few large bones, and scattered tufts of hair and hide. The large ram, which I later determined from horn annuli to be about thirteen years old, had been feeding with two younger mature rams near a low rock outcrop. The sheep and Savage River family of wolves saw each other while still several hundred yards apart. As the wolves slowly worked their way toward the sheep through deep snow and heavy willows, the two younger rams ran for safer rocks. The older ram remained where he was, and soon he had seventeen wolves for company. Now, to reach the safer rocks he would have to cross right through the group of wolves, which is exactly what he did. With a slow, hesitant trot, he passed within ten feet of most of them. The wolves stood motionless and alert, watching the ram as he moved literally right past their noses. It was as if his action so surprised them that they were unable to react.

Not until the ram was twenty feet away and began speeding his pace did they move. Almost simultaneously all the adults and a few younger wolves began full pursuit. The ram began to run, but within one hundred and fifty feet, the beta male, LT, overtook him and grabbed him by the left rear flank. The alpha pair and a black yearling caught up, and together these four hauled the ram down. Most of the other wolves caught up while the ram was still standing, but none attempted to join in until the first four hauled him down. All seventeen wolves crowded around the carcass and within twelve minutes they had eaten virtually all edible portions, leaving little but the skull, horns, spinal column, a few leg bones, some scattered hair, and the stomach contents.

There are those rare times when wolves will successfully kill prey but then lose it. If, for example, there are only a few inexperienced wolves, a bear might be able to successfully chase them off. And then there are the vagaries of environmental conditions themselves, as the three photos at the end of the chapter show. A single wolf chased a caribou along a segment of open river. The caribou entered the water to escape, but the wolf followed and successfully took it down—only to lose it to the current, which carried the carcass under the ice. The wolf followed the river to the next open segment, with no luck. No doubt, however, the caribou was scavenged by this wolf or others the following spring.

Snapshot: Pups at a Sheep Kill

Priscilla Feral

Priscilla Feral has been president of the international nonprofit Friends of Animals since 1987, as they chart the path that brings critical habitat and environmental issues into the animal-advocacy sphere. Priscilla met Gordon after the group's protests against Alaska's wolf control program prompted the governor to suspend the state-sponsored wolf killing. Friends of Animals sponsored Dr. Haber's work for seventeen years.

This was close to the last time I saw Gordon. We went into the park, and he used a receiver to find wolves. There were times we'd drive for eleven hours in his truck and never see a wolf. This time we went to an area the Toklat wolves were often using to train their pups to hunt hares.

But then we had a surprise: the Toklats had killed a sheep just off the road. Gordon showed us how one sheep probably went up while another went down, a kind of one zigged and the other zagged, and the one that zagged went the wrong way and got trapped.

We watched for hours as the wolves kept going back and forth, rallying the pups to come to the remains of the sheep. These little pups were just playing and yowling and all excited. Every now and then the mother would try to get them to cut it out, try to convince them that this sheep-eating was serious business. But then the pups would get distracted again, and get in the river and start running back and forth.

Finally one pup figured out that he could pick up a piece of the carcass; he started carrying it around like a trophy, his head held way up. Then all the pups joined in and started picking up pieces, throwing them around, gnawing on them.

We watched this for four or five hours, and it was absolutely captivating. And since Gordon knew all the bus drivers, he let them know and gave people an opportunity to stop and see what was happening.

Gordon taught me so much. I loved all these animals—wolves, bears, moose, all of them—without any direct experience. And then Gordon gave me information, he gave me these experiences, which made me love them all the more.

CHAPTER 8

TOKLAT'S SWITCH TO HARES: SURVIVORS SEIZE AN OPPORTUNITY

IN 1997, HABER FREED A SNARED WOLF, WAS SUED BY THE TRAPPER, AND WAS fined $190,000 by a jury in the trapper's hometown of Tok. Haber acted, he said, under an agreement with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The snare holding the wolf was surrounded by caribou carcasses; such baiting is illegal, so Haber contacted the state and claimed they told him they'd free the wolf. When they did not, he freed it himself. ADF&G later denied this conversation, however, and called Haber's actions illegal. The state investigated both the trapper and Haber but declined to file any charges, so the trapper sued Haber and won. The freed wolf, who wore a radio collar from the Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve, later died of an infection from the snare.

Like some of Denali's wolves, this wolf was snared just outside the park and preserve boundary—this time in the Fortymile region. Haber had been studying wolf family groups in Denali's neighboring areas, especially those with intensive predator control programs such as the Fortymile, beginning in the 1980s. His research with these family groups led him to conclude that many wolves killed through predator control were actually from surrounding areas, having followed migrating prey in winter. In areas like Fortymile, some were also national park wolves—family groups who primarily resided in Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve.

With the Toklats now the only remaining long-lived family group in Denali National Park, he watched with special attention the effects of the string of 2005 losses that orphaned the six remaining young Toklats. His research showed that, lacking the continuity and knowledge of older wolves, entire traditions and even the family group itself is at risk. And yet he also had observed the tenacity and resourcefulness of wolves. The small band of young Toklats lost their sheep-hunting skills entirely, allowed their territory boundaries to shrink, and focused all their attention on what was for them a lucky break, although not a long-term solution: hunting the peaking population of snowshoe hares. In keeping with his systems approach, Haber recorded every hare he saw, noting such abundance that “the ground moved with hares.”

THE HISTORY OF THE TOKLAT WOLF FAMILY, A FAMILY GROUP that has persisted for more than seventy years, including the entire forty-three years of my research in Denali, has taken a twist that represents a sad loss even as it showcases their high intelligence. Above all, it illustrates clearly the importance of continuity in wolf family traditions and what happens to those traditions when the family group is fragmented by hunting and trapping.

In early 2005 the Toklat alpha female and two younger wolves were trapped, the alpha male was shot, and a young female became separated during these events and dispersed. This left only the six one-year-old and two-year-old Toklat siblings. Toklat was suddenly converted from a group with eight years of experience (the age of the adults) to yearlings and two-year-olds. The Toklat survivors were orphaned before completing the several years of learning normally required for hunting proficiency in this area. Not surprisingly, as discussed in the previous chapter, Toklat's spectacular, decades-old sheep-hunting skills and routines disappeared.

The survivors reproduced well with impressive cooperation and high natural survival, but in winter there was less group cohesion—the wolves split into small subgroups and singles more often. Also, apparently the young survivors had not fully learned the established territory at the time the adults were killed. They used less than a third to a half of the established territory, lounging around much of the time without a regular travel routine inside the territory and without the usual forays outside—although they strongly defended this core area from intrusions by neighboring groups. Meanwhile, the neighboring group to the west began expanding its territory into the unused portion.

Tweet

July 10, 2009

Vegetation at peak lushness now. Luv the rich greens, many new flowers, and great aromas along the trail, forest and subalpine segments.

Instead of hunting and scavenging moose, sheep, and caribou, the young survivors focused on a much easier food source, snowshoe hares, during a coincidental peak in hare abundance. In their normal eight- to eleven-year cycle of abundance, hare numbers decline more steeply from the highs and virtually disappear for a number of years. This high in 2005 was stronger and more prolonged than any I'd seen since 1966—a lucky break for the young wolves, providing them with an easy prey alternative.

The young wolves' adjustments to the hare peak were fascinating, illustrating high intelligence and resilience, and enabled them to survive and reproduce successfully. However, this heavy use of hares by the young Toklats was the result of unusual circumstances brought about by the 2005 losses of all the adults. There's no evidence of any comparable reliance on hares—neither a switch from ungulates by Toklat or any family groups during earlier hare highs nor a switch by groups other than Toklat during the latest high. This seems like a necessary rather than an optional switch from their normal foraging behavior.

Still, their hare hunting was impressive, to say the least. The Toklat wolves adapted their tactics to changes in hare tactics as hare abundance declined, and they taught their pups how to hunt hares when the pups were only a few months old. But none of it was destined to be of much value for more than a few years. And by withdrawing to only a portion of the established territory during the feast, they risked losing other areas—and a long-term supply of ungulates—to neighboring groups.

During the first two winters of high hare densities, the ground literally moved with hares. It was not unusual to see several dozen or more hares hopping around in a patch of willow brush a hundred yards or so in diameter. The Toklat wolves would fan out as they entered a willow patch or spruce-willow area and then stop at short intervals to look and listen ahead intently. As they flushed the hares, the closest wolf or wolves immediately began leaping after any fleeing hares, zigging and zagging with them through the brush with impressive quickness, agility, and skill. Sometimes a willow patch exploded with ten or more wolves zigging and zagging in different directions in pursuit of a dozen or more fleeing hares. Ravens and red blotches in the snow from hares already eaten commonly followed the wolves among willow patches even at the locations where I did not directly observe the hunting.

By the third winter, hares became much less abundant. As hare numbers declined, hares seemed to rely less on flight and more on their camouflage while remaining motionless in the willow thickets, even when wolves approached to within a few feet. (Sometimes they would not flee at all—and promptly get eaten.) The Toklat wolves changed their tactics accordingly, with less emphasis on finding hares by driving and flushing them from the willow thickets, and more emphasis on closely examining the thickets to find and catch them individually before they had much chance to flee. (See Plate 12.)

Field notes #140

March 10, 2007[17]

10:13—S East

• hare—W of Hogan Creek

• hare”

• ptarmigan”

• 2 hares—Hogan Cr

• 4 hares—”

• 2 hares—E of Hogan Cr

• 3 hares—switchback

• 1 hare—E of”

10:20—E of Sanctuary

• hare—18.5

• hare—18.4

• ptarmigan—18

• hare—16.8

• hare—16

• hare—15.8

• hare—15.7

10:30—Savage E

• hare—12.8

• 3 hares—11

• 3 hares—10

For the first time in August and September 2008, I also observed several-month-old Toklat pups participating alongside the adults in hare hunts and learning the necessary skills within a few weeks. In the previous two summers, pups of this age seemed to participate in hare hunts only incidentally, if at all. In August 25 observations, the pups' participation consisted mainly of watching the adult hunters closely and then taking hares from successful hunters. By the September 19 observations, the pups were catching hares themselves, alongside the adults, and with as much success. Within a thirty-minute interval on September 19, for example, sixteen Toklat wolves, including nine pups, found nine hares in a two-hundred-yard area and caught five of these; two of the five were caught by pups.

By 2008 the wolves began some scattered caribou, moose, and sheep hunting, in addition to continuing heavy use of hares. As pointed out in the previous chapter, emphasis on caribou in the summer and moose and sheep in the winter is the traditional pattern for this wolf group. The alpha pair and two others killed one of three calves accompanying a cow moose, an unusual, relatively easy opportunity for the wolves. Twice they also killed a single sheep they caught in relatively low terrain. This is a far cry from the past sheep-hunting skills and routines. Nonetheless, it is reason for optimism that their sheep-hunting skills may yet recover.

However, the Toklat wolves have not yet shown much expertise in scavenging their winter meals, a possible artifact of their incomplete early learning. Scavenging contributed about half of the ungulate winter meals for Savage and Toklat in the past, and the younger Savage and Toklat wolves did not show much ability to find these carcasses on their own. Wolves commonly dig to frozen carcasses buried under the snow, as deep as ten feet or more into hard-packed drifts and avalanches. Without experienced adults finding the carcasses, the inexperienced Toklats have had much less scavenged food.

Field notes Denali #132

May 2006

4:22—The collared tan female sticks just her head & shoulders in, obviously checking pups. Within 10 secs I see one tan pup beside her head at entrance—it is the usual size and in the vacuum cleaner stage—has eyes open but seems to shy away from the daylight & goes back inside, out of view.

4:29—the large charcoal black with whitish chest and lower legs/feet appears atop bluff, stretching & yawning. It is the largest of the 5—much heavier body and all others are submissive to it.

4:32—female leaves the pups inside den & joins the others along the grassy face N of burrows—much nose-pushing & play, esp. centered on large charcoal.

After the first few winters, they did begin ranging much more widely across the traditional territory and outside in northward and eastward directions, and were remaining together more as a group. Their basic routine picked up as well, to a more continuous travel schedule—something closer to the routine observed previously for wolves in this area under a wide range of winter conditions, when they averaged ten to twenty miles per day. So far, however, most of this searching appears to be for better hare-hunting opportunities. Ultimately this is an exercise in futility because of the synchronous way hare numbers rise and fall across large regions.

Human causes—the continuing series of eastern vacancies and a failure of the young Toklat wolves to fully learn the established Toklat territory before the experienced adults were killed—are the leading candidates in explaining the Toklat's eastward shift. And unfortunately, this eastward shift puts the wolves in even greater danger from hunting and trapping deaths. Toklat consisted of seventeen wolves at the beginning of the 2007–2008 winter and nine at the end, with a high likelihood that most of the missing wolves were trapped during an extraterritorial foray into the northeast park boundary trapping area in February 2008.

Snapshot: Toklat's Hare Hunting

Troy Dunn

At the tail end of my time flying Gordon, the Toklat wolves were just starting to get back into hunting larger prey. When the alpha female was trapped and then the alpha male was shot, once we lost both of them, all the Toklats had were yearlings and pups. And they didn't have the patterns of hunting or of the territory down yet.

At first they were all over the place, in hazardous places, crossing over big ridges to the south side of the Alaska Range, going south of Cantwell. They just couldn't find themselves. They were staying together but just wandering. They didn't know how to hunt sheep and caribou, and the Toklats were previously big sheep hunters. So for a few years they stuck to smaller prey; their main diet appeared to be hares.

It was amazing watching that family hunt hares. Gordon documented their tactics, and whether they would share such small kills with each other. About 90 percent of the time when a wolf caught a hare it would eat it right up, but we did witness adults giving hares to yearlings and pups. This really showed a diet shift when the adults were lost.

17 In keeping with his systems approach to research, Haber noted every animal he saw, including, in this sequence from his field notes, every hare along the park road.

CHAPTER 9

COMPANIONS AND COMPETITORS: RAVENS, BEARS, AND OTHER WILDLIFE

WITH SUCH A RECORD OF UNIQUE RESEARCH AND DECADES OF ON-THE-GROUND experiences, Haber's life work was a natural for a wider audience. In fact, during the 1990s, National Geographic approached him about making a documentary film about his work. Haber was interested but concerned that his research be accurately reported, so he requested complete editorial control—something they couldn't agree to, so the film was never made. Haber did have plans to write a book based on his experiences and research, and he wrote a proposal and several chapters from which some of the material in these chapters comes.

A consummate systems researcher and inherent naturalist, Haber recorded the wolves', and his own, encounters with all of Denali's wildlife. He noted that ravens constantly followed the wolves to scavenge on their kill remains, and with their mischievous nature often tempted the wolves, especially pups, into a game of chase. Bears and wolves, on the other hand, usually kept their distance—except when it came to stealing kills from each other. In fact, Haber theorized that this “standoff” between the two actually reduced the amount of bear predation on such prey as moose calves, and that reducing wolves through predator control might instead increase predation by bears. Chance encounters between the ecosystem's two top predators rarely caused harm, and sometimes they even appeared to tolerate one another. For the most part, Haber concluded, bears and wolves—the two animals that visitors to Denali most hope to see—appear to share a deep dislike for each other. (See Plate 13.)

Raven Tales

MY EXPERIENCES AT WOLF HOMESITE BLINDS WITH WOLVES, bears, caribou, and other large creatures do not continue nonstop. There are long periods of inaction, sometimes as much as twenty hours, with miserable spells of wind, cold, rain, or excessive summer heat, and—curse the little bastards—the hellish black hoards of mosquitoes. But other performers help these wolfless and otherwise uncomfortable hours to pass more easily. And adding spice to these performances are the raucous little dust devils that spin their way across the gravel bars now and then, and other sounds of the landscape. At one favorite den site, always there is the soft background music of the little freshwater spring, gurgling right out of moss-covered rocks barely fifty feet from my tent.

A family of ravens—as many as twenty of them—has nested a few hundred yards from one of my campsites almost every year. Inevitably one or two of their scouts check me out each time I visit, at least until they leave in late August or so, as does a friendly family of gray jays. The two families have entertained me for many hours over the years with their aerial antics, and just by alighting nearby to see what I was up to.

At least one pair of mew gulls nested 450 yards west of another den. My route to and from the area forced me to pass within two hundred feet of their nest, and they dive-bombed me relentlessly every time—with a vengeance, it seemed, and once even splattered on me as well. One moose cow, whom I could identify by light markings on her side, helped me keep these gull attacks in perspective. She produced a calf in almost exactly the same spot between one homesite and another homesite in three consecutive summers. Her extremely aggressive behavior—including chasing me up a tree twice—strongly suggested she was harassed regularly by the wolves.

Once, in July 1968, a mother least weasel and her three young appeared out of nowhere. Their heads popped up and down at varying locations in the surrounding brush as they chittered away and studied me carefully for about five minutes, then disappeared. Almost the same thing happened again in June 1991, leaving me to wonder if this was a later generation of the 1968 family. Also on that June 1991 visit, a young porcupine calmly nibbled willow leaves twenty feet from where I sat with my spotting scope, as if he felt I belonged there as much as he did. And on an August 1990 evening, a wolverine bounded across a high slope about a half mile away, thoroughly spooking a nearby band of ewes and lambs.

Not only do many other animals pass near wolf homesites, but virtually all of the homesites and dens are also used by many other animals, including foxes, ground squirrels, porcupines, wolverines, and even humans in the distant past, during intervening summer and winter periods. Burrows at some sites were probably excavated originally by ground squirrels, were later enlarged and extended by foxes, and then by wolves.

Tweet

June 15, 2009

Moose or bear crashed off thru the brush just ahead of me as I dropped down from the subalpine hills into the forest 9:30 pm, on hike out.

I suspect this is one of the ways sites can persist for so long despite the occasional collapse of underground structures due to heavy rains, bear digging, vegetation changes, and other agents, especially over the time interval between the disappearance of one established wolf family and recolonization of the area by another family: a thoroughly collapsed site is most likely to revert back to ground squirrel occupancy, and the predator tradition then returns again as foxes and ultimately wolves decide to expand upon their work.

At one of the Savage River den sites, located in predominantly open terrain, with only scattered patches of heavy willows and small pockets of spruce forest, a pair of red foxes raised their young during the summer of 1971. I observed a single porcupine there several times during the winters; tracks in the snow, a few quills inside the burrows, and a girdled spruce tree nearby indicated extended winter use. Tracks showed that a wolverine investigated the burrow now and then during the winter as well. There was at least one ground squirrel colony nearby, and I regularly saw golden eagles, ravens, magpies, jays, marsh hawks, and a variety of smaller birds at or near this site when the wolves were occupying it.

But of all the birds and other smaller animals sharing wolf territory, the raven is the most conspicuous and persistent companion to the wolves. Year-round, ravens are part of the wolves' daily lives. Ravens typically follow wolves to pick whatever they can from the remains of their kills and scavenged carcasses, even when hares are the only prey.

They also seem to delight in teasing wolves, trying to get them to chase. Usually older wolves simply ignore them, but often younger wolves will take the bait, so ravens often go out of their way to taunt the younger, more gullible wolves in particular.

Encountering Rival Predators

One of the most conspicuous spring events each year in Denali is the sudden appearance of brown bears seemingly everywhere in the moose calving areas, where relatively few bears are seen for most of the rest of the year. In fact, at this time of year, bears are heavier hunters of Denali moose and other prey than are wolves, accounting for half to three-quarters of moose calf deaths, compared with about a quarter from wolf predation. One well-known moose-hunting mother and three-cub family in the late 1970s was known as the “fearsome foursome.” They patrolled a twenty-mile transect through moose calving areas each spring, killing with considerable success and coordination as a unit.

Field notes #3

May 22 [no year]

8:35 pm—blonde grizzly bear with a fair bit of brown mixed in eating on what appears to be a moose carcass, 1/3 the way up the north-facing slope of Jenny Den Ridge, about opposite the den—this is in high willows with scattered spruce, so my view is partly obscured. However I can see that the bear has piled up earth and is sprawled out on top, tugging away in the characteristic style while feeding on a kill. Single adult cow moose & 0 calves, 1 mile W of above bear, walking steadily farther westward—too far to tell if she is lactating, but she has no calves—possibly she is coming from the area of the bear, after having lost her young to it? Looks like an adult bear. Now I can see a light tan wolf about 20 ft from the bear, which explains why the bear is sprawled atop the carcass. The wolf then walked slowly to a snow patch 100 ft away, where it then lay down with a bone or chunk of meat and commenced chewing on it, its back to the bear, and vice versa—bear busily chewing and eating also, virtually ignoring the wolf.

Moose calves have been killed within twenty feet of the front door of the park service headquarters, and within two hundred feet of the Denali Hotel; bears have pursued fleeing calves right through the middle of startled campers' tents and campsites and right past the hotel dining room window, with many patrons watching while eating supper—some even complaining that the management hadn't given them advance notice of the show.

Bears also move back into moose areas in the fall, to hunt bulls who have been weakened by rutting activities. In five cases I found bears killing two bulls together—the bulls had fought to exhaustion and could not defend themselves when the bear showed up. I once observed firsthand just how exhausted and vulnerable bulls are after a fight. I watched from the Savage River cabin as two bulls fought twenty feet away. They almost crashed through my front door as I prepared a fast exit out the rear window. Afterward, I could literally walk right up to the two behemoths as they lay exhausted and completely drenched in sweat.

This bear-hunting impact on moose calves in spring and rutting bulls in fall is likely kept in check by the intense harassment from the resident wolves, who are competing for the same prey. When bears reappear in spring and hunt heavily on moose calves, wolves resist their intrusion. This heavy harassment appears to deter a certain amount of bear activity: the bears don't enjoy quite the free run of the area that they otherwise would. This means that a reduction in wolf activity wouldn't necessarily translate into a reduction in overall predation, and might even lead eventually to a predation increase by bears. There is a standoff of sorts between the two predator populations, which could shift considerably with a sudden major wolf reduction.

Field notes #3

May 22 [no year], continued

9:10 pm—the wolf walked back to within 10 ft of above bear, and suddenly a second bear appears 10 ft away from behind a tree, glowering at the wolf with a sideways look. This is a dirty blonde bear, a large female—therefore, what we have here is a mother bear and one older cub, in its 3rd or 4th summer. The wolf walks off ~100 ft behind the bears, sniffing around the bushes, apparently picking up blood, carcass pieces, etc., here and there—both bears are now eating, 5–10 ft apart.

Both bears and wolves commonly attempt to steal a fresh kill from the other. I once watched five wolves drive a brown bear from the nearby carcass of a bull moose the bear had killed a day earlier. Ten other family members had already started eating. A bear requires at least a week to consume an adult moose carcass, meanwhile ferociously attempting to guard it against all comers. In direct combat, even a large group of wolves would be sorely outmatched by one adult brown bear. However, using systematic harassment, it is usually possible for only four or five experienced wolves to bother a bear enough so that it finally runs off, as was the outcome in that early October encounter.

Still, when it comes to bears and wolves, one is never sure what will happen. Imagine yourself enjoying a pleasant afternoon nap and suddenly waking to some close, oncoming huffing and puffing and the sight of three large, irate grizzly bears on a full charge. My pilot and I watched this scene unfold during a September 16, 2008, research flight in Denali National Park, as three bears woke three wolves of the Swift Northeast family abruptly at close range while the wolves were taking a break on a hunt.

Although wolf-bear encounters are common in Denali, this one was unusual among the many I've observed in the way the bears—a mother and twin three-year-old cubs—aggressively charged the wolves from a considerable distance even though there was no caribou or moose kill to try to take from them. More commonly I've observed wolves harassing bears, usually in attempting to take over a kill and often with what seems like an element of sport for the wolves. It is an age-old rivalry that I am convinced includes some genuine dislike for each other, beyond the normal aggression of other competitive and predator-prey relationships.

The wolves' bold behavior around bears—often even attempting to bite them in the rear end—always amazes me. Bears are quick, fast, agile, and much more dangerous than wolves, especially with the lightning-fast swats from their powerful, clawed front legs. There were no injuries in this case (typically there are none), and the entire encounter lasted only about ten minutes. The bears left, and the wolves resumed their nap as if nothing had ever happened. (See Plates 14–16.)

Wolves and bears sometimes, however, choose to ignore each other. In 2007 I watched a grizzly bear cross to the wolves' side of the main river channels and ignore them while digging pea-vine (vetch) roots, a late-summer delicacy. Two of the wolf pups approached to within one hundred feet and watched the bear intently for about twenty minutes; they seemed fascinated. The bear could have covered the distance to them within seconds but continued to ignore all of the wolves. Meanwhile, the alpha male was lying down in willows, keeping a casual watch on the bear, and the alpha female was resting near him. Were the bear to have made a move for the pups, the alphas would have been there almost instantly. Perhaps the alpha male's own early experience with bears was involved in allowing his pups a front-row seat for this bear show. As a pup of the same age in August 2003, he “chased” a grizzly bear for several hundred yards by himself when the bear finally left a mostly eaten caribou kill that the older wolves had been trying to appropriate. It was only after his obviously alarmed mother ran after him that he stopped pursuing. The bear ignored him, about seventy feet behind, while continuing to leave the area.

Tweet

July 10, 2009

Grizz bear going same way on forest trail during my hike to den. Lukewarm droppings indicated he was a good half hour or more ahead of me.

“Real Bad Brown Bear Country”

When I began venturing to one of the Toklat dens in 1966, several old hands on the park staff warned me that it was “real bad brown bear country.” Back in those days, only relatively few backcountry areas of the park saw much hiking activity, and such tales about bear activity in that area, together with its sometimes truly dangerous river crossings, helped to keep it among the least traveled areas. It took on a kind of bear mystique over the years.

But bears or not, I was determined to go wherever necessary to observe the wolves, and I began frequent trips into the area that first year. It is now more than a hundred trips and forty-three years later, and I've had only a handful of bear encounters there. Probably the most unnerving was one in which I never saw the bear—only its fresh tracks. I crawled out of my tent one July morning in 1967 to discover that, sometime in the night while I slept, an adult bear had circled me at least four times only a few feet away, apparently debating whether or not to jump on the tent and give me what surely would have been the biggest—and quite possibly last—surprise of my life.

In fact, at many homesites, I could usually count on seeing one or two brown bears within a mile or two. Once, in 1969, I was met by a mother brown bear and her twin two-year-old cubs fifty feet from the burrow complex, and once in 1970 by a single adult brown bear about 100 yards from the den. In neither case were wolves currently occupying the sites, not surprising, given the animosity between these two top predators.

In June 1980, I was watching the den site from my usual campsite across the valley when suddenly a subadult bear appeared on the gravel bar about two hundred yards north of the den point. The bear looked and acted like a typical three- or four-year-old who has recently been chased off by its mother and is feeling quite alone.

But before the bear could proceed another fifty yards, six adult wolves exploded out of the trees from behind the point, raced up to the bear, and were instantly circling it in a menacing, no-nonsense way with tails and hackles raised. Very quickly they started attacking the bear: first one wolf darted in and bit a hindquarter, whereupon the bear swung around to retaliate; then another wolf bit the bear from the opposite side. It didn't take long for the bear to recognize its poor odds, and soon it was running for its life. All six of the wolves chased for about a hundred yards, until the bear crashed through a main river channel and suddenly turned on them in a burst of fury. This seemed to convince them that they had made their point and could go home now.

I try not to choose sides during incidents such as this; nonetheless, it did give me a nice feeling to see the bear resume its flight without serious injury and without wolves in pursuit. Then I realized that the bear's fast retreat from the wolves was taking it straight across the valley—to me. It kept coming, not yet aware of my presence, bounding along in that deceptively fast, rocking-horse way bears run, stopping twice to rear up and look back toward the den.

The bear saw me at two hundred feet and stopped abruptly. It raised up again, first to look at me, then back toward the den, and then sat down while continuing to look at me. I was slightly relieved, because it didn't have the menacing demeanor I have seen a couple of dozen times over the years when other Denali brown bears bluff-charged me at this range or closer. The young bear now seemed quite interested in me in a nonaggressive way, and not the least bit anxious to leave.

After studying me for another minute from the same sitting position, it retreated fifteen feet, then walked calmly first to my right and then to the left, maintaining a distance of two hundred feet and continuing to watch me with curiosity. This continued for ten minutes or so, at which point the bear started acting like it was going to stay around a while. It even began digging and eating roots while calmly keeping an eye on me. Simply put, it seemed apparent that the bear merely wanted some companionship, almost like a stray dog that has just attached itself to a newfound human. I remained wary but not panicky, and indeed was starting to feel sorry for this big baby. Nevertheless, I couldn't imagine crawling into my tent in a few hours for a restful night of sleep with a bear—friendly or not—hanging around just outside, perhaps entertaining the notion of joining me inside.

Twenty minutes later, when the bear began digging roots only about a hundred feet away, I decided it was time to break camp and leave. As I gathered my gear, the bear stopped rooting and started walking a bit closer, then stood and watched me. I quickly weighed my options as I continued watching the bear and decided to regain some space by throwing a rock at it. I plopped a big one right in front of the bear, and immediately it bounded away about a hundred yards. The expression on its face as it turned to look back at me was almost one of dejection. But then it came bounding right back, to within a hundred feet again. I waved my arms, yelled “Shoo, bear,” and threw another rock. The bear bounded off but then returned again. I shooed it away a third time and it bounded right back. It was behaving almost as if this was a game; its facial expressions and overall demeanor didn't convey any serious aggression.

My expedited camp-breaking soon saw me hoisting the old expedition Kelty onto my shoulders and departing the area. I threw another rock at the bear as it started to follow. This worked—it just stood there, with what truly seemed a look of dejection. I remained quite aware of the harm the bear could do to me if it wanted, but as it continued to stand there and I continued to put more distance between us, I couldn't help feeling sorry for it. Its own mother had probably chased it off recently, a bunch of wolves had just appeared out of nowhere and started picking on it, and who knows what else it had endured. And now I had just turned on it with rocks, and it was alone again.

Snapshot: Wolves with Bears

Troy Dunn

Flying with Gordon, I got to see plenty of wolf-bear interactions, but I never saw a bear killed by wolves. Usually we'd see a bear eating, and then the wolves would come up, become an annoyance, and literally start nipping the bear in the behind. It was a standoff, and whoever got tired first didn't get the meal. Most of the time the wolves got tired and left first, and then the bear would lie down spread-eagled on the kill.

Once we watched a big grizzly take down a moose, and the six wolves of the Mount Margaret group showed up. They started hanging around, but it was a big bear, so they ambled off. Then they came upon a scrawny cow moose that looked like she was on her last legs. The cow took off running with the wolves in pursuit. She ran up Riley Creek, made a U-turn, came back down Riley, and ended up within one hundred yards of where the wolves had harassed the bear. The wolves took down the cow, but then the bear kicked the wolves off it, and dragged it through the brush to the other kill. Now the bear had two moose, and the wolves just curled up nearby to wait him out.

Once near Teklanika we found a subadult bear sleeping with a group of wolves. We were counting the wolves and then realized, wait a minute, that's not a wolf, that's a bear.

“Is that bear alive?” I asked. So we continued our orbit and saw that it was.

“Yeah,” said Gordon, “that's a subadult, probably just kicked off by its mother and feeling lonely.”

That was one of the darnedest things, a bear hanging out with wolves, and the wolves didn't seem to care a bit.

CHAPTER 10

NATURAL FEARLESSNESS: WOLVES AND PEOPLE IN DENALI NATIONAL PARK

MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE VISIT DENALI NATIONAL PARK and Preserve every year, drawn by the natural scenery—particularly Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America—and by the wildlife. More than the sheep, caribou, moose, or even brown bears, what many people want to see are wolves. Haber was well aware of this, and took issue with the National Park Service many times for what he saw as mismanagement—especially in designated wilderness areas—of their primary directive: to protect the natural systems of the park. His relations with the NPS, as with all federal and state managers, as Joel Bennett recalled, varied with political winds. But at least with one longtime NPS wildlife biologist, Dr. Tom Meier, Haber maintained good relations and mutual respect. According to Meier, he and Haber talked nearly every day, comparing notes about Haber's observations and NPS tracking data. “Gordon had a real history with the park,” Meier said, “I admired him, getting out there so much, doing really tough and grueling work.”

In this chapter, Haber addresses three of the issues that he and the NPS disagreed upon: whether the tolerance toward people shown by park wolves is habituation or simply wolves' natural fearlessness; whether the subsistence moose hunt in the preserve should allow killing of park wolves and bears as well; and whether the methods for darting and collaring of wolves, notably involving the accidental deaths of three wolves subsequent to darting, were sound. Previously, Haber had agreed with NPS about habituation; however, his long-term and continuous observations of wolf families, particularly of the two newcomers to Toklat in 2001, led him to a different conclusion. The fear wolves show toward people, he concluded, is a realized fear, not a natural fear—one born of persecution. In the absence of persecution, as in the wilderness areas of Denali National Park, wolves show a nonthreatening fearlessness, and perhaps some mild curiosity, toward people. For Denali's eastern wolf families, this natural fearlessness toward people makes them easier targets for trappers and hunters in the Wolf Townships.

Not Habituation but Natural Behavior

IT IS CONVENTIONAL WISDOM THAT WOLVES AND OTHER CREATURES should inherently fear people, and if they do not, something must be wrong with them. This isn't, however, necessarily true. For wolves, it isn't possible to draw clear lines between natural and unnatural, wild and habituated in the way they respond to people. This is in part because of expected variation among individuals and groups and over time, as earlier chapters have shown. In fact, for wolves in particular, it is more likely the other way around: fearless, bold, inquisitive behavior around people is much closer to “natural” and “wild” than are fear and wariness.

In 2002 the superintendent of Denali National Park declared that the “fearless” behavior of Denali wolves was unnatural, potentially endangered park visitors, and had to be reversed. The National Park Service began advising Denali visitors and employees to throw rocks at any wolves within throwing distance to make them afraid, and to “be aggressive” toward any wolf that approached within one hundred feet, “to send a clear message to the wolves that they are not welcome.” NPS gave implied consent to visitors to use virtually any weapon available on a wolf perceived—accurately or not—to be dangerous. It began experimenting with its own, mostly covert, aversive measures, including shooting at wolves with a paintball gun and luring them to a booby-trapped tent where a pepper spray discharge awaited.

Never mind that not a single instance of any such aggressive wolf behavior has been reported in Denali. Forget the permanent damage that could be done to a wolf by a blow to the head with a rock or from using pepper spray on highly tuned sensory organs. Is this a prelude to even more serious measures, especially for the well-known Toklat family, whose use of a traditional denning area near the Teklanika Campground has been the focus of NPS's concerns? What about the devastating impacts on this decades-old family and the world-class viewing and research opportunities it provides if NPS decides to relocate “problem” wolves or deter the use of traditional dens to put more distance between these hubs of summertime wolf activity and certain campgrounds?

These NPS policies assume that fearless behavior by Denali wolves around people is unnatural (not “wild”), that it has emerged only recently, and that without NPS intervention it will progress to a more aggressive, dangerous form. The Denali wolves are now described as “habituated,” a scientific term that for the most part is being used as another way to imply unnatural behavior. None of this thinking holds up to scrutiny.

Unnatural?

There is widespread carelessness by biologists and others in the use of “habituated” to characterize fearless wolves, and I have been as careless as anyone. Supposedly, scientists continue to improve their thinking, however. Events surrounding the arrival of the two Toklat newcomer males in 2001 and recent group turnovers in the eastern park were especially valuable as eye-openers for me. This and a better job of integrating behavioral observations from the past and from other areas prompted me to reconsider some of my assumptions about habituation and to recognize that its common usage does not do a very good job of explaining the people-related behavior of Denali wolves.

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June 11, 2009

Obs at Toklat natal den in Denali N.P. - studying this wolf family since 1966. Seeing 8+ pups so far this season, nursed by 2 females.

Free-ranging adult wolves generally show little fear of other nonhuman species. They typically approach other creatures closely in a markedly bold, inquisitive, investigative way, although for species like bears, moose, and porcupines, they attempt to kill in only a low percentage of the encounters. There is little reason to assume that, absent some highly unusual, unnatural, and powerful incentive, such as persecution, they should behave in an entirely different way around people. It is also apparent from historical literature and accounts from frontier areas, at least where open terrain predominates, that wolves generally show little fear or wariness of people at initial contact, unless and until there is persecution or harassment.

With few exceptions in Denali (e.g., certain high-ranking adults attending pups), recolonizing wolves act indifferently around people very soon after they begin encountering them in the absence of harassment. This happened after the human-caused turnovers from the Savage River to Headquarters and Sanctuary to Mount Margaret family groups in the eastern area of Denali in 1983 and 2001. The Savage River family was largely fearless when I began my studies in 1966, well before park visitation increased dramatically. It is much easier to reconcile these and other observations by recognizing fearless behavior toward people as mostly natural rather than a product of habituation.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of this point was when two newcomer adult males joined the Toklat family (just west of the Savage-Headquarters-Sanctuary-Margaret area) and took it over in spring and summer 2001, shortly after the Toklat alpha male died while being radio-collared.[18] These two ear-tagged wolves had lived two hundred miles away until April 5, 2001, in the Fortymile area, a wolf control area with a long history of hunting and trapping. Within a month they were residing in the protected Teklanika-Igloo area of Denali.

They began interacting closely with people almost immediately, mostly on and near the park road, prior to the onset of the regular summer visitor season and prior to much if any interaction with the established Toklat wolves. Their behavior was predominantly if not exclusively fearless. Essentially they exhibited the same behavior toward people, vehicles, roads, and structures within two or three weeks that Toklat and other groups had exhibited for decades.

How could wolves with nothing but an adversarial history with people so suddenly and dramatically reverse their behavior? It would be a strain, to say the least, to explain this as a habituation-related shift away from natural, wild behavior. A simpler explanation is that highly intelligent creatures such as these quickly recognize when they are no longer in danger or not being harassed, and thus return easily to behavior that is inherent.[19]

Being fearful, not fearless, is the aberration for this species. The former, not the latter, is what probably requires the most difficult learning. In short, NPS emphasizes that it must “keep Denali's wolves wild,” but the conventional wisdom it is adopting is more likely to move them further from rather than closer to their natural, wild behavior. It is a realized fear, not a natural fear. It is questionable as to whether “habituation” even applies here.

A key issue is whether the interactions with people are of a passing nature or seemingly the wolf's objective. Most, if not all, cases appear to be interactions in a passing way: as an aside to some other hunting or related travel objective, or in response to an intrusion at a den or rendezvous site with pups present. Wolves pass through a campground, stopping briefly to check something out and perhaps carry off a small camp item for a short distance. Wolves trot past people within five or ten feet of the park road or continue down the center of the road at a normal pace while ignoring a string of shuttle buses and other vehicles following just behind for a half hour or more. These are routine examples of fearless wolf behavior around people in Denali, none of which involves the prolonged fixation on them that habituation usually implies.

Food conditioning—when an animal associates people with handouts or other ways of obtaining food (such as at a campground)—is the most likely way that habituation could become a problem. There has not yet been any evidence of food conditioning of Denali wolves, thanks to NPS's ongoing efforts to prevent this for bears as well as wolves.

Menacing or Curious?

Two examples of “menacing” wolf behavior toward people in Denali that prompted these policy changes bear closer examination.

Field notes #1

Summer 1979

May 25—clear, beautiful morning, but largely overcast by early afternoon and into the evening

left Tek campground at 6:15 am

6:25 am—encountered the “fearsome foursome” at E end of Tek bridge, rooting—it should be emphasized that these bears have been spending much time rooting, in addition to their moose hunting.

On August 9–12, 2000, seven Toklat adults and subadults and their four pups provided thousands of park visitors with an extraordinary wolf-viewing opportunity from within a few hundred feet of the Teklanika bridge as they killed a moose, confronted bears intent on taking it from them, and interacted with each other. They, the moose, and bears went about these activities in a mostly natural way, virtually ignoring the dozens if not hundreds of visitors as well as buses and other vehicles that were present almost constantly during daylight hours. Many thousands of pictures and untold hours of video were taken of this natural behavior, such as in the photographic essay, “Dance of Death,” published in the May 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine.

At one point a Toklat yearling timidly approached the small pack that a photographer had set down on the road. An NPS employee snapped a picture as the wolf sniffed the pack briefly, and this has become NPS's primary icon of the entire, rich, mostly natural four-day event. This unrepresentative scene of a wolf sniffing a pack—rather than a selection from the thousands of pictures that show the prevailing natural wolf-moose-bear interactions—now appears regularly in slide shows and other material that NPS and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game disseminate in trying to characterize this event and fearless wolf behavior in general as unnatural and ominous.

The second event happened late on May 31, 2001, when six Toklat wolves departed the natal den on a hunt along one of their routine travel routes, downriver and then northward along the park road past the Teklanika Campground. At the campground entrance, three of the six wolves diverted 150 yards or so into the campground and began circling a tent from only a few feet away. Inside were a Norwegian couple and their baby. They saw the wolves through the tent window but did not come outside. Within about ten minutes the wolves left, having done nothing more than circle the tent repeatedly, chew briefly on a toy truck, and carry off a sandal.

NPS staff cites this incident as a good example of menacing, worrisome, unnatural wolf behavior. It was just the opposite. The baby was screaming loudly at the time, as it had done for much of the previous day because of a stomach ailment. Its screaming could be heard from almost a half mile away and sounded much like a wounded animal or a bawling bear cub. It is surprising that only three of the six wolves investigated such a seemingly obvious prey possibility. At no time did they show the slightest hint of aggressive behavior while circling the tent—only intense curiosity as they evaluated the loud distress calling inside. It would have been easy for them to jump on the tent in an aggressive fury but they did not, clearly because they figured out that there were people inside. Chewing the toy truck and carrying off the sandal probably amounted to displacement activities, the kind of behavior that one sees commonly, especially on the part of juveniles, just after wolves are frustrated by a capable moose or something else.

And there are many more examples of wolf-human encounters where the wolves were clearly just passing by. In June 2002, I watched from overhead as two Toklat wolves traveling the road met two oncoming hikers and overtook a shuttle bus. The black alpha male paused briefly to watch as the first hiker photographed his mate. The wolves continued toward the bus and second hiker. The bus moved on as the wolves trotted casually past the second hiker. The wolves overtook the bus and continued at a normal pace for the next half hour with the bus following only fifty feet behind.

Is Fearless New?

Denali wolves have exhibited much the same fearless behavior around people for the entire forty-three years I have been studying them. It did not emerge prominently, as NPS claims, in 1999 with Toklat's latest round of five or so summers using a natal den near the Teklanika and Igloo Campgrounds. There are many accounts of this behavior in my 1977 PhD dissertation. In one of these, from June 1967 near the Savage River family's natal den, eight Savage River wolves approached me from four hundred yards away. They displayed a range of fearless behavior, from the acceptance and indifference of one of the males while lying down calmly ten feet away, looking the other way, to the subsequent highly assertive barking, growling, and other defensive bluffs of the alpha male—all typical pup-protection behavior.

Nor is denning near campgrounds, frequenting these areas, and interacting with campers anything new for Denali wolves, especially at Teklanika. It is arrogant for NPS to advise current Teklanika campers to “make the wolves feel unwelcome,” given the evidence for an ancient history and prehistory of occupancy of this site by wolves as well as humans. In fact, it is contrary to the park mandate to maintain the Denali ecosystem, a designated wilderness area, in its natural form. Carbon dating indicates that humans began using this location at least ten to twelve thousand years ago, originally as a campsite for hunting activities. Wolves used the same site for a major natal den beginning at least centuries and probably millennia ago, judging, for example, from the size of the debris cone below the main burrow complex. The last known wolf use of this den was in 1961.

The site is an obvious choice for any intelligent hunter, and subsequent use of the area by people for other purposes beginning in the early 1900s is almost certainly a consequence of the earlier activity. The wolf den appears to have been the anchor site in a cluster of homesites that includes an upriver natal den now used by the Toklat wolves, probably with much the same alternating within and between-summer occupancy patterns that I have observed since 1966 throughout the park.

The Teklanika dens were within the Savage family's territory when I arrived in 1966 and up until this group was eliminated, almost certainly illegally by hunters, in the winter of 1982–1983. Savage used the upriver Teklanika den during all or portions of the summers of 1971, 1972, 1978, 1979, and 1980. Toklat annexed this area shortly after Savage River was eliminated and used the upriver den during all or portions of ten summers between 1988 and 2003. Throughout these decades of observations and during at least fifteen years of wolves using the Teklanika upriver dens, both Savage River and Toklat groups acted the same fearless way around people in the nearby campground areas and on the road as Toklat does today. The same was true for Toklats at and near a campground twenty miles westward during much of the 1960s and 1970s, while this family occupied another traditional cluster of dens in that area.

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June 21, 2009

Raw, gusty wind during den obs tonite, 55 F—watching wolves not always fun and games. Sitting in those conditions for hours builds character.

Aggressive?

From my first days in Denali, I wondered if the fearless behavior of these wolves would progress into anything more serious and have watched closely for even the subtlest indications. My interest was fueled by encounters such as the one in June 1967, where an outright attack by an angry alpha male certainly seemed possible, but did not happen. I have not seen the slightest hint of any such escalation.

One of the first ways it would be expected to show up is when high-ranking wolves protect their young pups. Threat displays such as in the 1967 encounter almost always involve an alpha male with pups present and amount to defensive, bluffing actions. This behavior was common in the 1960s and 1970s. But I have seen much less of it over the last couple of decades, even though high-ranking wolves remain sensitive to human presence near the pups and are still likely to move them from disturbed sites.

Any progression from fearless to aggressive should also become obvious during extreme hunger, especially for a high-ranking adult wolf still in the prime of life. The former Toklat alpha female died of starvation in July 2002 at only seven years of age. Her death was one of the lingering consequences of the radio-collaring death of her mate, the alpha male, in 2001, via her separation from the Toklat family less than a year after the two newcomer males took over.[20] She did not do well on her own. By sometime in May 2002, her status as a loner was seriously affecting her ability to obtain enough to eat, even though she remained primarily within Toklat's established territory. She was in an advanced stage of starvation in June (as determined during necropsy). By that time, the summer increase in park visitors was under way, and as usual her travels on and near the park road brought her into close contact with people.

On June 22, I circled overhead in an airplane and watched intently as she passed within fifty feet of several surprised hikers in open alpine tundra atop Polychrome Mountain. She had been almost completely at ease around people since at least 1998, exhibiting calm, trusting, nonaggressive behavior, though always as an indifferent aside to a hunting, travel, or other nonpeople objective. In none of the 2002 incidents was there any detectable change in this behavior, and certainly no hints of any aggression, even though she was well on her way toward starving to death. The Polychrome Mountain encounter happened only because she was following the easiest and most direct route toward a moose below the next ridge (she ended up looking the moose over a little more closely but not descending the ridge). She virtually ignored the hikers, who were on her route by coincidence, while calmly continuing toward and remaining focused on the moose.

Other than some responses to intruders at dens and rendezvous sites, the fearless behavior I have observed in Denali over the decades continues to feature about the same often-curious, typically relaxed, and trusting demeanor (much more laid back than typical dog behavior) for the most part, as if the wolves are viewing people neither as a threat nor as prey.

Wolves can be highly selective as hunters, not even attempting to take certain large classes of potential prey—most of the moose, bears, and porcupines they check out, for example. They are intelligent enough to avoid these classes of prey upon examining them “fearlessly” at close range because of the danger of getting killed or injured. I can only guess why they do not attempt to kill in most of their close encounters with people. The point is simply that selectivity is nothing unusual in the hunting repertoire of these highly intelligent creatures and, for whatever reason, people are almost always on their excluded list even where there is no persecution.

Better Guidelines

Any wolf-people problems in Denali are most likely to originate from avoidable people mistakes, not unnatural, dangerous wolf behavior. That is where NPS's preemptive efforts should focus—controlling people in a way that allows the wolves to continue their status quo, rather than vice versa. If a problem seems imminent, an emergency visitor use closure should be the first course of action, including the closing of the Teklanika Campground for one or more entire summers if necessary.

Food conditioning is the most serious potential problem.[21] As noted, NPS has done an excellent job of preventing this from happening in Denali. Given that a lapse could easily lead to rapid conditioning, this should remain the highest possible priority, especially with regard to cooking, food storage, garbage, and related policies at Teklanika Campground.

Dog activity at Teklanika and elsewhere is a close second to food conditioning in its potential for triggering problems. One of the best-known characteristics of natural wolf behavior is the intolerance, in general, of an intact, established family group to any outsider canids, especially near a den. Dogs are also often treated opportunistically as prey. Dogs pose other serious risks for wolves, notably by vectoring viral and bacterial diseases.

Nonetheless, the Denali superintendent continues to reject professional advice to prohibit dogs in the park, and even encourages dog mushing in the park, showing the ultimate inconsistency with the goal of maintaining the wilderness state of the Denali ecosystem and of keeping people and wolves apart. Park visitors bring their dogs to Teklanika, tether them outside their campers, and routinely walk them along the park road through some of the Toklat wolf family's most heavily used areas. NPS employees take the NPS sled dogs for daily summer walks along the road from park headquarters westward for several miles or more, even though the Mount Margaret wolf family dens only a short distance up the road and regularly hunts in this area. Even without a progression to aggressive behavior while protecting their young, during hunger, and in other circumstances, it is tempting fate to expect the wolves to continue ignoring dogs in their midst.

Park visitors can follow a few easy preemptive guidelines but keep the issue in perspective. While a wolf attack is possible, it is highly unlikely. There are many serious risks for people at Teklanika Campground and throughout Denali from hazards other than wolves, most of which rank much higher than wolves in their likelihood of occurrence. More people, by far, are attacked, injured, or killed in Alaska by moose, bears, goshawks, dogs, and other people, for example, than by wolves. There is probably a comparable likelihood of being struck by lightning or crushed by an old spruce tree falling onto a tent in the middle of the night during a wind. I have interacted closely with Denali wolves for forty-three years but still consider myself in much greater danger from a variety of hazards on the streets of Anchorage, one of the safest cities in the world.

Field notes #74

May 2000

5:23—4 of the 5 pups are now back inside the den (3 went via lower burrow and 1 via upper). One pup is exploring by itself 3–35 ft away near edges of bluff & slightly to N. The yearling walks off to the brush and lies down out of view. All is mostly quiet again.

5:33—the lone exploring pup comes back down to the lower burrow on its own, sliding several feet on loose dirt just above the burrow. It shakes itself off, then goes into lower burrow & disappears inside. Now no wolves in view. The pups look like they probably emerged from the den almost a week ago. They seem to see well and at a distance, and are well past the “vacuum cleaner” stage. They have their legs and are able to scurry about fairly well. They seem to be able to negotiate their way all over the slope and to the bluff atop without any problems. They are definitely in the exploratory stage of development, with individual pups and groups readily exploring 30–40 ft or more from the burrow. All five look normal size and healthy.

A wolf approaching in a quiet, calm way is probably following the easiest route to some travel destination (especially if this happens on the park road) or diverting temporarily in a natural investigative mode. One should hold his or her position, standing somewhat assertively but calmly, looking the wolf (or the most assertive wolf of a group) straight in the eyes. Talk to the wolf in firm but otherwise normal tones. If the wolf approaches within about ten feet, seems to want to come closer, and isn't simply trying to pass (on the road or another narrow route), it would probably be a good idea to pump these responses up with some arm waving and maybe foot stomping and mean-face yelling, even if the wolf still seems curious rather than aggressive. If a wolf comes into a campsite obviously to steal or beg food, combine all of these responses into the fiercest-looking-and-sounding crescendo possible, so that hopefully the wolf will remember this unnatural foraging attempt as an unpleasant experience.

Kantishna Subsistence Hunt

Besides trapping along the northeast-east park boundaries, as detailed in the next chapter, Denali's wolves are subjected to hunting in the park itself, during the annual Kantishna subsistence hunt in the heart of Denali National Park. Certain local hunters are eligible under a provision of the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) to obtain permits from the National Park Service for this annual September hunt.

The hunters' objective is to shoot a moose for meat, but they are also allowed to shoot any wolves or bears they might see—up to an astonishing ten wolves per hunter.[22] Recall that wolf pelts are not usable in late summer to early fall, so there is no reason for hunters to take wolves this time of year. In fact, some of these hunters kill wolves merely because they view them as their moose-hunting competitors. Even though they have the administrative ability to do so, and even though there is no legitimate subsistence use of a wolf or wolf pups at this time of the year, the NPS has not closed this area to wolf hunting.

Collaring Deaths

In March 2001, three wolves died in Denali National Park during or shortly after radio-collaring by a U.S. Geological Survey biologist who does research in Denali for the National Park Service. Two of the three dead wolves were alpha animals from the famous Toklat and Sanctuary family lineages of eastern, road-accessible areas of the park. NPS concluded that at least two of the three deaths most likely happened because heart valve irregularities predisposed these wolves to higher anaesthetic risk, that the biologist followed proper protocols and exercised good judgment, and that the deaths were of little biological or other consequence. I take issue with virtually all of these conclusions, based on my observations of what happened and research familiarity with the Denali wolves.

The heart valve explanation for at least two of the three March 2001 deaths is little more than speculation, as there was no direct evidence of such. A more likely explanation is that the biologist unknowingly darted these wolves with a drug intended for much larger moose or caribou, because of the similar appearance of the darts and dart guns, and because he routinely carried all three. He also exercised poor judgment in subjecting the Sanctuary alpha female to the inherent risks of darting at a time when the survival of that family lineage depended almost entirely on her, by replacing the Toklat alpha male's collar well before this was necessary, and by undertaking capture activities without regard for the timing of the wolves' all-important courtship and mating activities and pregnancy.

He showed even worse judgment in closely approaching the four Toklat wolf pups with a helicopter five months later—when they were only four months old—in order to separate out the new alpha male for radio-collaring. None of the pups were seen since. It's likely they scattered in panic in response to the helicopter. They then may have become lost, with little chance of surviving: pups of that age could not survive on their own for long. The capture effort could have waited a few months, when the risks of separation would have been much lower.

It would be difficult to imagine many biological consequences of greater significance than have followed the recent Sanctuary and Toklat losses. NPS emphasized that only 8 (2 percent) of the 327 wolves that had been radio-collared in Denali through March 2001 were known to have died of capture-related causes. However, as with wolf management in general, there is much more to consider than simple head counts in determining impacts, especially when the deaths include alpha and other key individuals.

Soon after these radio-collaring deaths, Sanctuary was terminated as a family lineage and is being replaced by a different lineage. This is the third human-related termination of a family lineage in that eastern wolf area of Denali since 1982. Without human-caused deaths, it is likely there would otherwise be persistence—with the Savage River family lineage, which was already well established when I began studying it in 1966, and lasted until winter 1982–1983. Effects on the Toklat were likewise severe. Within a period of less than a year, the neighboring decades-old Toklat family lineage sustained losses of its alpha male, his last genetic contribution to the lineage (the four 2001 pups), the reformulating group's demanding four-month time and energy investment toward raising these pups, and the resulting starvation death of the alpha female.

In both cases these amount to human-caused experiments that never should have happened, especially in the wilderness areas of a national park. Both cut short much more interesting and biologically valuable streams of information. For example, the Toklat alpha male and female (who were most likely siblings) constituted one of the closest, most efficient pair bonds I have seen in forty-three years of research.[23] I had monitored this pair closely since its first litter in 1998. It would have been a major contribution to the understanding of social organization in general to have been able to determine its duration and long-term reproductive success under natural conditions.

In short, Denali wolves have been subjected to an ongoing crapshoot by National Park Service wildlife managers. There are also major ethical and aesthetic concerns from which NPS is not excused, and there have been and likely will continue to be major wolf-viewing losses for many thousands of visitors in the most accessible area of the park. These 2001 collaring deaths are only the latest manifestation of NPS's refusal since the early 1990s to adhere to provisions of its own, ANILCA-mandated, Denali General Management Plan, which emphasizes the importance of individual wolf family lineages and the need to protect them.

Snapshot: Dr. Gordon Haber

Jonathan B. Jarvis

Jonathan B. Jarvis is director of the National Park Service. He wrote this statement for Dr. Gordon Hater's memorial service in Anchorage, Alaska, on November 6, 2009.

I worked in Alaska for five years as the superintendent of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. I knew Gordon and though his bright focus was rarely on my park, I appreciated his knowledge and passion.

As stewards of the Alaskan national parks, some of America's great national treasures, it's hard for us to imagine what it will be like not to have Gordon either standing at a microphone or tugging on our sleeves telling us what we need to do to protect one of the most iconic animals in the park.

He helped shape the way we view, and the way the world views, Denali wolves. His passion was informed by his work and he was never, ever shy about passing his views on to us all, sometimes at different decibel levels, over four decades.

We may not be hearing Gordon's voice in the same way over the next four decades, but I suspect that those who have worked with, listened to, and sometimes argued with Gordon will be reminded of him anytime when, in the course of our duties, we're lucky enough to see or hear any of the animals he loved.

Snapshot: The Hamburger Drop

Johnny Johnson

It was early April 1972 when six of us started out for McKinley. We hiked out the park road with snowshoes, set up our base camp on Traleika Glacier, and climbed a new route up McKinley. We were all local guys, so we pretty much knew what we were getting into, but still it was a long climb, seven and a half weeks in all. Every now and then, we'd see Gordon's plane; he checked up on us much more often than the park service did.

On the way back out we found that our cached food had been covered in an avalanche, so we made a radio call to the park service and asked them to leave some food at Eielson for us. We were back on the Traleika Glacier, hungry but glad to be off the mountain, and all of a sudden here comes a plane flying out of the clouds straight toward us, and then it circles over us a few times, and it's flying real low, about sixty feet above the glacier, and then these boxes start dropping from it, these brown cardboard boxes.

We all ran over and opened them, and inside were six sacks, each one filled with hot hamburgers and french fries. We were all jumping up and down on that glacier, and gulped that stuff down. But after seven and a half weeks on freeze-dried food, those burgers didn't settle so well; a couple of us got pretty messed up digestion, which isn't much fun when you're dressed up in all that cold-weather gear.

By now, as we went through McGonagall Pass, it was spring breakup and we were hiking across bare tundra and then through slushy snow six feet deep. We had only eighteen miles to go, but it took us four days; the conditions were that hard. About halfway through, here comes Gordon's plane again, this time he drops roast beef sandwiches, apples, oranges, and gallons of ice cream.

I saved my orange and later, when we were about ten minutes from the park road, I was sitting on a rock with Bill Ruth, and I pulled out that orange and shared it with him. It was the best gourmet meal I've ever had.

When we all got back to headquarters, everyone was so happy to see us, most of all Gordon. We all told him he was our hero—even if that rich food probably did slow us down by a couple of days.

18 See chapter 2 for more about these two wolves joining the Toklats. See “Collaring Deaths” later in this chapter for more on the radio-collaring deaths.

19 Haber alludes here to Occam's razor: in the face of two competing hypotheses, generally the simpler explanation is more likely to be true.

20 Read more about this wolf in chapter 2.

21 Some suggest this may have contributed to the 2010 death of the teacher in Chignik on the Alaska Peninsula, who was killed by wolves during a cross-country run at dusk, as there were unconfirmed reports that some residents had been baiting wolves to bring them in closer for hunting. Her death occurred two years after ADF&G biologists shot twenty-eight wolves (including fourteen pups still in the den) in that region.

22 In 2012 the NPS and the Denali Subsistence Resource Commission reduced the bag limit to one wolf per hunter during the fall period because of concerns that large numbers of wolves could be taken. After November 1, the limit is five wolves. Outside NPS boundaries, the limit remains at ten wolves. These are hunting limits; there is no bag limit to trapping wolves within the preserve and outside the park. The reporting of wolf kills during the subsistence hunt is entirely voluntary. Therefore, the number of wolves killed inside Denali National Park and Preserve during this hunt is unknown.

23 This pair bond was described in chapter 2.

CHAPTER 11

PARK WOLVES IN DANGER: THE DENALI BUFFER SOLUTION

AS EARLY AS 1972, HABER ADVOCATED FOR A NO TRAPPING/NO HUNTING BUFFER zone to protect park wolves as they crossed the boundary of the park onto state lands in the Wolf Townships and Nenana Canyon. The Wolf Townships (also called Stampede Trail) is a rectangular chunk of land that protrudes into the park, with park lands on three sides. In 2000 the Alaska Board of Game established a partial buffer. Haber found this compromised buffer to be inadequate. He proved correct when, in just one year, the winter of 2007–2008, at least twelve and as many as nineteen park wolves were killed just east of this buffer--causing a significant drop in the park's wolf population. So in 2008 he and Rick Steiner petitioned the ADF&G Commissioner to expand the Denali buffer—and were denied. Then they wrote the superintendent of Denali National Park, requesting that the National Park Service more assertively work to protect wolves outside park boundaries.

At a 2010 Board of Game meeting, four months after Haber died, the NPS did propose an expansion. However, the board not only voted down this and four other expansion proposals but went even further: they abolished the existing buffer entirely and placed a moratorium on considering future buffer proposals. Since the buffer's removal, several key members of Denali's most-viewed wolf groups have been killed in the Wolf Townships, one group—the most often seen of all—has disintegrated, and visitor wolf-viewing success has decreased by more than 70 percent.[24] In this chapter, Haber explains why protection on this sliver of state land is essential to arguably the most scientifically valuable and the most-viewed wild wolves in the world.

AS STATED IN THE ANILCA-MANDATED DENALI GENERAL Management Plan (GMP), the objective in managing Denali wildlife is to preserve the range of natural behavior, patterns, changes, and processes of all park wildlife. Yet astonishingly, not one of the groups of wolves that use the Denali area is protected from hunting and trapping.

Much more is known now about the territories and movements of Denali wolves and the distribution and movements of their prey than when the Denali National Park boundaries were drawn, first as Mount McKinley National Park in 1917 and then as Denali National Park in 1980. The map boundaries—even with the 1980 park additions, which were originally proposed primarily to protect Denali's wolves—do not align with this world-class wildlife system's most important ecological boundaries, especially in the northeastern area, where Denali's most important wildlife wintering area is left largely unprotected. The most glaring omission from true ecological boundaries is the Wolf Townships, a rectangular notch that juts into the eastern park just a few miles from the park road. It is an essential and regular part of the wolves' natural ecosystem territory.

It might not be possible to change the park boundaries, but much more could be done to protect Denali wolves with adequate no trapping/no hunting designations in adjacent state areas and inside the 1980 park additions. For instance, the state and National Park Service have provided full protection to Denali caribou since 1972—both within the park boundaries and on state and private lands outside and on inholdings in the park. It would be a sound move from biological, scientific, ethical, aesthetic, educational, visitor viewing, and other standpoints to do the same for Denali's highly valued wolves.

Most Valuable, Yet Unprotected

Full protection from hunting and trapping has long been advocated for the two major “road corridor” groups of wolves in Denali National Park and Preserve. The seventy-year-old or older Toklat family lineage and at least five successive groups occupying the adjacent eastern area—Savage River, Headquarters, Sanctuary, Mount Margaret, and Toklat East—have provided more viewing opportunities and scientific insight than wolves anywhere else in the world.

Along with Yellowstone National Park, Denali is considered to be the world's premier location for viewing wild wolves. Data from bus driver observations indicate that visitors have a 19 percent chance of seeing a wolf on a trip into the park.[25] More than anywhere else in Alaska, wolves in the eastern part of Denali provide significant benefits to tourism. However, because most park visitors travel only fifty to seventy miles into the park along the park road, just a few groups of wolves provide the great majority of viewing opportunities.

Yet they are not accorded full protection from hunting and trapping. In fact, because of the complex shape of the northeastern park boundary, there are areas within a few miles of the park road where wolf hunting and trapping are not only legal but have increased significantly in recent years. After the Savage River group was hunted to extinction, the four successive eastern groups in their territory have been terminated over the past twenty-five years owing largely to hunting and trapping. Toklat has also been hit hard at least several times. Losses of individual wolves and entire wolf groups continue with serious harm to their world-class scientific and viewing values and despite legitimate ethical concerns.

The eastern areas of Denali generally provide good year-round moose and sheep and seasonal caribou hunting for wolves; thus it is to be expected that they would also support persistent wolf family lineages. The Savage River family was well established in 1966 but disappeared in winter 1982–1983, almost certainly because of illegal hunting. None of Savage River's successors has lasted long in the presence of continued trapping, hunting, and growing development outside the northeast and east park boundaries. State land transfers in recent years have facilitated even more human activity. The spring 2009 estimate of fewer than seventy wolves in the park north of the Alaska Range is the lowest it's been since 1987.[26] Without these impacts, eastern Denali would support a group of wolves with longevity comparable to the decades-old Toklat family just to the west.

Wolf Movements and Traplines

Wolves typically engage in one of three types of movements: (1) the more or less routine, recurring movements that define the “territory” of each group, (2) the unpredictable extraterritorial forays by each group well outside these areas, and (3) dispersals, during which certain individuals, most commonly two- to three-year-olds, leave a group and don't return. It's during winter extraterritorial forays that eastern wolf groups are put in danger. Extraterritorial forays are easy to underrate in importance because they constitute only about 9 percent of the wolves' winter travel. But when they extend into the areas of easy hunting-trapping access and the heavy development that nearly surrounds the east and northeast boundaries of Denali, it becomes a crapshoot for the wolves to make it back home intact.

In the winter of 2008–2009 alone, about half of the twenty Denali study groups were known or likely to have been hit by trappers or hunters. Since 2003 at least nine groups of wolves from near and far areas of Denali have used the Wolf Townships. At least six of these groups suffered hunting or trapping losses. The Denali National Park wolf database provides a longer-term perspective in a somewhat different way: since 1987, when wolves were first radio-collared in Denali, eighteen collared wolves (among others without collars) have been trapped or shot in the Wolf Townships on state land east of the park boundary. These eighteen wolves represented eleven different family groups, including three groups from areas west and northwest of Wonder Lake, seven groups from surrounding areas of the park and within the townships, and one in between.

Field notes #140

March 10, 2007

5:30 pm—Farther up Savage we see snowmachine tracks: 63°48.05',

149°21.43'—virtually right to park boundary, which is 63°48.00'.

As of 2009 three active wolf traplines border the park boundary and account for the majority of trapping deaths for Denali's wolf groups. In some places trappers may even use saturation snaring—a corridor of snares that is the land-based equivalent of high-seas drift-net fishing. Consider, for example, the Dry Creek trapline. Like most traplines in Alaska, it is maintained with a snowmachine. Typically traps are placed in and along the snowmachine trail and snares with baits are clustered in brushy areas here and there short distances off the trail. Wolves commonly travel in these trails during deep snow periods, as do most other large wildlife such as moose. The Dry Creek snowmachine trapline trail essentially follows right along the northeast park boundary. As with the other two traplines, it seems obvious that the trapper used a GPS receiver to set the line as close to the park boundary as possible. Clearly, these trappers have situated their lines so as to maximize the chances of catching Denali National Park wolves.

Field notes Denali #132

May 2006

12:25 pm—we are following the snowmachine tracks W.

• ~30 caribou (0–2 calves) ~ 2 miles W of starting coordinates

• adult red fox curled up ~ 2–3 miles W of forgoing “dismantled hunting camp,” along snowmachine trail.

• We tracked snowmachine trail to lowermost of 2 camps / airstrips located along Dry Creek just above Dry Creek canyon.

• there are 3 snowmachines, ~ 2 sleds, etc and we see 2–3 men at the cabin—apparently just arrived here yesterday or early today—we circled them, but they do not seem very friendly—apparently they recognize us. They must have wanted to get here very much, as their trail over the ridge traverses much bare ground.

• The next day, Buck's wife received a call from K-2 Aviation—Rick S, who owns this cabin, called to emphasize that “that bug lover Haber is not welcome to land here.” I later learned that he is one of the ranking officials of Alaska Outdoor Council.[27]

More Than Numbers

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists have routinely brushed off my call to protect these wolves in the Wolf Townships with their usual emphasis on numbers, telling me that there are enough wolves around to repopulate the area. However, there are more than numbers and “populations” to consider in evaluating the impacts of shooting and trapping on wolves. Wolf numbers might bounce back fairly soon after a major human-caused loss, but the behavior and other aspects of biology that set this species apart are likely to be an entirely different matter. In fact, human killing endangers the very sociality—the eusociality—that sets wolves and a handful of other species apart, and makes them so interesting and important from ecological, scientific, and other standpoints.

For an ultra-social predator in particular, it is to be expected that shooting and trapping will produce numerous biological impacts. For wolves, there is evidence of lingering impacts long after numerical recoveries on the social structure and other behavior, hunting patterns, distribution (including territories), genetic variations, and mortality patterns of survivors and recolonizers. These impacts begin showing up at annual areawide shooting-trapping losses of 15 to 20 percent, that is, at rates below what usually would be needed to offset annual reproduction.

The primary functional units of wolf biology are families and extended families, featuring among the most sophisticated forms of cooperation known for vertebrates. A relatively few of the oldest, experienced wolves, especially the primary alpha breeding pair, typically assume the key roles. Because these core adults commonly stand out near the forefront as leaders or with other assertive behavior, they are disproportionately vulnerable to ground and aerial shooting. Although young, inexperienced wolves generally sustain most of the trapping losses, the behavior of the core adults leaves them vulnerable to this killing method as well. In fact, high-ranking adults commonly try to help other family members who get caught and in the process risk getting caught in nearby traps and snares themselves. Also, where wolves are more accustomed to people, as in a park situation, a higher proportion of older, experienced adult wolves is likely to be killed by hunting and trapping. Their frequent exposure to humans along the park road makes them relatively unconcerned with human activity or scent, and thus less likely to avoid trap and snare sets.

Biologists and others often point to the well-known 35 to 40 percent average annual areawide losses that wolves sustain under natural conditions and argue that shooting and trapping merely replace these natural losses or that the natural losses “swamp out” the shooting and trapping losses. What they overlook is that the natural losses consist mainly of pups and subadults who die and disperse, whereas the shooting, trapping, and other human-caused losses are much more likely to include adults with key roles in maintaining the integrity of the group and determining how it functions. This probably explains why shooting and trapping impacts begin to show up at only about half the natural average annual areawide loss rate—at 15 to 20 percent, rather than at 35 to 40 percent. The recent history of losses for the Toklat group alone demonstrates how the alpha wolves are more susceptible to hunting and trapping deaths, and how their deaths shatter the family group structures.

Most of the wolf behavior and wolf-related patterns and processes that prevail in the prolonged absence of shooting and trapping are adaptive. Shredding and sometimes even temporarily distorting them is therefore likely to diminish and simplify the species itself. When this happens, it amounts to an important biological cost, even if wolves “repopulate” the area or their numbers haven't declined much in the first place. (See Plate 18.)

Misplaced Protection

State officials claim that it is important to protect the lifestyle of a handful of trappers who kill these wolves. However, any notion of a grizzled old trapper on snowshoes eking out a living by killing these park wolves is a fantasy: all three of the current trappers make a good living apart from selling the pelts of these wolves. This has been true of all of the wolf trappers I have observed in the area over the past forty-three years. One trapper does not even live in the area but works at his well-paying job as an ADF&G biologist in Palmer during the week and drives north now and then to check his trapline, located less than two hours via snowmachine from Healy. Another trapper is a National Park Service employee. A part-time recreational activity of a few trappers is being given priority over hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world—including thousands of Alaskans—who come to the park in hopes of seeing wolves.

Furthermore, the response that the “area's wolf population” is doing fine, hence there is no biological reason for a protective closure, is meaningless even from a population perspective. Abundant data on dispersals of wolves from and to Denali indicate that the biological population to which Denali wolves belong extends far beyond the boundaries of Denali National Park, probably all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Killing every wolf in Denali would not threaten the actual biological population; wolves from other areas of the population would recolonize the small park portion. In other words, this is a meaningless standard. Thus, there is no threshold number of wolves within the park area below which anyone could logically (let alone biologically) identify a “credible biological emergency.” The only biological basis for managing wolves is by emphasizing their primary functional units, the family group, both the naturally short-lived as well as persistent. The loss of a single group, or even a significant individual, whatever the cause, constitutes a significant biological loss.

There are usually fifteen to twenty groups of wolves living primarily within the Denali National Park and Preserve boundaries at any given time. At least a third of these groups venture to the northeast park boundary area at unpredictable winter intervals.[28] They do this because that area is a major traditional wintering ground for their prey, used by Denali caribou but at times also moose and sheep from interior areas of the park. The existing boundaries of the park and adjacent state wolf protection area have little relevance to the ecological boundaries of this wintering area, and trappers are able to target park wolves accordingly.

In particular, these trappers target the very same wolf groups that provide the majority of viewing opportunities for park visitors. Losses to these wolf groups directly translate into significantly less wolf sightings by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each summer. The Denali wolves are of well-established state, national, and international importance from various standpoints, yet a few trappers are allowed to lie in wait for them in this area and lay waste to the interests of the far greater numbers of people who want these wolves to be left alone.

Journal Notes: State-Snared Wolves, 1994[29]

November 28

At 2:40 pm, we find a second ADF&G Moody Creek snare site, right along Moody Creek, just east of a small creek that comes into Moody from the north. This one is 150 yards south of the other snare site in this area. It is in an area of spruces and willow brush. It looks like there are several baits, especially on the south side, near Moody Creek. It also appears that an adult caribou has been caught in one of the snares here; it is dead and already somewhat scavenged.

We see one adult tan wolf, lying passive on its side, caught in a snare around its chest (just behind its front legs). It is about one hundred feet north of the Moody Creek bar, at the north side of the snare set. At this time it looks dead because it's not moving, however upon closer observation we see that it is alive. Broken spruce branches and brush in a ten to fifteen foot diameter area around this wolf indicate it struggled considerably earlier, but now it is lying passively.

It is now 2:50 pm. Bad weather—lowering ceilings—force us to leave. We fly down Moody Creek and find a wolf trail, fairly fresh, going upslope on the north side of Moody Creek valley, about two miles to the west outside of the wolf control area. This trail came down Moody Creek from the snare area, then went upslope to the north at this point, where we lost it in the trees and low ceilings. It looks like the trail of about eight to ten wolves, obviously the Yanert-Moody Creek group. They had traveled to the snare site, where one of their adult females now has been caught. Was this wolf caught first, and then the others came there, or were they all together at site when the one was caught?

We then continue down Moody Creek to the Healy area, then northward to head back to Fairbanks. Along the way we see eighteen single adult moose and five pairs of cows and calves—a total of thirty-eight moose.[30] At 3:50 pm, we land at Fairbanks International Airport.

I then arrange for a helicopter from Fairbanks to fly us to the Moody snare site tomorrow morning. SR and BH with the Anchorage Daily News will fly to Fairbanks in the early morning, and I will take them to the snare site. We'll fly the Cub as well as helicopter.

November 29

SR and BH, Anchorage Daily News, will fly with JF in the helicopter, and follow AW and me in the Cub, to Healy. At Healy, I will get out of the Cub and join them in the helicopter. Meanwhile, AW will fly in the Cub by himself, scouting the Dean Creek set and flying cover for us at Moody Creek.

At 10:30 am, we start up in the Cub. The weather is calm, with ice fog, and twenty below zero. We take off, heading south to Healy, and in the first few miles I count seven adult moose and five pairs of cows with calves—a total of seventeen moose.

At 11:08 am, we reach the flats/foothills interface. The temperature is thirteen below zero at altitude, with light fog and clouds. I count two moose and several dozen caribou here and there, without even trying to find them. I also note quite a lot of fresh tracks and cratering in the snow, signs of considerable caribou activity, particularly on the California Creek area. We also spot the tracks of about six wolves on the trail where our Fairbanks-Healy route intersects; they are fresh but we didn't follow them.

At 11:28 am, we arrive at the Healy airstrip and land on skis. I now get in the helicopter. At 12:05 we arrive at the Moody snare site.

There are now four wolves caught in the snare set. The one right along Moody Creek, the tan adult we saw last night, is still alive but lying passively near the north side of set. And now there are also three tan pups, caught at the south side of the set, each within twenty feet of the snared caribou, which obviously lured them here. What likely happened is that the remainder of the wolf family group came back here late yesterday or early today, after having continued down Moody Creek and turned north, to try to help the adult female who was already caught in the snare.

There are five tan free wolves, mostly adults, milling around, acting confused, on the river bar right in front of the three pups that are caught. Two of the pups are still alive and one, on the south side of the set, is dead. The five free wolves are completely ignoring the helicopter as we circle and hover just above. They make repeated attempts (we saw at least six attempts) to walk up onto the bank to the three pups just twenty feet north of the bank, apparently wanting to help them. However, each time, as soon as they get to within a few feet of the pups, they stop, as if afraid, and retreat back to the river bar, looking back at the pups. They clearly want to help the pups but seem to know there is danger and hence pull back at the last moment each time.

It is now 12:15 pm. The five free wolves finally give up and begin walking single file northward, along the west side of the south Moody set, directly toward the north Moody set. The front two of the five free wolves look apprehensively at the area of the north Moody Creek snare site, then skirt it along its west side, continuing north in single file. Two of the five appear to be large adults and seem to be particularly savvy. They are the ones doing most of the reacting to the north Moody, and they seem to be doing the leading. We watched them continue north, upslope into trees one hundred and fifty feet northwest of north Moody, at which point we stopped observing them, and hence do not know where they ultimately went. We returned south to Moody, so that we can land out on the river bar in front of the set and examine on the ground before ADF&G arrives.

At 12:45 pm, we land in front of the snared wolves, at which point SR, BH, and I go into the set to observe, photograph, and video-tape the snared wolves, close up, before ADF&G arrives. It is about thirty-five below zero at this site on the ground. JF remains at chopper to monitor radio and periodically start it to warm it up. Meanwhile, AW is off in the Cub, flying in the Dean Creek area to check that snare set. While there, he encountered MM flying an ADF&G scout, and talked to him in the air. He told him he was flying for me and that we were on the ground with snared wolves at Moody Creek. MM then came to south Moody and began circling, ultimately calling in the ADF&G helicopter, whereupon RS and EC arrived.

Of the three newly snared pups, one is already dead, caught around the neck. A second one is caught just above the right front paw and still in good condition. The third is caught by the right front leg and has become entangled against a small spruce. Its leg is chewed off at the elbow, and marks on the spruce indicate it did some of the chewing, but some of it may have been done by others, trying to help free it.

At no time do any of the snared wolves act aggressive. The dominant response is passiveness and looking away. They do not even make any sounds. This is even true of the adult, even when EC walks up to it, to about five feet away, to shoot it. The adult does not look at him but continues sitting down and strains a bit to look away.

Even the pup that EC shoots repeatedly makes no attempt to lunge at him and shows not the slightest hint of aggression. It, instead, looks glassy-eyed at him, hurt and scared.

We have about one hour with the snared wolves before MM arrives overhead and the ADF&G helicopter lands. AW returns to south Moody and is circling overhead with MM. AW says there is nothing in the Dean Creek set. The ADF&G helicopter takes three of the four dead wolves off to the east, to a small lake along the north side of Yanert Valley, where MM could land the Scout to pick them up. Meanwhile, EC remains at south Moody to reset the snares.

At 2:45 pm, we take off in the helicopter, flying down Moody Creek to refuel near Healy. AW had left earlier, flying back to Fairbanks. After refueling, we fly east across the foothills to Wood River, right where it emerges from the mountains, but see no current activity. The light is becoming dim, so from there we fly directly to Fairbanks.

At 5:10 pm, we land at W's. AW said he watched MM check a snare set in Moody Pass, “at a pond in Moody Pass.” MM had not seen AW, and when AW radioed him, MM pulled up abruptly and began flying away from the area, as if wanting to prevent him from learning about that set.

Snapshot: This Guy Is Hard Core

Joel Bennett

Joel Bennett, an Alaska resident for forty-three years, is an internationally recognized natural history and wildlife filmmaker. He served on the Alaska Board of Game for thirteen years and has been active in many wildlife conservation causes over the years. Gordon Haber was a personal friend and provided critical information and interviews in several of Bennett's wildlife films.

Gordon's PhD and wolf research put him right up front in terms of someone in the north who had academic credibility regarding wolves, but Gordon had a roller-coaster relationship with both the state and the National Park Service. It depended on which way the winds were blowing politically and who was in positions of authority. Sometimes he enjoyed a preferred position as an authority, and sometimes he was a pariah.

Of course, ADF&G doesn't like to hear from someone not in-house, and he was always pushing them to bring forth positions that could be defensible biologically. He came to all the Board of Game meetings; he'd show up with long statements and usually get cut off because of the time limit, then he'd huff and puff back to his seat. Still, he always stayed engaged in the process even though things didn't usually go the way he thought they should. When I was on the board, I enjoyed a good relationship with him because he honestly believed that, unlike other board members, I had a personal sense of what was right and not right in terms of hunting ethics, and what was a permissible line to cross in terms of predator control and management.

Toward the end of my time on the board, we were involved in the contentious issue about Denali National Park buffer zones. I spearheaded a plan to create a small buffer on the east side, and that got whittled down through compromise to a point that Gordon wasn't happy at all, but I'd tell him, something is better than nothing. We had lots of spritely dialogues about this, how the board required some degree of compromise, and wouldn't it be better to have 60 percent of the buffer than none at all? He'd say, “It's not going to work, I don't agree with it.” But I'd tell him that the board is so political it doesn't matter what biologists bring to them. He'd be completely disgusted with the way the buffer situation has gone now.

Gordon was never convinced that the ballot initiatives to limit wolf killing would be worth the effort, either. When we won the first one in 1996 and literally stopped aerial hunting for three years, he realized the initiatives were a good thing. He did help us with the Jack Frost case. Frost was the orthopedic surgeon who was convicted of illegal aerial hunting; catching him exposed the whole “flying doctor” ring and was the catalyst for stopping land-and-shoot hunting, which is still closed statewide except in a few control areas.

Gordon used to be invited to Frost's cocktail parties as an authority on wolves. Frost was so arrogant and thought he was so untouchable that he would literally invite into his own home his hardest opposition. And Gordon would go to the home of arguably the most effective wolf hunter in the state.

Well, Gordon would tell us about the parties; he'd tell us there were wolf pelts everywhere in Frost's house, wolf pelts hanging every three feet on the banisters. He gave us an insider's view of Frost and his world—information that contributed to the effective monitoring of Frost's illegal activities.

We talked often on the phone when he was doing field research, especially in the Tok area. I remember thinking, man, this guy is hard core. There he is flying in February and January, right on the margin of sanity, in freezing weather, bundled up in a small plane, when it's dark most of the time, and then holed up in this threadbare room in Delta Junction. This guy is dedicated; he doesn't let up.

And sure enough, he was doing it up until the moment he died.

That's what made him as effective as he was. He never stopped; he was stubborn like a pit bull on the state. And they knew he was a credible scientist who could show up at these conferences around the world and cause trouble for them, so they had to deal with him. He was intense, and he was a formidable player in the last forty years of wolf management history.

Snapshot: Mortality Call

Barbara Brease

Barbara Brease has lived in and around Denali since the mid-1980s. She currently works for the National Park Service, within the Cultural Resources Division of Denali National Park and Preserve.

I met Gordon at a Board of Game hearing, when I was on the Nenana Advisory Board in the early 2000s. I was astonished by his eloquence and grace before the board. He was out there seeing these terrible things that were happening to the wolves, and he'd call me to share this sorrow, so I could witness through him what he was seeing. I'm sure that's how he dealt with the pain of having to witness these things directly. He'd share the stories and see if I could make any sense of it.

Being on the advisory board, I heard a lot of talk about where people were going to hunt and trap wolves. There was one trapper who worked for Alaska Department of Fish and Game and was having more of an impact on the park wolves than the other two trappers; this trapper seemed to have access to the park's tracking information on the wolves and was being very quiet about it.

Gordon had a reputation as being cantankerous, but I never thought he was cantankerous, I just thought he was outraged, and I thought everyone should be outraged. He was actually very gracious.

I remember one beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon in fall; he was at our house and got a beep on the mortality caller. I thought it would be a good experience to take my two girls with us. He didn't think it was going to be a trapped wolf. We hiked around the Stampede area and couldn't find it, and then we kept following the beeping to a friend's house. It was a shock.

But Gordon was so polite. Instead of embarrassing my friend and making the girls feel awkward, he waited until after I took the girls home to confront my friend's husband, the trapper. Still, it opened my daughters' eyes to see who was killing the park's wolves.

Gordon really liked kids; he liked to do things like pull a penny out of their ear. My daughters both loved him; he would always see them at hearings and was very supportive when they would testify.

One of the most compelling stories Gordon told me was about a wolf in the Yukon–Charley Rivers area whose mate was killed in the predator control program. That wolf took his mate's carcass and buried it, then lay down on top of it for ten days. It was so moving. He was upset about it but also more moved than ever to help others understand the unique social relationships these wolves had, and what made them such a complex species.

And then there was the desperation he felt when the Toklat alpha female was caught in that trap, how he tried to get the trapper to release her, and how she was in that snare for nearly two weeks until the trapper came and shot her and dragged her body away on the snowmachine.

There was also that Sanctuary wolf pup that was the only survivor of the group, a yearling, the rest had been trapped or shot. He tried to help her; he orchestrated a food drop for her. But then a trapper got her.

And it wasn't just wolves he tried to help. He was involved in several rescues for climbers, too. He showed the same perseverance trying to help climbers as he did trying to help wolves.

24 Read more about these losses in the epilogue.

25 See the epilogue for more on viewing statistics and how these have dropped by more than 70 percent.

26 See the epilogue for an update on wolf population numbers in the park.

27 The Alaska Outdoor Council is the largest hunting and trapping lobbying organization in Alaska.

28 In later years, Haber realized that these areas just outside the park weren't simply extraterritorial forays but had actually become part of these two wolf groups' territories.

29 This snaring incident occurred as part of a State of Alaska predator control program begun in 1993. The video that Haber made of the scene he describes in these journal notes was viewed worldwide, initiated a tourism boycott, and contributed to the cessation of that round of state predator control. The state began using aerial gunning rather than snares for wolf control, although the state still teaches the snaring method described here to trappers, who use it widely, including along Denali National Park's boundaries.

30 Haber always recorded all wildlife he saw, but in this instance he is also noting just how many moose and caribou are in this area, where the state claims wolf control is necessary because of low prey numbers. As chapter 12 describes, Haber concluded that the state's prey population methodology was seriously flawed.

CHAPTER 12

SCIENCE GONE AWRY: ALASKA'S WOLF-KILLING PROGRAMS

HABER'S STUDY AREAS OUTSIDE DENALI FOCUSED ON AREAS WHERE THE STATE WAS initiating predator control, particularly in the Fortymile area, which is adjacent to Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve—thus putting preserve wolves at risk, much as Denali's wolves are at risk when crossing boundaries onto state land. Haber came to know many of these wolf family groups with a similar level of detail as Denali's wolf groups. As he observed how predator control affected them, he became even more convinced that human-induced mortality has a greater negative impact on wolf families than natural mortality. He expanded upon the conclusions about wolves' roles in the ecosystem that he described in his dissertation, and also increasingly wrote about the state's complete failure to prove a biological emergency for prey populations, and therefore the necessity of predator control, in any area of Alaska.

With the shifting political winds, and as the state ramped up predator control, Haber's conclusions fell on deaf ears. However, as Joel Bennett noted, Haber never gave up. He continued to go to every Board of Game meeting, continued to state his case, and continued to stay engaged even though things rarely went his way. After his and Rick Steiner's efforts in 2008 failed to effect change, they draft the “Sound Science Act” in the spring of 2009 and forwarded it to select legislators. The act would have required an independent scientific peer review, made available to the public, of all wildlife management proposals by ADF&G or the Board of Game. The bill was not introduced, but Steiner continues to advocate a similar bill.

In this chapter, Haber makes his case against Alaska's misguided and destructive predator control. Not only are the state's data in error, but there is no hunter hardship, and predator control isn't cost-free. The ecological, economic, and ethical costs, he argues, are unacceptably high. What's more, the hunting, trapping, and aerial killings by which humans have tried to reduce wolf numbers are instead most likely to have the opposite effect—to increase them. He also reveals the state's “hidden” predator control: in order to avoid public process on predator control, the state has set liberal seasons and bag limits, thus using hunters and trappers to reduce wolf populations.

PICTURE A FAMILY GROUP OF WOLVES—PARENTS, CURRENT PUPS, earlier offspring—together in the hills, interacting in all their ebullient, highly advanced ways. Then imagine the scene transformed into panic and chaos as one or two planes suddenly appear just over a nearby ridge and, in a blast of blowing snow, swoop down ten feet over the wolves. One by one, wolves are targeted and chased to exhaustion. As they flee, they fall head over heels in the snow, crash head-first into trees, and attempt to hide in thick brush. The gunner leans out of the plane and shoots wolves, killing some, but often not all, of this family of wolves, leaving the rest—often the younger, less experienced wolves—to fend for themselves.

Wolves are being killed in Alaska in greater numbers, over larger areas, with more deception, and based on worse “science” than most Alaskans realize. What is needed is a rethinking of wolf management policies from top to bottom to help to end this dark chapter of wildlife “management.”

The current formal wolf control program began in 2003 and now includes five areas totaling about sixty thousand square miles, or about 10 percent of Alaska.[31] After a semblance of a public process via the policymaking seven-member Board of Game, the state issues aerial shooting (and “land-and-shoot”) permits to private pilots and their gunners to kill wolves. Since 2003, aerial permittees have killed more than a thousand wolves.[32]

These wolf killings grew from a failed attempt to reduce wolf numbers through an ill-conceived nonlethal program of sterilizing and relocating wolves. In this failed nonlethal program, the alpha pair was sterilized and returned to their territory, while the rest of the group was transported hundreds of miles away. Some of the transplants showed tremendous heart in struggling all the way back home over the following months, only to be chased down by helicopters again and hauled off to more distant locations. One such returnee, a male of the Granite family group, finally gave up and died alone in a dark crate, after again being chased to exhaustion, snatched from family members, and transported hundreds of miles away.

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June 13, 2009

“Pro-wolf” lawsuits say sustained yield OK. But for wolves, SY means can kill 30–40%+ per yr, which shreds basic wolf biology.

It was a sad spectacle as parents, offspring, siblings, and mates were so callously ripped from each other. One of nature's most interesting and exquisite creations, a vibrant extended family with exceptionally close, sophisticated emotional ties and a form of social organization at least as advanced as any found on the planet, was converted to a sterile, two-wolf shell of itself.

Hidden Control

The current aerial killing program is only the tip of an annual wolf-killing iceberg in Alaska. Much more killing goes on behind the scenes, largely hidden from public notice. At least five thousand wolves were killed by other means throughout the state during the first five years of the current predator control program, including in the aerial killing areas. The total annual reported kill is usually about fifteen hundred wolves, but anyone who is savvy to the ways of the Alaska bush and village life understands that at least 10 percent of the wolves killed are not reported.

For the most part, this killing is authorized under the guise of providing routine trapping and hunting opportunities. However, board members, ADF&G biologists, and others occasionally let their guard down with comments that make clear the primary intent: to suppress wolf populations in order to avoid the more difficult and contentious formal public process required for aerial killing.

For fifteen dollars, anyone with an Alaska driver's license can purchase a trapping license and then legally kill an unlimited number of wolves, of any age or sex, in most areas of the state from October or November through April—over a month after wolf pelts commonly become worthless for commercial or subsistence uses due to warm-weather shedding, rubbing, etc. The “trapper” is not required to own or use a trap or snare; with a trapping license it is also legal to kill wolves simply by shooting them, even from their car or truck beside the road. With a hunting license, it is legal to shoot several wolves of any age or sex. In many areas there is no bag limit at all.

Few if any people eat wolf meat, wolf pelts seldom if ever have any established subsistence or commercial value prior to October or November (pup pelts usually later than that), and sport hunters are rarely interested in trophy mounts of more than a couple of wolves. This alone, together with regulations against “wanton waste” of trapped and hunted animals, should leave little doubt that the primary intent of these regulations is to suppress wolf numbers.

Even more illustrative is what a hunting license allows during the wolf homesite period. Across most of Alaska, wolf pups are born inside a den in early to mid-May but do not fully open their eyes and emerge for the first time until late May to early June. They are usually not completely weaned until late June at the earliest. They are dependent on the older wolves for provisioning and protection at dens and rendezvous sites until at least October, and they normally remain dependent well beyond the homesite period.

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June 26, 2009

The killing is far worse than the 100–200 wolves aerial-hunted each winter. Total of 1200–1500+ killed most years. Must address all of it.

Yet it is legal for a hunter to shoot any older wolves foraging away from the homesite, which means that the pups can be legally orphaned and left to die a slow death—in May, before they have even emerged from the den, and in August, while they are still being attended at the den or a rendezvous site. It is legal to shoot the pups themselves (and any adults) right at a rendezvous site, near a den, and while the older wolves are moving the pups between dens or rendezvous sites. Killing one- to three-week-old or three-month-old wolf pups would not be justified even if there were subsistence or trophy uses for the dead pups. The fact that there are no such uses should make even clearer the intent to subvert the public process with hidden control.

Bad Science

The formal wolf control programs usually begin with claims about alleged low, declining, or “stagnating” moose or caribou populations and/or moose-hunting or caribou-hunting problems. ADF&G biologists eventually expand upon these claims in “predation control implementation plans” that they write for the Board of Game. To show there is a moose, caribou, or related hunting problem for which predator control is needed as a solution among other things requires good population data and data sufficient to identify a “predator pit” condition. ADF&G biologists have yet to meet these requirements for any of the control areas.

Since the 1970s, biologists have developed moose censusing procedures that, when applied properly, produce reliable estimates of moose numbers and trends with accompanying measures of their accuracy and precision. The value of these censusing procedures in producing high-quality moose population estimates has been apparent for decades in Game Management Unit 20A (south of Fairbanks and east of Denali National Park), for example. However, the moose estimates for the five formal wolf control areas are not reliable, for at least two major reasons: (1) ADF&G biologists use the improved procedures to census moose in a small portion of each area but then extrapolate the resulting estimates, meaninglessly, to the entire area; (2) few if any of the censused areas include the entirety, most, or even a known portion of the annual range of the target moose population or subpopulation.

Wolf population estimates are even less reliable. Information on wolf abundance is long on extrapolations, calculations, second-hand observations, and anecdotal information, and short on actual survey data. For example, a late fall 2005 wolf estimate for the GMU 13 wolf control area, southeast of Denali National Park, gave no details about methods other than that it was “based on wolf and track sightings gathered from staff biologists, hunters, trappers, and pilots, adjusted for documented harvest.” Fall observations are of an incidental nature. They involve staff biologists who happen to see wolves while conducting moose trend counts.

As well, some estimates fail to take into account the migratory nature of some wolf populations. In the Fortymile wolf control area, wolves are more heavily dependent on caribou, thus many more migrate seasonally in response to caribou migrations. My year-round wolf research throughout the Upper Tanana–Fortymile–Yukon–Charley region via aerial tracking indicates that wolf numbers can increase substantially in this area as wolves from as far as 150 miles away arrive to hunt caribou. Unless they are killed, migrant family groups and breeding pairs return to their natal territories by April or early May. At least some nonbreeding migrants follow Fortymile caribou to their spring calving areas, which often coincide with the wolves' natal territories.

The first six Fortymile wolves shot by aerial control permittees in winter 2005–2006 were from an established, radio-collared family group of fourteen wolves that had migrated more than 120 miles to the control area from its natal territory in Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve. This group was an extension of a resident Yukon–Charley Rivers group that I began studying in 1993; it migrated to the control area in previous winters as well. (See Plate 19.)

Hunter Hardship?

In at least three of the five areas, the board and ADF&G promoted and began aerial wolf killing based on unsubstantiated claims about hunter hardships as well as low and/or declining moose populations. The most striking example is from the McGrath (GMU 19D east) wolf control area, where annual moosehunter success rates have remained high for at least fifteen years, with a stable or increasing trend. After conducting a follow-up moose census, the state found that their earlier estimate of moose numbers were much lower than the number actually in the area. In fact, the McGrath hunter success rates are as high as or higher than in the state's best moose-hunting area, which ADF&G regularly touts as one of the most successful moose management stories in North America.

This flies in the face of the claims about a severe 1990s areawide moose decline and related subsistence hardships in the McGrath area. Biologists and board members say that McGrath hunters must now spend more time and money traveling farther afield to get a moose. There are no data to support this claim, but even if there were, the bottom line is that the local hunters continue to enjoy high success within the overall management area. It is nonsensical to argue that they should forever be able to get their moose right off the back porch.

Killing Wolves Isn't Cost-Free

In Alaska, wolf and bear control are viewed as a way to alleviate competition between urban and rural moose and caribou hunters when there are shortages, whether real or imagined. The state is focused on killing wolves and bears to produce and maintain such high numbers of moose and caribou simultaneously across all the major hunting areas of the state that there will never be a need to apply the subsistence hunting priorities, where rural subsistence hunters would have priority over urban sport and personal use hunters, as dictated by statute.

For these predator control programs, biologists and policymakers have proceeded with the shallow, one-dimensional assumption that killing wolves is cost-free: there are no potential negatives because wolves will always “repopulate” the control areas. But as we've seen in the killing of Denali wolves, there are nondollar costs of much importance to Alaskans and many others in today's world: biological, scientific, ethical, aesthetic, educational, and viewing costs.

What drives wolf and bear control perhaps more than anything is reliance on “maximum sustained yield” as a guiding principle. In Alaska, this thinking is expressed in several intensive management (IM) statutes, which many advocates now refer to as “managing for abundance.” These statutes were enacted by the state legislature primarily at the behest of the Alaska Outdoor Council, the state's most powerful hunting-trapping lobbying organization, whose wildlife positions have long been ideologically guided by retired and active ADF&G biologists. This is the same “maximum sustained yield” (MSY) thinking that scientists have had for thirty years, since publication of a famous paper in 1977, now widely discredited. Maximum sustained yield is anything but good science, and it is certainly unlikely to generate the advertised long-term hunter benefits.

Hunters who attempt to thin a wolf population might do well to consider that the more they shoot wolves in a given area (short of almost wiping out the population), the more socially fragmented the population becomes, resulting in more matings, more young, and often more wolves. Data from exploited wolf populations in many areas of North America and elsewhere show this to be the case, particularly with regard to the rapid increase in the proportion of young. It is no wonder that bountied wolf carcasses from the past in Alaska showed an exceptionally high percentage of pregnant adult females. Nor is it surprising that wolves seem to be increasing in many areas that have been subjected to substantial aerial hunting pressure. Well-meaning but naive “game protectors” defeat their own purpose.

A wolf hunter whom I once explained this to said that if I liked wolves, then his wolf hunting, which may well produce more wolves, should make me happy. But I don't want more wolves. Too many wolves are as bad as too few. There is an optimum number of wolves in terms of what is best for the entire ecological community of an area, and it is the health of the community, not merely of this or that species, with which we should be most concerned. As my research and other studies of natural animal communities have shown, the optimum number of wolves is best reached and maintained by the wolves and prey themselves.

Wolves are fascinating as individuals, but what I find unique is the beautiful, interesting, and advanced social structure of an intact family group. Fragmentation of a wolf group through hunting disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic. We often get more wolves in this manner, but at the diminishment of the very quality of the species that so sets it apart. Wolves are vastly different in their behavior from other game animals and cannot be managed on a sustained-yield basis as a “crop” like most of the others.

Command-and-Control versus Systems Management

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists talk about moose and caribou within fixed game management areas as if these were single populations or other meaningful ecological units. They establish, often arbitrarily, objectives for the numbers and annual yields they would like to maintain within these areas complete with “desired” sex, age, and predator-prey ratios. Almost always this means attempting to keep numbers and yields at relatively high, constant levels within each area. When the numbers and/or yields fall below the specified objectives or certain ratios deviate, the thinking turns largely to killing predators to bring them back up. If the numbers and ratios increase well above the specified objectives, such as at present in Game Management Unit 20A, the emphasis shifts to heavier moose and caribou hunting—with longer seasons, more permits, or larger bag limits—to bring them back down.

It is an old cornerstone of wildlife management: trying to “smooth out the peaks and troughs” of population change primarily to maintain high, ongoing yields for hunters. Anything beyond what is needed to keep the population stable is a harvestable “surplus” for providing these yields. However, to a large and growing body of science, this represents just the opposite of true sustained yield thinking. It is instead a classic “command-and-control” resource management that in the long run seldom succeeds, and in the process does harm on many fronts, including sometimes to the very consumptive users, such as hunters, who are supposed to benefit the most.

Things in the natural and man-made worlds don't usually work at single scales. They operate as systems at multiple interacting scales and across scales, such as what goes on annually between wolves, moose, and sheep within established wolf territories, between these units and other groups of wolves that migrate seasonally across territories, bears that prey seasonally on moose in some of the territories, and between all of the foregoing and the caribou subpopulations that migrate seasonally across the region for decades and then shift to other regions. And like all dynamic ecosystems, these and other ecological systems behave with patterns of change over time that, underneath all the external influences, amount to only a handful of potential major phases, albeit with variations and special cases for each. A key combination of “slow” variables—for example, relating to predation, habitat quality, and ungulate harvest rates in a predator-prey system—“tuned” one-way results in long periods during which system components (such as predator and prey populations) fluctuate mildly within one stable state or occasionally flip into a higher or lower state. The tuning changes and the same system oscillates periodically. It changes further and the system oscillates aperiodically. It changes enough and the fluctuations are likely to become chaotic (“deterministic chaos” rather than complete disorder).

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26 June 2009

This issue has been dumbed down to meaninglessness. The level of detail here is vital. Force yourself to understand it—you can!

The bottom line is that there is almost nothing in the way ecosystems behave that resembles the steady-state population objectives that go hand-in-hand with the wishful thinking of command-and-control management, aka maximum sustained yield, intensive management, or management for abundance. The highly unnatural attempts to dampen as much variability as possible and hold ratios within narrow tolerances virtually guarantee that in the long run the managed systems and their component populations will be less able to absorb the natural and human-caused disruptions that are both inevitable and unpredictable in the real world. This means a higher potential for sudden, unnatural shifts to system states with even lower yields and unforeseen consequences for other valued natural features and ecosystem services.

A more scientific view of sustainability would seek to retain as much of the natural, multiscale spatial and temporal population variability and related behavior as possible because of its importance to system resiliency. There would be more emphasis on adapting to rather than trying to control natural changes. Moose and caribou harvesting strategies would feature much more spatial and temporal variation at broader scales, such as along the lines of the “rotating pulse harvest” approach described for caribou by myself and Walters in 1980. In short, the proximate emphasis would switch from maximizing population yields to maximizing system capacities so as to absorb surprises.

Many complex controls operate between predators and prey when they are left to themselves. The result is an animal community characterized by a high degree of vigor, genetic diversity, great variety, and the ability to withstand major natural disturbances such as severe winters. Claims that wolves destroy the very food source upon which they depend are absurd. Nothing of the sort has ever been witnessed in any study of a natural animal community where wolves are the major predators. In short, there is no reason for us to think we must control a natural wolf population. The optimum size is reached by leaving the control solely to the wolves, as research in many areas of North America has demonstrated.

Alaska Peninsula Killings

A recent example of a predator control plan based on this erroneous command-and-control thinking involves a so-called emergency to try to halt a caribou decline on the Alaska Peninsula—a “decline” that, according to historical population data, put the current population well within normal population fluctuations. In late May and early June 2008, ADF&G area wildlife biologists shot twenty-eight wolves near an area where caribou were calving, including fourteen newborn pups at dens they accessed in a helicopter. The area is some 615 miles southwest of Anchorage, near the eastern end of the Aleutian Islands.[33]

I don't know much about the southwest Alaska Peninsula wolves, nor do the biologists who did the killing, for they told me there has not been any significant wolf research in that area. However, I am confident there were also important biological and scientific costs to consider before killing these wolves, at multiple interacting scales. The biologists did indicate that southwest Alaska Peninsula wolves probably rely on salmon and marine mammals as well as caribou, which by itself would have made the control-area wolves interesting and valuable subjects of scientific study.

Research in the Denali area indicates that killing wolves stands to disrupt behavior, patterns, and processes of high biological and scientific value related, for example, to social interactions within family groups at one scale, foraging, social, and longevity differences among large areas at another scale, and regional kinship links at even larger scales.

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June 14, 2009

Was going to Toklat natal den today but not much to see on a rainy day. Adults put pups this age inside burrows and hunker down in the brush.

Each of the fourteen pups was caught on foot and “euthanized humanely” with a bullet through the head, shot by state employees. Pups of this age (a month or less old) are still nursing and relatively immobile at the den. The biologists think the fourteen adults and fourteen pups were from two family groups, and that possibly there are still a half dozen surviving adults that were away at the time.

It is difficult to understand how biologists could be responsible for such a thing, how state employees could helicopter to a couple of natal dens and, after killing the adult wolves, grab fourteen frightened young pups and one by one blow their brains out with a pistol.

Ethical Costs, Ecological Values

Wolves feature two unusual evolutionary strategies—cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting—that operate primarily through sophisticated interactions and interdependencies within family groups. These close, complex, cooperative relationships cannot be expected to withstand heavy predation, natural or otherwise. Human killing at annual rates of 15 percent or higher appears to produce lingering biological impacts even when numbers recover to prior levels—impacts to social structure, hunting, distribution, genetics, and annual mortality rates. Sometimes mortality rates increase sharply well after the killing has ended.

Extraordinary intelligence, expressiveness, and emotional depth enable wolves to maintain their sophisticated bonds as cooperative breeders and cooperative hunters. This same high sentience that is so integral to their biology also provides an ethical basis for challenging the current control programs. Many people recognize the importance if not preeminence of ethical considerations in determining how we should interact with other species, especially animals of such high sentience. Many scientists now also feel this way and recognize how integral intelligence, emotions, personalities, traditions, culture, and other previously ignored aspects of sentience are to the biology of nonhuman social animals.

So prominent has this thinking become in the greater society that it must be treated as a major societal cost to be considered explicitly before deciding about wolf control or other such actions. Scientists in particular are obliged to recognize and be guided or constrained by the ethical implications of their work. It remains for many ADF&G biologists—who regularly emphasize that “we manage wolves [and other wildlife] for populations, not individuals or groups”—to see this ethical light.

There is immensely more worth to wolves than what is derived from fur money or their value as a trophy. For example, the close parallels in many aspects of social behavior between wolves and primitive man offer us an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. We know remarkably little about the origins of human aggression and how it is or isn't controlled in some societies. We have much to learn about the roots of primitive culture, and even of possibly more efficient forms of government. By studying wolves and other advanced social creatures, we stand to learn something about the more complex variations of the same patterns found in humans.

We also know it is not necessary to possess an animal and materially do something with it in order to enjoy it and use it. Many derive an immeasurable thrill at the sight of a wolf track or of wolves, upon hearing the singing of a group, or just from knowing that out there somewhere in the wilderness another intelligent society lives unmolested by humans. These uses of wolves and wilderness are legitimate.

In a world of limited resources but increasing human numbers and demands, nonconsumptive uses such as watching and photographing may, in fact, have the greatest validity. Viewed in this perspective, we can at the very least insist that the days of aerial gunning, snaring, denning, poisoning, and other types of wolf slaughter—whether called predator control or not—and the resulting degradation of wilderness must remain in our past.

The Missing Sense of Wonder

What leaves me shaking my head the most about all these predator control programs is the missing sense of wonder. Listening to biologists involved in control programs, I am always struck by how blandly and matter-of-factly they talk about killing wolves. They seem to think being “objective” in ignoring items like behavior and sentience is the mark of a good wildlife scientist. How sad and revolting that professionals entrusted with the management of these fascinating, important creatures view them in such shallow ways.

I spend long hours observing wolves in the wild year-round, during the summertime mostly sitting quietly with a spotting scope near their dens. The behavior I see is truly enthralling. Quite likely, while I was observing some of it at a den in Denali National Park, ADF&G biologists swooped down in a helicopter and suddenly turned similarly enthralling scenes at a wolf den on the Alaska Peninsula into a horror show culminating with a bullet through the head of each pup.

We are the ultimate losers from all this wolf killing, I am convinced, for the way it diminishes the ability of our surroundings to evoke the sense of wonder that helps us not just to live, but to be alive.

Journal Notes: Snowmachine Hunt

Sgt. MK (Fish and Wildlife Trooper from Palmer, who is in charge of the investigation) told me that the two hunters who killed the wolves had told them that there were eight wolves in the group but that they shot only the six. I told him that I doubted this, based on the fact that we scoured the area and saw no wolf tracks exiting the area.

The two hunters did not deny that the wolves had run hard down the last slope from their snowmachines. However, they claimed that the wolves must have heard the snowmachines while still on the opposite side of the mountain, out of line of sight. They said they topped the hill to find the wolves near the bottom, and then shot them there, all the way from the crest of the hill. However, this would have been a one- to one-and-a-half-mile distance. They had one assault rifle, which they said “amazed” them with its accuracy. Also, J told me he had checked the wolf carcasses with a metal detector and there were no rounds in any of them.

Therefore, this would mean the hunters shot them from one mile away, and the rounds still had enough velocity and energy to whiz right through all six carcasses! This is far-fetched, to say the least, and, as indicated, there are strong indications from the tracks alone that there was a direct chase and that they shot the wolves from much farther downslope.

Snapshot: Wolf Summit

Priscilla Feral

I first met Gordon at the Wolf Summit in Fairbanks, in January 1993, the one that Governor Walter Hickel called together. It was a privilege for me to sit there and listen to people whose work I had long admired, like Victor Van Ballenberghe and Gordon Haber. It was the first time I'd met David Mech, too. At one point, Gordon and Mech faced off in a very public way about what they believed in. Mech was head of some wolf specialist group, and would later approve of the state's wolf control plan. Gordon was just so funny and so gutsy that he really impressed me. He said to Mech, “You know I don't run with your pack,” and a bunch of us just burst out laughing.

As Gordon talked, I got a sense of his humanity, the depth of his wonder. Wonder is the word he used to describe his passion for the wolves he studied. And he never lost that passion, that wonder. Whenever there was an uproar about wolves, whether it was in Yellowstone or Denali, he'd say, “Keep the people out and let the wolves be.” That really spoke to my principles. So after he talked at the Wolf Summit, I went up and introduced myself. Then we started sponsoring his work.

Gordon and I were different in many ways; he was a rough backwoods guy and I was a citified person, as he would say. He used to try to get me to hike out to a wolf den with him, but I was cautious about bears. Even walking the path to his cabin, I'd worry. And he found that hilarious, making me scared. He'd tell me, “Oh, gee, I wouldn't worry about it, I get charged by a grizzly on the path to my cabin only a couple times a year.” He just loved the excitement and tension of having that experience, I think.

We shared a single-mindedness about what freedom was, and that wolves deserved it. We were united over the idea that the wolf control program in Alaska was deplorable. That was what attracted me to working with him, his principled thinking. It was unmatched among all others that I admired. They broke the mold and threw it out when they made him.

Over the years his scientific arguments helped to unravel a lot of wrong. Some would say he alienated people, but you just can't work with wolves in Alaska without enemies. The question was whether his science was good, whether he had the intestinal fortitude and work ethic to do what needed to be done. It was, and he did. He was brilliant and enormously valuable.

Snapshot: Picking Pilots

Troy Dunn

Gordon flew with some big-name folks, like Don Sheldon. But there was some pressure not to fly Gordon. One of the pilots he had before me said he finally stopped because people would tell him, “If you're going to fly Gordon Haber, then we're not going to use you.” One former pilot told me that he felt wolf opponents might sabotage his aircraft or harm his family.

But for me it was a real honor. My wife and I were really interested in wolves, and when we started learning about the state sponsored snaring programs, we kept seeing the name of Gordon Haber. We wanted to help, and since I had the capability to do that, we sent a letter to Priscilla Feral, hoping to reach Gordon.

A couple of weeks later, we got a phone call. My wife answered, and said to me in an excited voice while covering the phone, “Hey, it's him, it's Gordon Haber!” It was just so exciting for us both to have him call us, this iconic hero of wildlife. Then when we met him, well, the mental image we'd had didn't match his physical presence—we had this vision of a six-foot-six lumberjack with a beard ready to tear into anybody. Although not imposing in stature, Gordon, the former hockey player, was still one tough man as he proved to me on many hikes into the backcountry.

It was the beginning of a great friendship. I flew with him for ten years, the longest continuous run of any of his pilots, and I got to know what he wanted and he knew what I could do. There was a lot of unspoken communication.

Once we were flying out of McGrath, right when they first started the McGrath wolf control. I went to pay for my fuel, and a woman who was all bundled up and leaning against a post said to me, “You riding with Haber?” All of a sudden, I felt like I was in some wild western. “It's more like he's riding with me,” I said. “Do you have a problem with that?” She looked down a second or two, and then said, “I guess not.” It turned out she was the wife of one of the Board of Game members who was pushing for more wolf control. I just left there thinking, Where the hell am I, in the 1800s Wild West?

Gordon was really good at choosing fights; he was more selective than I am. He'd say to me, “You don't have to stick up for me. Let it go. That's not the fight you've got to fight.” He had focus. When I would want to answer some letter to the editor based on misinformation, he'd tell me, “I don't care about that little stuff. We need to fight the long-term fight.”

31 As noted in the epilogue, this 10 percent figure includes areas unsuitable for prey or wolves, such as vast icefields. More accurately, predator control is now taking place on 20 percent of Alaska's available land.

32 See the epilogue for 2012 data on the magnitude of Alaska's wolf control.

33 This is in the same region where the Chignik teacher incident occurred two years later.

CHAPTER 13

ENDANGERED SPECIES: THE PROBLEM WITH DELISTING NORTHERN ROCKIES WOLVES

IN 1974, WHILE STILL A GRADUATE STUDENT, HABER PRESENTED A PAPER SUGGESTING a different way of evaluating species for endangered status: not by simply counting their numbers but by recognizing and preserving the presence and health of their functional characteristics. This systems approach guided his work with the NPS-appointed scientific committee on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in 1989–1991. For the rest of his life, Haber continued to closely monitor and write about this reintroduction to the Lower 48, most recently decrying the wolves' endangered species delisting by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Haber feared what individual state management would mean for these highly social and tightly integrated wolf families as they crossed over national park boundaries and between states. As always, his conclusions are firmly grounded in what he learned from his forty-three years with Denali's wolf families.

THE TRADITIONAL WAY OF EVALUATING THE STATUS OF AN animal species is to look primarily at its abundance. If numbers are rapidly diminishing or few remain, we usually classify it as threatened or endangered. If the species is relatively abundant over most of its original range, we usually don't. Generally, the larger the population, the more apt we are to consider it thriving. However, for most species, especially for highly social species like wolves, this concept is inadequate and can do more harm than good in our attempts to preserve the planet's biodiversity.

For wolves and other highly social species, and probably for most others as well, we must learn to recognize the most important functional characteristics and then closely guard these, not just the numerical status. When important functional characteristics are significantly affected by our activities, we should immediately consider the populations involved as threatened or endangered and take appropriate remedial action—even if numbers haven't yet decreased. For some species, like wolves, this implies little or no exploitation. Other than relatively light and sporadic subsistence use in areas where it is a traditional practice, we shouldn't allow any harvests of natural wolf populations.

It is ecological nonsense to assume we can exploit any wildlife species just because its numbers remain high, particularly for a species like the wolf, which, near the top of the food chain, has been exposed to only low levels of exploitation by other species throughout its evolutionary history. And yet, on the advice of his biologists, the secretary of the interior of the United States has removed wolves from the endangered species list throughout most of the northern Rocky Mountains.

Tweet

August 16, 2009

Found Toklat at a site 4–5 mi (7.2 km) from natal den. Most if not all 11 older wolves still together provisioning the fast-growing pups.

Delisting means that individual states assume management responsibility and can allow wolves to be hunted. Agency biologists and other proponents of delisting argue that there are no worries about the population's genetic diversity, and that the population will therefore remain viable, that is, persist overall, albeit at some smaller population size, in the face of regulated state hunting. Opponents argue that the Interior Department has not yet shown there is enough genetic mixing for the population to be viable in the face of hunting, that wolf numbers could end up declining much more sharply than expected. The Interior Department has replied that it will monitor the situation carefully to ensure that wolf numbers will not drop below certain levels.

The underlying problem with the arguments on both sides is that ultimately they place too much emphasis on the numbers of wolves and their population and not enough on the biological features and primary functional units that most define this species and set it apart. This is also the fundamental biological flaw in the thinking behind delisting wolves of the western Great Lakes region and in allowing heavy killing of wolves across the north in general.

Fragmentation and Degradation

Routine public ground hunting (without direct use of airplanes, helicopters, snowmobiles, etc.) is unlikely to suppress numbers as in the worst-case scenarios being envisioned particularly for the northern Rockies and in some cases might, because of social fragmentation, even temporarily result in higher numbers. However, any substantial ongoing exploitation of a species with a long evolutionary history of and complex adaptations for cooperative breeding and cooperative hunting, but with no comparable history of being exploited, stands to degrade the species' biology in other important ways.

As noted in previous chapters, the biology of organisms, societies, and systems is described by behavior, patterns, processes, and much more, at multiple scales and across scales, not just by the number of individuals present or how fast they recover from losses. The number of individuals present at any given time, that is, their abundance, is more of a manifestation of the biology—of the behavior, patterns, processes, etc.—and, for wolves, is not a very sensitive manifestation.

Genomes and patterns of genetic variation across populations and within and between primary functional units (such as families and societies) are of central importance in defining the biology of a species. But so too is the large amount of information that is transmitted across generations via learning, especially in ultra-social species like the wolf that feature prolonged dependency of the young, cooperative breeding, and cooperative hunting. Ultimately such behaviors or predispositions are encoded in the genome. However, simply preserving the genome is not enough to ensure their expression in the face of hunting or trapping.

Wolf numbers often rebound from public hunting, trapping, and heavier agency killing, at least in the short term, without reflecting anything obvious to most observers about other impacts. Nonetheless, there is evidence of lingering impacts—even after numerical recoveries—on the social structure and other behavior, hunting patterns, distribution (including territories), genetic variations, and mortality patterns of survivors and recolonizers. Again, these impacts begin showing up by the time annual areawide hunting and trapping losses have reached 15 to 20 percent, that is, at rates below what usually would be needed to offset annual reproduction.

Remember that the primary functional units of wolf biology are families and extended families featuring among the most sophisticated forms of cooperation known for vertebrates. A relatively few of the oldest, experienced wolves, especially the primary alpha breeders, typically assume the key roles. As the previous chapters explained, because these core adults commonly stand out near the forefront as leaders or with other assertive behavior, they are disproportionately vulnerable to ground and aerial shooting. Although young, inexperienced wolves generally account for most of the trapping losses, the behavior of the core adults leaves them vulnerable to this killing method as well—such as when they try to help other family members who are snared and in the process risk getting caught themselves. The assertive behavior of core adults also means that they are often the wolves most likely to be killed or injured during natural intergroup conflicts. However, the frequency of these conflicts can vary dramatically with foraging variations; thus, the conflicts constitute a much less significant source of mortality in some large areas than in others.

Biologists often equate the well-known 30 to 40 percent or higher average annual areawide natural losses that wolves sustain to losses from hunting, trapping, and agency killing programs in terms of their impacts. As noted in the previous chapter, they commonly argue that hunting, trapping, and other killing merely replace the natural losses and are therefore of little biological consequence. A common variant of the argument is that wolves should be able to sustain higher harvest rates than ungulates (e.g., elk, moose, caribou) because they have higher reproductive rates. This thinking overlooks two important points: (1) the natural losses consist largely of pups and subadults, who die and disperse; (2) the natural losses, including of key adults, typically vary in ways that are related to social and food variables, such that they may compensate for changes in group sizes and prey availability and thereby enhance the ability of groups to persist.

In contrast, hunting, trapping, and other human-caused losses across large areas are more likely to include adults with key roles in maintaining the integrity of groups and determining how they function but are unlikely to vary in adaptive ways (spatially or temporally). This probably explains why hunting and trapping impacts begin showing up at loss rates well below the natural average annual areawide rates.

Diminishing Species Integrity

As we've seen from several Denali wolf groups, most of the wolf behavior and wolf-related ecological patterns and processes that prevail in the prolonged absence of hunting, trapping, and other human killing are adaptive, including the foraging variations that result in area-to-area differences in the frequency of intergroup conflicts. Shredding and sometimes even temporarily distorting wolf groups via hunting and other killing is therefore likely to diminish and simplify something about the species, its groups, its interactions with prey, and/or broader system interactions.

When this happens, it amounts to an important biological loss even if wolves recolonize an area or their numbers have not yet declined much. As I pointed out regarding wolves, and as other researchers have observed for hunting and fishing in general, it should be assumed that hunting- and fishing-induced evolution might occur with unforeseen biological consequences that could be difficult or impossible to reverse. For species like wolves, with little or no significant evolutionary history of being exploited, selective pressures induced by hunting and other human killing are likely to act in the opposite direction of those induced by natural mortality.

Complex systems such as wolf societies can be expected to behave in counterintuitive, nonlinear ways, with lags and discontinuities. This provides all the more reason for not assuming that all is well simply because there has been a numerical “recovery” (or series of annual recoveries) from human killing, particularly in the case of a relatively new wolf population. State management plans that have taken effect with federal delisting will allow sufficient ongoing killing to risk long-term changes in the fundamental behavior that sets wolves apart as a species, including by fragmenting and simplifying and otherwise diminishing the primary functional units, if not an eventual longer-term decline in numbers. Endangerment can happen via diminished numbers of individuals but also by diminishing the numbers of individuals and groups behaving in ways consistent with the species' natural direction of evolution.

While I disagree with proponents of delisting that there is a biological rationale for allowing routine hunting and trapping of this species, I agree that there will be a need to remove problem wolves now and then, most commonly when wolves begin moving into areas of heavy, incompatible human use. The previous legal status of northern Rocky Mountain and western Great Lakes wolves already allowed officials to employ these measures; it was not necessary to delist them for this purpose. Delisting is resulting in widespread, indiscriminate hunting impacts on many established groups of wolves in areas where there are no major conflicts with people and the wolves are essentially controlling their own numbers (both group sizes and number of groups), as wolves do under natural or near natural conditions.

To ensure their continued presence and vitality, the integrity of important functional characteristics, not merely numbers, must be guarded carefully for each and every species. Otherwise, we might one day find ourselves inhabiting a lonely, deadened planet, where living wildness and all of its gifts will only be a memory. There is cause for much concern, but it is still not too late for us to recognize the difference between life and mere existence.

Snapshot: Scientist as Advocate

Rick Steiner

Rick Steiner was a conservation professor at the University of Alaska for thirty years, specializing in environmental issues. He continues to advocate many of Haber's ideas today.

After Gordon's tragic death in 2009, I knew I had lost a true friend and colleague. I was asked by his family in Florida to collect his research materials, publications, photographs, etc. and place them with the Alaska Resources Library and Information Service here in Anchorage for all to access. As I went through the materials, I was struck not just by the reminder that I had lost a good friend, but also by the unique kind of scientist that Alaska and the world had lost. And I learned more about wolves in those few weeks pawing through Gordon's research materials than I thought was possible to know about wolves. His stacks of materials, many dating from the 1960s, dust-covered, paper fading, provide a fascinating glimpse into his life intertwined with his beloved wolves. The research collection also provides a look at the profound sense of sadness, and sometimes rage, Gordon felt about the continuing loss of the many wolves he had come to know personally, and to care for so deeply.

I had first become friends with and a professional colleague of Gordon's about ten years ago, as our careers took similar trajectories: applying science in conservation advocacy. We met weekly each winter at his favorite coffee house here in Anchorage, Café del Mundo, where he would set up shop with his laptop, engaging any and all who wished to talk about wolves. Everyone was deeply impressed with Gordon's intellect, his passion for wildlife, and particularly his passion for wolves. I was also fascinated with the intricate details of the social lives of wolves he had recorded. His research was without doubt one of the most significant contributions in the history of wildlife science. Together, we drafted legislation that would have increased the use of science in Alaska's wildlife management, and wrote several joint letters to the governor and National Park Service, seeking greater protection for Denali's invaluable wolves. I was truly honored to join him in the political application of his science.

Gordon was the quintessential field biologist, the sort that we don't really have around anymore. He was far more comfortable spending long hours at forty below observing Denali wolves than being in an office. And he did what many other scientists don't: he advocated the application of his scientific findings. Two things, both interrelated, best describe Gordon's unique contribution to wildlife science and ecology, and both set him apart from most others in the field: (1) his in-depth, long-term field observations—careful, methodical, thousands of hours of observation—conducted in winter and summer, in all sorts of weather, for over forty years; and (2) his passionate advocacy, based on his findings, for protecting wolves.

On this last count, he went against the established, stale orthodoxies of science. But it was clearly his intimate understanding of the intelligence, social organization, and sentience of wolves that fed his passion to protect them. For Gordon, there was no other choice. It seems that anyone who comes to know the fascinating, caring lives of wolves as he did would have to take that step. He advocated protection of Alaska wolves with all the tenacity of a family group of wolves guarding a litter of newborn pups. For this, he was reviled by those who are threatened by the truth about wolves, and greatly admired by the rest of us.

I hosted Gordon on a statewide Alaska Public Television debate on Alaska's wolf control program in 2004, face-to-face with his most ardent opponents, where he and his colleague, Priscilla Feral of Friends of Animals, methodically destroyed the arguments of wolf-control advocates. I again hosted Gordon and Priscilla in 2005 for a public debate in Anchorage, at which they had both agreed to debate their opponents on the issue of wolf control, but none of their opponents showed. Gordon's opponents must have known that logic, science, and public opinion ran strongly against their backward ideology of killing wolves, and that they would lose any fair debate on the issue with him.

In the end, the enduring legacy of Gordon's forty years of research will be the new and powerful understanding we all now have of wolves, and the sacrosanct need to protect them. As well, perhaps his lesson will provide a model to young scientists, who have to begin advocating the application of their research results. I am sure that someday, those who don't yet appreciate this lesson will, and Gordon Haber will be remembered as the true scientific pioneer he was.

When I think of Gordon and his decades of life spent with wolves, I am reminded of an Ed Abbey quote about a centuries-old desert tortoise: “He knows his home, loves it, stays there, guards it.” And as Gordon's home was with Denali wolves, he did just that.

CHAPTER 14

TOKLAT'S HIGH VALUE: THE CASE FOR UNEXPLOITED WOLF GROUPS

GARY BAKER, WHO FIRST FOUND WILD WOLVES FOR HABER IN 1966, SAID HABER was always a dynamic presence. “He delivered it with both barrels,” Baker said. “He wasn't afraid of confrontation. If he felt you were wrong, he'd go to the mat with you.” And his longtime pilot, Troy Dunn, noted that Haber carefully chose those battles—always choosing those that would have the most effect on the wolves themselves, especially the Toklat family group of Denali. The Toklats were the one family group that spanned Haber's entire career with wolves; they were there when he arrived, and they were there when his plane went down in 2009. In fact, Haber was most likely tracking the Toklats or their offshoot, Toklat West, when he died; his plane crashed in the mountains just downriver from the East Fork cabin, in the heart of the Toklat family territory.

“He was on a path,” recalled Karen Deatherage, “of changing how we see wolves, how we view their relationships, their families. Numbers, he said, are secondary to relationships and actions. It isn't about numbers; it's about traditions, about cultures.” In this chapter, Haber makes this case one last time—with the Toklats at the core. He also explains just why he stopped using the term “pack” and why these Toklat wolves represent a continuous nonhuman family lineage, something increasingly rare and valuable in today's anthropocentric world.

THE TOKLAT WOLVES OF EASTERN DENALI NATIONAL PARK LIVE together as one of the world's oldest known nonhuman social groups in the wild. As such, Toklat, also known as East Fork, is a biological treasure, a gold mine of research opportunities for understanding more about the characteristics of a successful society and cooperative behavior in general. Toklat is also important to the biological integrity of Denali as the oldest of only about twenty predator functional units that interact year-round with the ungulate populations and subpopulations of this ecosystem. It is the world's most viewed and probably the world's most photographed group of wolves. It provides a wealth of educational and scientific opportunities. The history Toklat embodies in this ecosystem gives it a special aesthetic value as well, something like the aura of a 150-year-old bowhead whale or 2,000-year-old redwood.

There are certain behaviors that make Toklat—and made its former neighbor to the east, Savage River—so successful, interesting, and important to study and protect. The Savage River family was well established in 1966 but disappeared in the winter of 1982–1983, probably due to illegal aerial hunting. None of Savage's successors—Headquarters, Sanctuary, Mount Margaret, Toklat East—has lasted for more than eight years in the presence of continued trapping and hunting just outside the east and northeast park boundaries, which was part of their home territory.

When I began this research in 1966, Toklat was a well-established family. Adolph Murie, the famous naturalist-scientist who was still studying bears and wolves when I arrived, told me this was the same family of wolves he began observing in 1939 and described in his classic 1944 monograph, The Wolves of Mount McKinley. From my own observations, I know Toklat is at least forty-three years old, and from what Murie told me, it is probably at least seventy years old. Wolves of this family have been radio-collared continuously for the last twenty-one years. This ranks the Toklat wolves and a forty-six-year-old or older community of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, as the two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups anywhere in the wild.

Under natural conditions, longevity and levels of sociality can be expected to vary widely among groups of wolves, in areawide patterns related directly and indirectly to prey resources. Toklat, Savage, and Savage's successors have been the primary resident groups of eastern Denali, the only major area of the north side park/preserve where mountain sheep as well as moose and caribou are available to wolves. This richer, more diverse prey base has enabled Toklat (and formerly Savage) to avoid much of the direct competition and strife with other groups that results in higher natural rates of turnover and probably lower levels of sociality for wolves in surrounding areas to the north and west. Sheep provide a key additional winter hunting opportunity that reduces the need of the eastern groups to venture to the more dangerous caribou wintering areas just outside the park. The eastern groups also largely escape competition from migrating wolves because the latter are much more attracted to the nearby caribou wintering areas, in part because caribou are easier to hunt than sheep.

Field notes #3

May 22 [no year]

10:15—arrived Headquarters area. Leaves starting to open noticeably in the HQ—hotel—East boundary area—perhaps one-fifth open now. Turned into a mostly gray day, with dull sky and fairly cool.

Characteristics of Success

The Denali research suggests that being able to accommodate major prey changes, durable relationships among key individuals, and heavy reliance on altruism and other sophisticated cooperation are among the most important reasons why Toklat still persists and Savage River lasted at least seventeen years. Although both groups benefited from good overall prey resources, there were differences in the way these resources were distributed between their territories, and major seasonal and long-term prey changes. Both groups seemed to adapt primarily through social adjustments. Adapting efficiently to food constraints is obviously vital for any society's long-term success and in this case is consistent with other evidence that the eastern Denali wolves conserve their prey as “prudent predators.”

Durable relationships characterized both groups, especially their primary reproductive bonds. For example, over a span of thirty-three years, there were only six Toklat alpha (primary breeding) females, one of which retained the position for fourteen years until she died naturally. The behavior of three subsequent Toklat alpha and beta pairs in their prime, and of the surviving mates after human-caused breakups, leaves little doubt that these and other relationships would have lasted much longer under natural, undisturbed conditions. In the Savage River family, the same two males occupied the alpha and beta positions and maintained an efficient division of leadership for at least seven years.

Field notes #134

June 2006

7:25—8 am (Stampede II) Wolf sleeping out in front of den with one black pup. Wolf returned from a hunt, very distended belly obviously from eating. She arrives at 7:35 am going straight to den in trees along bank. Initially she does not see #930 and black pup. Four pups 200 feet out on bar. But a few minutes later she comes out of trees, followed by two tan pups toward the others. The black pup sees her and comes to meet. #930 remains flaked out, not responding in the slightest. The four pups get her to regurgitate again, probably several times. Later the black pup and one tan nurse briefly while she is lying down, though she is not accommodating them much—doesn't seem to want to nurse.

2:30 pm—All seven pups (5 black and 2 tan) appear in the open and romp and play. Then 830, who had been resting ~ 100 yds away, comes to them. They mob her, food begging. She does not regurgitate. Several times 1–2 pups try to nurse and each time she reprimands them by snapping at them—definitely is not nursing any longer. She then lies down and allows them to climb all over her, etc. Lots of this and pup-pup play.

3:30 pm—830 howls & looks to the S side of bar ~200 ft. away. Apparently that is where 429 is resting. Then the pups look that way. 429 appears, & comes to pups & 830—pups mob him—he snaps at them but they persist.

Strong pair bonds do not necessarily preclude polygyny (“monogamy” can be a risky term). I directly observed one instance of cooperative polygyny in Toklat, in 2002, between the new alpha male, his primary mate, and her mother. This seemed to have little if any effect on his relationship with the younger female, which remained exceptionally close until she was trapped (and he was eventually shot) three years later. As described in chapter 2, for almost two months the male continued returning almost obsessively to the site where she was trapped, even right after mating with another female.

I suspected other polygynous matings with little effect on the primary bond, especially in the Toklat family, with its relatively high frequency of multiple simultaneous litters (in thirteen of the thirty-eight years I could determine the number of litters); in 1990 there were at least three and probably four Toklat litters. Savage River produced multiple litters in only one of the twelve years I could determine the number of litters. In that case, I observed a young adult male making intense sexual advances to a young adult female during the mating period in March, after the older alpha pair had completed its courtship and mating activities.

Nonbreeders, especially young adult females, routinely help breeders and in the process often enhance their own potential future reproductive success (e.g., by practicing for motherhood or delaying dispersal until there are better opportunities elsewhere). However, much of the helping I observed in Toklat and Savage River also appeared to be altruistic. Helpers included high-ranking, experienced adult males and females who deferred breeding even though they almost certainly could have dispersed from the group, found mates, and succeeded elsewhere. It was commonplace even for breeders to assist other breeders of the group, including by nursing and otherwise provisioning and protecting the young interchangeably. As described in chapter 3, I observed cooperative nursing by nonbreeding, pseudopregnant females as well. Young Toklat and Savage River wolves remained dependent beyond the summer homesite period for as long as three winters while developing full hunting proficiency. Not surprisingly, much of the helping and related behavior that I observed, such as the division of leadership between the Savage River alpha and beta males, was prominently on display year-around.

Some form of reciprocity apparently also operated. The two adult males from two hundred miles away that took over the Toklat family two months after the established Toklat alpha male was killed, and helped raise the dead male's four unrelated newborn pups, did so with what appeared to be the same dedicated behavior, including displays of affection, as the mother and older siblings. Yearling helpers play an important role in caring for new pups; thus there was a potential genetic payoff for one of the new males (the new alpha) the next breeding season when he produced his own litter.

There were also high levels of cooperation during hunting activities, as described in chapter 7. Among the Toklat and Savage River cooperative hunting tactics I have observed:

• Coordinated setup of attacks on caribou, sheep, and moose from up to several miles away and several directions, including by driving them into difficult escape terrain.

• Storming and then closely circling a moose to test it.

• Chasing sheep, caribou, and moose to one or more wolves waiting in ambush.

• Ambushing moose or caribou at a mineral lick.

• Decoying caribou while other wolves stalk from behind or on a flank.

• Killing a moose by holding its nose and anchoring the dangerous front hooves while other wolves attack from the rear and elsewhere.

Perhaps the ultimate cooperation is the close inbreeding that Toklat, Savage River, and other wolves seem able to do successfully. For example, six Toklat wolves, all almost certainly from the 2003–2004 litters, produced eight pups in 2005 and six in 2006, with high survival rates in both cases. The dominant pair of the six also produced at least five pups in 2007 and six in 2008. There was high survival of the 2007 pups through at least eight months of age, but the snaring losses in February make it impossible to determine any level of natural survival thereafter. The Savage River alpha male, whose mate was shot in 1968, almost certainly mated with two daughters from the 1968 litter in 1970–1973 (with one in 1970–1971 until she disappeared, then with the other, who was subordinate to the first). These four primary matings produced twenty-seven pups, including a litter of nine in 1970. I observed intense sexual activity between two of the 1970 pups in 1972. Two months later a young female produced a litter of at least four pups that was raised in the group together with the primary litter of five.

Inbreeding has negative consequences for many species. However, highly social species may avoid or offset these problems in unanticipated ways. Well-established wolf social systems are relatively closed to newcomers, and, more important, newcomer breeding; this may facilitate purging of genetic loads (deleterious recessive genes). Advantages accruing from sophisticated cooperation among close kin could also offset disadvantages from any losses of phenotypic variation or the effects of inbreeding depression. Recent research on a small Scandinavian wolf population indicates that inbreeding, at least to the level of sibling matings, does not necessarily lead to a major loss of genetic variation in the first place, least of all among the breeders.

Understanding the roots of cooperative behavior, including our own behavior, is among the most important endeavors in all of scientific inquiry. To be able to observe the forgoing and other details of behavior for the same groups of wolves in the wild for decades presents one of the rarest and most direct opportunities for new insights into these roots. Given the likelihood that wolf social organization provides an excellent model for early human societies (perhaps even better than nonhuman primates), continuing to allow the Toklat and other Denali wolves to be trapped and shot is especially foolhardy.

Family Lineages and Genetic Dilution

Wolves typically live in social groups consisting of breeding adults, their offspring from multiple years, and siblings. Simply put, they live in “families,” most commonly extended families, in both biological and commonsense interpretations of the term. “Family” is not human-specific. Along with related terms such as “mother,” “father,” “daughter,” “sister,” “brother,” and “uncle,” it has long seen routine use in the world's leading scientific journals (e.g., Science, Nature, Conservation Biology) in papers about aspects of social organization in nonhuman species.

The use of the term “family” with regard to wolves is sometimes belittled in Alaska. However, any biologist who belittles the use of this term for wolves or other species reveals his or her ignorance of the scientific literature and knowledge about one of the most active areas in all of science—sociobiology—and may also be betraying his own underlying social or political agenda. The term “pack” is unscientific and misleading. Not only does it fail to convey the fascinating essence of what sets wolf social organization apart from the organization of many other species, but it connotes almost the opposite. It is used by many biologists and others for little reason other than that many use it.

Tweet

July 17, 2009

No see attack goshawk or jump any moose or bears on hike out tonite, in rain. Worried about lightning strikes while crossing the subalpine.

By “family lineage” I refer to the continuity arising from combined learning-based and genetic transfer of information across generations of a family. A family's history consists of social as well as genetic continuity. Observations of the Toklat wolves since 1966 indicate both kinds of continuity and confirm they are a single, seventy-year-old or older family lineage rather than two or more consecutively recolonizing families.

The close radio-telemetry contact that has been maintained with these wolves since 1987 should not leave any doubt as to continuity from both standpoints over the last twenty-one years. The overlapping “timelines” of at least a dozen wolves that I (and others) could identify during the previous twenty-one years, including two wolves that were subsequently radio-collared in 1987 and 1991 as the primary male and female breeders, provide one indication that a single family lineage spans both periods. Overlapping spatial and behavioral traditions provide another. For example, not only did wolves continue to use the same homesites during both periods, they also varied their winter-summer occupancy among certain sites in the same ways. In the most striking example, adults repeatedly moved pups between two major denning complexes during both periods, using the same fourteen-mile route each time.

Some biologists question my reference to Toklat as a continuing family lineage because, they argue, the original genes would be so “diluted” after such a long period of time. First, this overlooks the importance of social continuity. Second, for what social group, of any species, do the original genes not become diluted? There may be much less dilution in groups like Toklat and Savage River than in most human families, given that the wolves seem able to inbreed and newcomers become breeders less often.

To use an example from our own species, generations of the McDonald family have maintained the same Nebraska farmstead for more than 150 years. Some offspring have dispersed to distant areas, and some have started new farms nearby. But together with marital and adopted newcomers, other offspring remain on the farm and define a core family lineage. They have progressively diluted old McDonald's (and Mrs. McDonald's) genes, but there is also social continuity. The original (renovated) house and barns that old McDonald built are still home. They celebrate the harvest with remembrances of the old man and the farm's trials and tribulations. Their children still gather mushrooms in the woodlot next to the south forty. Most of the original farmstead remains in production with much the same schedule of crop rotations, though some inferior acreage has been sold on one side and productive neighboring acreage annexed on another.

Field notes #133

June 2006

5:25—I hear one 2–3 sec howl-moan and then a 5 sec mini chorus of howls from several wolves and even some pups—coming from atop bluff near or even a bit N of gulley.

5:39—I howl 3 times

5:44—a chorus of howl of at least 4–5 adult wolves answers—2–3 rounds for about 1 min.

Distinct short-lived and persistent human farm family lineages can be identified in mosaics across the landscape, the latter especially where soil and water conditions are the best. And for the oldest of these we recognize special cultural, aesthetic, biological, and other values, just as we should recognize the enormous values of an old nonhuman family lineage such as the Toklat wolves of Denali National Park.

Persistent Effects of Human-Caused Deaths

As noted in chapters 12 and 13, although wolf numbers often rebound from public hunting, trapping, and heavier agency killing, at least in the short term, the repercussions are distinct and long-lasting. There are lost traditions, fragmentation, and continued mortality long after direct killings. Effects can be felt for generations.

The Toklat lineage and the effects of human-caused deaths, described in chapter 2, provide a compelling example—especially the repercussions of the alpha male's death during radio-collaring by the National Park Service in March 2001. Prior to his death, the alpha male and his mate were the core of the Toklat family's social structure. Six months after his death, his last litter of four pups disappeared, most likely because of another radio-collaring effort.

Soon after, two adult males joined the group and immediately began caring for the new pups as if they were their own. At first, the alpha female was accepting of them during the annual round of courtship and mating. However, the dominant newcomer and the alpha female's oldest daughter ended up as the primary mating pair, and the alpha female began spending most of her time alone. Sometimes she was joined for short periods by one or two of her older offspring but never with either of the newcomer males. There was no obvious indication of hostility by any others toward her. It seemed that the separation was her choice. At one point she was joined by a male who lived thirty miles west, after he and his mate had become separated during a skirmish with other wolves. He soon left, however, eventually relocating his own mate and returning with her to their home territory.

When it came time for pups to be born, the Toklat daughter, with five other adults in close attendance, settled into the same established den that Toklat had occupied the previous three summers. The alpha female, still primarily on her own, occupied another den ten miles away, in the area where she and her dead mate had produced their first litter. By this time, her lower hunting success as a loner was taking a toll. She produced only two pups, both of which died before emerging from the den. Two months later, still mostly on her own, she finally starved to death, so weak she couldn't stand. Such is the longer-term impact of hunting/trapping kills of certain individuals in a wolf family.

It was a sad ending for this small but smart, resourceful female still in her prime, one of my all-time favorite wolves. She and her dead mate, who likewise was in his prime, were one of the closest, most efficient pair bonds I have known. In retrospect, maybe it shouldn't be much of a surprise that she didn't pair again, despite at least two apparent opportunities, and ended up the odd female out in her own family.

Of all the arguments considered in how to manage wildlife, perhaps the most important has to do with diversity—the variety of life about us. For full expression of its marvelous potentials, the human mind needs to grow in as varied an atmosphere as possible. Variety of all forms—not only biological, but cultural and social—is needed to stimulate our thinking and to sharpen our powers of imagination; it freshens our ability to find new solutions to old problems and leads to higher levels of creativity. Variety nurtures the mind and the spirit and is as vital to our well-being as the food we eat. In short, it helps to make us more human.

But we are unknowingly destroying the very treasure on which we thrive and, in fact, depend. A sameness results with a numbing of the spirit, and we gradually lose our ability to marvel. The battle to protect wolves or a wild caribou herd, alligators or whales, or another tract of wilderness isn't a plot to lock wilderness and wildlife away. This battle really represents an attempt to ensure that we do not neglect some of our most basic nonmaterial needs. It is nothing less than a matter of helping ourselves toward full achievement of the human promise.

Snapshot: Last Phone Call

Barbara Brease

The last phone call I had with Gordon, we talked about the politics of wolf hunting—the liberal hunting across the state, as well as what was happening in the park. It was so much bigger than simply a mandate from Alaska's governor; it was coming from other organizations and people outside Alaska.

On that last phone call, I told him that I understood what he'd been saying, why killing wolves wasn't effective for increasing prey populations. “I know you understand,” he said. And after all those years of our conversations, I'm glad he said that at the very end, “you understand.”

I asked him if he'd work with students to share his information in case something happened to him, and he said, “Nothing's gonna happen to me; I've got too much work to do.” And that was a week before he died.

The day he died was so strange. Before we even knew he was missing, we had all these animals hanging around. A fox started screaming the night before. She screamed that afternoon and the following night. It was a very unusual, high-pitched screaming that we had never heard before. That day, there were ravens on our roof, magpies on our roof, a gray jay tapping on the window—very unusual stuff, all happening at once.

Then my friend Susan called me. She and her husband were hiking up the ridge from their cabin near Pinto Creek. They were up above a cloud layer, so clouds obscured the view below, but they could hear a plane circling. Then it just stopped. And the wolves started howling, she couldn't believe how long the wolves howled. She'd been going out there for twenty-five years and had never heard a howling like that.

They didn't even think about it being a plane crash, but the next day, after we found out Gordon was missing, her husband called the rangers and helped them narrow their search.

Significant Findings of Gordon Haber's Wolf Research

Social Attributes

• Wolves are perhaps the most social of all nonhuman vertebrates. Wolf family social ties are unsurpassed, even among humans. Wolves will go to tremendous effort to remain with their families (relocated wolves have traveled hundreds of miles to return to their families).

• Each individual wolf has its own personality, and their ability to express emotions becomes obvious after one watches the same individuals for even a short time.

• Wolves are monogamous, and their reproductive bonds are at the heart of wolf social organization.

• As they become finely tuned to their territories, each wolf family group will develop its own unique adaptive behaviors and traditions; taken together, these can be considered a culture.

• Wolf social organization and success are based on two evolutionary strategies that are rare among vertebrates: (1) cooperative breeding/rearing—nonbreeders altruistically attend the breeding pair, as well as cooperatively nurse, babysit, teach, guard, and raise pups; and (2) cooperative hunting—adults cooperate in stalking and killing prey.

• Wolf groups do not often accept unfamiliar wolves trespassing into their territory but will adopt newcomers at times, especially if the group has been fragmented and reduced by human exploitation.

• Deaths from intergroup fighting do occur but appear to constitute only 10 to 20 percent of a family group's total natural (non-human-caused) winter losses from death and dispersal.

• Wolves howl to communicate with other group members, to locate one another, to announce their return from a hunt, when they or other members of the group are in pain or distress (e.g., caught in a trap), to energize the group after a rest, as a form of socializing that helps to maintain important bonds, to express a range of emotions, to advertise their territorial boundaries, and simply for the joy of howling.

• Play is a very important form of maintaining social bonds (in addition to chorus howling, etc.), and wolves usually play at least every thirty minutes.

• Wolves cross large rivers by reading the currents to project their own float path and then let the currents take them diagonally across with minimal effort.

• Ravens follow wolves to scavenge on the remains of their kills and often taunt young wolves into chasing them [chapter 9].

• Wolves try to help other family members caught in traps or snares and have been observed returning to sites of trapping deaths for weeks after losing a family member [chapter 6].

• Behavior that is fearless and curious of humans (such as along the Denali National Park road) is nonthreatening and natural for wild wolves—not evidence of “habituation.” It is the fearfulness they learn from human persecution that is not natural [chapter 10].

• The Toklat family group in Denali National Park is at least forty-three years old, and most likely over seventy years old. This ranks the Toklat wolves as one of the two oldest-known, longest-studied large mammal social groups in the wild [chapters 1, 14].

• Individual wolves are important, and total numbers in an area say little about the health and integrity of wolf populations. Loss of significant individuals, such as alpha adults or helper females, from trapping or hunting can lead to long-term effects in wolf family groups, causing loss of hunting and socializing traditions, loss of dependent pups, dispersals, and, ultimately, loss of the group [chapter 11].

Raising Pups

• Wolf dens are an elaborate, deep, honeycombed series of burrows and entrances that are used year after year. All members of the group are involved in preparing the dens. They include play areas for the pups, rest areas and lookouts for adults only, socializing areas for hunting departures and arrivals, and a maze of interconnecting trails, spread over as much as fifty acres [chapter 3].

• During intervening periods most wolf dens are also used by other animals, including foxes, ground squirrels, porcupines, and wolverines. Burrows at some sites were probably excavated originally by ground squirrels and were later enlarged by foxes, then wolves [chapter 9].

• Many dens in Denali National Park may have been used for thousands of years or longer. Archaeological evidence indicates that at least three ancient wolf den sites in Denali were also shared with humans from three thousand to ten thousand years ago [chapter 3].

• Raising new pups at a den is social glue for wolves, without which individuals seem more likely to split apart and disperse at a time of the year when some young adults are already predisposed to disperse [chapter 3].

• Yearlings develop some of the closest bonds with the new pups, and their close care of the young pups is one of the manifestations of the wolves' sophisticated cooperative breeding behavior, in this case a form of “helping” that also amounts to a division of labor [chapters 3, 4].

• Adult wolves engage in deliberate teaching, particularly of two- to three-month-old pups. Older wolves take them on short “puppy walks” to better acquaint the pups with the world outside the natal den [chapter 4].

• Loss of significant adults (and teachers) can cause groups to lose unique hunting abilities, the ability to hunt certain prey at all, the ability to find winter kill, and the ability to maintain their territory [chapter 8].

• In some wolf family groups, such as the Toklats, that rely heavily on the most challenging prey like moose and sheep, pups require a two- to three-year period to learn from older, more experienced wolves. If they are denied this, by loss of the adults, then their very survival is at stake. Much of this learning amounts to traditions that are refined over time, behavior that helps adapt the group to the specific resources and other conditions of its area [chapter 4].

• Pups progress through four fairly distinct phases in learning how to hunt: (1) hesitation and fear for the first few months after homesites are abandoned in the fall; (2) exuberant (and ineffective) overreaction to potential prey in midwinter; (3) effective participation, with adult guidance, at about one year old; and (4) effective hunting at two to three years old [chapter 4].

• This prolonged period of dependency of pups on the adults, about 25 percent of their total life span, provides the means by which knowledge can be passed from one generation to another. This is a general characteristic of intelligent animal societies, including our own. And as with the young in many primitive human societies, young wolves have the added advantage of being raised in an extended family, where the presence of many adults caring for them—not just one or two parents—exposes them to the broadest possible opportunity for learning [chapters 3, 4].

Hunting

• Wolves can spot prey from at least eight miles away, anticipate and intercept potential prey escape paths, and drive prey into difficult escape terrain for capture [chapter 7].

• Wolves are not indiscriminate killers but are deliberate and careful about which animals to pursue. For scavenged winter carcasses, they eat parts as they thaw and may have to wait for thawing before consuming it all, if they are not interrupted by humans [chapter 7].

• Wolves are able to distinguish subtle differences between the fittest potential prey and those that may not be so fit. As a result, the weakest tend to be culled from the population first. Only about 5 percent of wintertime wolf-moose encounters in Denali resulted in an attempt to kill the moose, but most kill attempts were successful [chapter 7].

• Wolves have been observed to encircle a moose and hold a standoff for up to seven days, until the moose collapses in exhaustion [chapter 7].

• Scavenging of winter-killed ungulates is a primary source of food for wolves. Denali wolves scavenged, rather than killed, about three-quarters of the moose they ate and about half of all the caribou and sheep they ate. Scavenging can contribute up to 85 percent of wolf diet in harsh winters with high winter-kill. Wolves commonly dig to frozen carcasses buried under the snow, as deep as ten feet or more, into hard-packed drifts and avalanches [chapters 7, 8].

• Wolves can communicate to other group members the location of a prey kill site, allowing other wolves to find it, even when it is as far as eight miles away [chapter 4].

• While resting at the den, adults will often ignore prey that wander through the area [chapter 5].

• Wolf groups have been observed consuming a twelve-hundred-pound moose within forty-five minutes and a two-hundred-pound Dall sheep ram within twelve minutes [chapter 7].

• Wolves develop unique hunting traditions that fit their territories and aren't used by any other wolf groups. When a family group is lost, their unique hunting traditions are often lost as well [chapter 7].

Humans Killing Wolves

• For wolves, shooting and trapping causes significant impacts—lasting long after numbers have recovered—on wolf family social structure, behavior, hunting patterns, distribution, territories, genetic variations, and mortality patterns of survivors and recolonizers [chapters 10, 11].

• While natural mortality (e.g., winter, starvation) is proportionately greater in pups and yearlings, hunting and trapping takes proportionately more adults, and alpha adults, as these individuals often lead hunts and forays. Thus, human-induced mortality has a greater negative impact on wolf families than natural mortality [chapter 11].

• Killing wolves doesn't usually reduce overall predation on ungulate populations. Other predators like bears fill the vacant niche, and wolf reproduction increases after alpha adults are lost. If a family group is fragmented due to hunting/trapping losses of alpha adults, other pairs are able to get away with mating, thus resulting in more, not fewer, wolf pups overall. This means that the hunting, trapping, and aerial killings by which humans have tried to reduce wolf numbers are instead most likely to have the opposite effect: to increase them [chapter 12].

• Wolves compete with brown bears for prey (such as moose calves in spring), harass bears away from moose calving areas, and steal carcasses of animals the bears have killed. Thus, a reduction in wolves in such areas will not necessarily lead to a reduction in overall predation of ungulates but might actually increase predation [chapter 9].

• Other than relatively light and sporadic subsistence use in areas where it is a traditional practice, it is clearly best to not allow any harvests of natural wolf populations [chapter 12].

EPILOGUE

FROM BAD TO WORSE: AN UPDATE ON HABER'S WOLVES

SINCE GORDON HABER'S DEATH, INFORMATION ABOUT Denali's wolves has become limited. No other biologist is out in the field with any regularity to observe and report on the wolves' status. What little we know is that things have seriously deteriorated for both Denali's and Alaska's wild wolves. The state has implemented the largest de facto predator control Alaska's wolves have ever endured, and Denali's wolf population has plummeted. Meanwhile, wildlife managers in Alaska and elsewhere largely ignore Haber's findings and manage simply by numbers, even though events keep proving him correct. Haber, said Joel Bennett, would be outraged.

After Toklat's series of losses in the early 2000s, they contracted their territory, changed their hunting behaviors and den sites, and became less visible to park visitors. Toklat West, Toklat family members who split off and formed their own group, shifted into areas of the former Toklat territory.[34] They began using two dens—including the East Fork, the den Adolph Murie observed—that are among the oldest in the park and closest to the road corridor. With these changes, Toklat West became the most-viewed group of wolves in Denali National Park.

Then in April 2012, one of the two trappers who target Denali wolves shot one of his own horses, hauled it near the boundary of Denali National Park, and laid a minefield of snares around its body—the kind of saturation snaring that Haber had spoken out against twenty-five years earlier. Days later, the NPS learned the trapper's snares had killed two wolves, one of them a collared female from Toklat West. This was the female, according to the NPS, who was seen the previous summer nursing pups in the East Fork natal den. Killed after the mating season but before the pupping season, she was considered the breeding female of the most-viewed wolf family group in the park, and so, one of the most viewed in the world.

By killing this breeding female, this trapper most likely also killed Toklat West's pups for the year. The remaining Toklat West wolves, though briefly seen at the East Fork dens in May, were not seen with pups that summer. With no ties to a den, and no concerted effort at raising pups—what Haber called the group's social glue—this group abandoned its den and fragmented. According to the NPS fall 2012 count, several wolves have left the group and other members were seen very rarely. When they were, they were most often seen as single wolves rather than in a cohesive family group. From this one trapping death, the Toklat West family group has shrunk from a highly cooperative and integrated family group of fifteen wolves to only five wolves.

This is precisely the scenario Gordon Haber repeatedly warned would happen to Denali's wolves when not protected by a buffer in the Wolf Townships, or Stampede, area. It's the scenario his research shows will result with any human persecution of wolves, whether trapping, hunting, or predator control: alpha members are more likely to be taken, thus fragmenting and disintegrating the entire family group.

Park Service biologists agree that the integrity of Toklat West, and the very future of this group, is now in doubt. Whatever the fate of this family group, it's clear that park visitors now have much less chance of seeing any wolves. In fact, wolf-viewing success for the four hundred thousand people who visit Denali each summer has decreased by more than 70 percent in just three years—since the Board of Game abolished the protective buffer in March 2010.

News from the Toklat group, though sparse, doesn't bode well either. They have shifted their territory even farther to the northeast, and were seen in midsummer 2012 taking their pups over Primrose Ridge out of the park and toward the Wolf Townships. The other eastern park group, called Nenana River, dens within ten miles of the park road but is more elusive and rarely seen. They spend much more time on the edges of the park in the former buffer areas; one of their pups was killed in the summer of 2012 by a train near the park entrance.

These wolves were Gordon Haber's research subjects, generations of wolves he'd observed for more than forty years. When his plane went down in October 2009, it wasn't just an experienced, world-renowned wolf biologist and advocate who was lost. Also lost was everything he would have known about the Toklat West wolves, about the rest of Denali's wolf groups, and about the wolves of Alaska. In short, we lost our best source of information on Alaska's wolves.

Simplistic Population Management

Haber was so certain of the significance of family groups to the essential nature of wolves that he rarely photographed a single wolf. As he wrote, “Wolves are fascinating as individuals, but what I find unique is the beautiful, interesting, and advanced social structure of an intact group. Fragmentation of a wolf group through hunting disrupts the animals' most prominent characteristic.” He knew better than anyone that a lone wolf is a dead wolf—a fact painfully underscored by the 2002 starvation death of what he once called his favorite wolf, the Toklat alpha female.

Yet Alaska's wolves continue to be managed without consideration of family group structure and traditions, or of the significance of particular individual wolves; instead, they're managed by population numbers alone. The State of Alaska's Board of Game and Department of Fish and Game claim there is no reason to change the level of hunting, trapping, and predator control as long as the overall population of wolves in any given game management unit (GMU) is at an acceptable level. To Alaska's wildlife managers, the loss of the Toklat West female wolf amounts to a “take” of one in GMU 20, a thirty-five-thousand square mile area about the size of the state of Maine. According to the state's standards, the wolf population of GMU 20 would still be “healthy” even if wolves disappeared entirely from all 9,375 square miles of Denali National Park and Preserve. What's more, as Haber pointed out, even the state's population numbers for wolves are seriously flawed. Not only are wolves managed simply by the numbers, but there are far fewer wolves than the state claims.

Wolf population monitoring is primarily all the National Park Service is doing as well, said NPS biologist Dr. Tom Meier. Only one master's student research project currently focuses on wolves. This project uses collar data from six members of three family groups; with this data they are investigating whether the removal of the Wolf Township and Nenana Canyon Closed Areas (the protective buffer) has affected visitors' wolf-viewing success. The decline after the effects from the recently trapped female demonstrates, said Meier, that it has.

Since 1986, the NPS has routinely monitored wolf populations as one of eighteen vital signs of overall ecosystem health in Denali National Park. To accomplish this, NPS conducts biannual aerial surveys and radio-tracks collared wolves once or twice per month. No researchers regularly hike to den-viewing areas to observe active dens. The knowledge that the dead Toklat West female was nursing pups was a one-time observation by a pilot during an NPS spring survey flight.

Now, all we know are numbers, and those aren't looking good. From 2007 to 2010, the Denali wolf population dropped from 147 to 84 wolves. As many as 19 wolves from five family groups were trapped and hunted in 2007 alone. Two years later, in the fall of 2012, the population plummeted to 54 wolves, a 63 percent decline since 2007 and the lowest it's been in twenty-five years. And, because the fall count is usually higher with the new litters of pups, many fear that the spring 2013 count will drop below that quarter-century low.

According to NPS biologists, prey populations are stable or growing, so food supply isn't an issue; instead, hunting and trapping, as well as an expanded predator control program in surrounding areas, are likely causes. Meier speculated that the state's predator control program has left such a vacuum around the edges of the park that Denali's wolves may be broadening their territories beyond park boundaries to fill this vacuum, becoming even more vulnerable to trapping and hunting. Clearly, this ecosystem vital sign of Denali's wolves is not in good shape. (See Plate 25.)

Fewer Wolves, More Wolf Killing

Since Haber's death, the Denali National Park buffer situation has also deteriorated. At the 2010 Board of Game meeting, several proposals were submitted to create a complete protective buffer in the Wolf Townships. Many of these proposals were inspired by and based on Haber's work, which showed that the established buffer was incomplete. For example, in the winter of 2007–2008, at least twelve and as many as nineteen Denali wolves from five family groups were trapped and shot in a small area just east of the buffer. This significant bite out of the park's wolf population marked the beginning of the populations' dramatic decline.

As testimony, one group presented a stack of Haber's research publications more than two feet high. But, recalled Rick Steiner, the board expressed no interest in what Haber's forty-plus years of research showed about the importance of the protective buffer. Even the National Park Service, alarmed by the drop in population and viewing success, proposed expanding the existing buffer zone for the first time ever. However, the Board of Game not only voted down every single buffer expansion proposal, they went further: they abolished the existing buffer and placed an eight-year moratorium on considering future buffer proposals.

As of this writing, no protective buffer of any kind exists, and the effects are increasingly visible. The Toklat West female was trapped within the abolished buffer. And, according to preliminary data from the NPS viewability research project, viewing success of Denali wolves since removal of the buffer has declined by more than 70 percent: from 45 percent in 2010, to 21 percent in 2011, to just 12 percent in 2012. (See Plate 26.)

Meanwhile, Alaska's predator control program continues to expand.[35] Alaska's Board of Game has initiated state-sponsored wolf killing in more than 20 percent of Alaska's available land. These programs cover over seventy-six thousand square miles; with four new programs approved, including two on the Kenai Peninsula, the area will grow by at least a third. They have considered programs to kill a significant number of the rare Alexander Archipelago wolf, found only in old-growth forests of southeastern Alaska—the same wolves who, having lost much of their former habitat to clear-cut logging, are being considered for threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. The Board of Game is even attempting to spread predator control into Alaska's national parks and wildlife refuges.

The Board of Game, comprised entirely of hunters and trappers, has gone so far as to approve methods that haven't been legal since before statehood. In addition to shooting wolves from the air, a practice outlawed in the 1960s, state-paid wolf hunters can also gas wolf pups in their dens. This practice was approved after the uproar over the shooting deaths of pups on the Alaska Peninsula.[36] Rather than a bullet to the head, says Steiner, pups are gassed to death before ever leaving their natal dens.

Pups face a more established threat, too. Hunting seasons now run as late as June and start as early as August, even though late summer wolf hides, noted Haber, are virtually worthless. Instead, as Haber revealed, these liberalized seasons are clearly the state's hidden predator control—the most extensive Alaska's wolves have ever faced. These long seasons also mean hunters can kill pregnant females in April, adult wolves whose newborn pups are still in the den in June, and adults whose pups are still entirely dependent on them in late summer—all of which effectively kills the pups, a loss that goes unreported in state statistics.

Since the current regime of predator control began in 2003, hundreds of private pilots gunning from the air have killed more than fifteen hundred wolves. Trapping and hunting have also killed more than one thousand wolves in these same areas. Across the state of Alaska, approximately seventeen hundred wolves are reported killed every year. This estimate is likely low for three reasons. First, it only includes kills reported through the hide sealing process, in which an authorized ADF&G representative places a seal on an animal hide; most villages traditionally don't seal wolf pelts, so these kills are not reported. Second, there are a substantial number of wolves killed illegally, and therefore unreported, across the state. Third, the number of pups that die because the adults are killed is entirely unreported.

Beyond Alaska

Throughout their range, wolves continue to be the target of persecution. In Canada, the Alberta tar sands development has destroyed thousands of acres of boreal wildlife habitat, causing caribou populations to decline from habitat loss. To prop up caribou numbers for hunters, the Canadian government's response is to kill wolves by the thousands, through aerial shooting and poisoning.

In the western United States, after wolves were taken off the endangered species list in 2009, many of Haber's concerns about state wolf management have been realized. Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming quickly initiated liberal wolf hunting. More than five hundred wolves—more than 25 percent of the reintroduced population—have been killed since delisting. Within the first few weeks of Montana's first modern wolf hunt, the alpha pair and other adult members of the Cottonwood family group were shot. The loss of these wolves ended a long-term research study of one of Yellowstone National Park's most important and most often viewed wolf groups.

While some still reflexively consider the only good wolf a dead wolf, many people are delighted and fascinated by wolves reclaiming old territory. Wolves from a growing family group in northeastern Oregon were radio-collared, and four of these young wolves dispersed. Their dispersal journeys were followed online by thousands of people. One of the wolves was quickly killed when she crossed into Idaho; two more have stayed in Oregon; but the fourth, OR7, found his way through a crazy quilt of public lands into California: the first wild wolf in that state in more than ninety years. As he wanders in and out of Oregon and California, most likely searching for a mate, he has become world-famous.

What would Haber say about all this? The delisting, he said, was a terrible mistake, since uncontrolled hunting and trapping fragments wolf groups and destroys the very essence of wolf society. He would remind us that it's not just wolf numbers that count in determining the threatened status of a species. It's also their genetic diversity and functional characteristics, their ability to become tuned to their specific ecosystem over time, the traditions and the culture that they can develop—if we allow it.

Signs of Change

While Haber's conclusions may still fall on deaf ears in Alaska and in much of the western United States, elsewhere they may be taking hold. A growing number of scientific publications and books corroborate Haber's essential conclusions about the importance of a healthy predator population to an ecosystem. These include The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity by Cristina Eisenberg and Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg. Particularly important is Wolves of the Yukon, in which biologist Bob Hayes concludes—after eighteen years of research—that wolf control simply does not work.

In the same month in 2012 that the Toklat West female and her family member were killed at the edges of Denali National Park, two dead wolves were found in a dumpster in Tofino, British Columbia. At a town informational meeting, a wolf biologist told the crowd that killing wolves was counterproductive. He said splintering the group by killing significant members could result in even more wolf-human conflicts as remaining younger wolves with insufficient hunting skills may be drawn to human communities in search of food. He could have been quoting Gordon Haber. It seems, like many of history's most famous dissenters, Haber's minority perspective may yet unfreeze old thinking patterns.

_________________

34 The NPS name for Toklat is East Fork; their name for Toklat West is Grant Creek.

35 For more detail on Alaska's present-day predator control programs, see Van Ballenberghe, “Intensive Management—or Mismanagement?”

36 See chapter 12.

REFERENCES

Dr. Gordon Haber's papers are available through his blog (www.alaskawolves.org) and at the Alaska Resources Library and Information Service (ARLIS) in Anchorage, Alaska, where all his research materials, including photographs and field notebooks, are archived.

Haber, G. C. 1973. “Eight Years of Wolf Research at McKinley Park, Part I: The Social Life of Wolves.” Alaska (April):7–9, 52–57.

1973. “Eight Years of Wolf Research at McKinley Park, Part II: Wolves, the Animals They Eat, and Man.” Alaska (May):43–45, 50–56.

1974. “Wolves and the Endangered Species Concept: A Different View.” Symposium on Endangered and Threatened Species of North America, Washington, DC.

1977. “Socio-Ecological Dynamics of Wolves and Prey in a Subarctic Ecosystem.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Special report, 1978, Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission for Alaska, Anchorage.

1980. “The Balancing Act of Moose and Wolves.” Natural History 89 (10)38–51.

1987. “Exploitation of Wolf-Moose Systems: Lessons from Interior Alaska.” Anchorage: The Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

1988. “Wildlife Management in Northern British Columbia: Ketchika-Muskwa Wolf Control and Related Issues.” Tenino, WA: Wolf Haven International.

1992. “Wildlife Management in Alaska: Southcentral-Interior Wolf Control and Related Issues.” Tenino, WA: Wolf Haven International.

1993. “Wolves and Wolf-Prey-Human Interactions, Interior and Southcentral Alaska.” Research Report 1. Anchorage: The Alaska Wildlife Alliance; Darien, CT: Friends of Animals; Tenino, WA: Wolf Haven International.

1996. “Biological, Conservation, and Ethical Implications of Exploiting and Controlling Wolves.” Conservation Biology 10:1068–81. www.alaskawolves.org.

1997. “Caribou and Wolves in the Fortymile Region of Alaska. A Review of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Management Plan. Part I: Is There a Fortymile Caribou Problem?” Anchorage: The Alaska Wildlife Alliance; Darien, CT: Friends of Animals; Kent, WA: Conservation Society For Wolves and Whales.

1999. “A Selective View of Wolf Ecology.” Conservation Biology 13:460–61. www.alaskawolves.org.

1999. “Wolf Control in the Fortymile Region of Alaska: A Frightful Blueprint For Beginning the Next Millennium?” ActionLine (Spring):18–21.

1999. “Biological Problems with Fortymile Wolf Control.” www.alaskawolves.org.

1999. “The Toklat Wolves: An Enduring Family Lineage in Peril.” ActionLine (Summer):31–35.

2000. “Moose Hunting and Wolf Control in GMU 19D East, Interior Alaska. Review.” Report available from Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Juneau. www.alaskawolves.org.

2000. “Wolf Family Lineages and Wolf-Prey Systems in the Denali Region of Alaska.” Society for Conservation Biology Annual Conference, Missoula, Montana, June.

2000. “Is the Leader of the Pack Astray?” ActionLine (Fall):22–24.

2001. “Moose Abundance and Moose Hunting in the McGrath Region, Interior Alaska.” Review. www.alaskawolves.org.

2002. “Toklat, Margaret, and Sanctuary: The Wolves of Eastern Denali. Biological Year 2001–02 Responses to Disruption.” Research report, July. Denali National Park Resource Library. www.alaskawolves.org.

2002. “Reexamination of 2001 Wolf Radio-Collaring Deaths in Denali National Park.” Technical review. www.alaskawolves.org.

2002. “Delineating a Protective Buffer Zone for Eastern Denali Wolves.” www.alaskawolves.org.

2003. “New Buffer Zone Provides Only Token Protection for Denali Wolves.” ActionLine (Spring):6–9.

2004. “Wolf Behavior around People in Denali National Park.” ActionLine (Spring):29–35.www.alaskawolves.org.

2005. “Behavior and Conservation of Wolves in Alaska: Research in the Denali and Fortymile Regions.” www.alaskawolves.org.

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Haber, G. C., C. J. Walters, and I. M. Cowan. 1976. “Stability Properties of a Wolf-Ungulate System in Alaska and Management Implications.” Institute of Resource Ecology Research Report R-5-R. University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

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Walters, C. J., M. Stocker, and G. C. Haber. 1981. “Simulation and Optimization Models for a Wolf-Ungulate System.” In Dynamics of Large Mammal Populations, edited by C. W. Fowler and T. D. Smith, 317–37. New York: Wiley. Reprint, Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn Press, 2004.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS—MARYBETH HOLLEMAN

When I first heard Dr. Gordon Haber talk about wolves twenty-five years ago, I was struck by his knowledge, passion, and courage. Here was a man who knew what he wanted to do with his life, and did it, who knew truths about wolves based on direct experience and wasn't afraid to speak them. So my first debt of gratitude is to the wolves and to Gordon.

Just like the wolves, we humans accomplish things only in community—and this book is no exception. Gordon's sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Jack Licht, generously allowed me access to Gordon's materials and provided insights into his life before Alaska. Priscilla Feral shared information from Gordon's years of working with Friends of Animals and gave welcoming encouragement; her organization's funding made the last years of Gordon's work possible. Rick Steiner, my husband, supported this project every step of the way, from his initial herculean sort of Gordon's papers, to helping with the book's structure, to reading every page several times and boosting my spirits when the task seemed impossible. The photographs appear only because of the patient and expert help of my son, James Holleman, Nancy Wallace, and Hal Gage. Many of Gordon's friends and colleagues were generous with time and information, including Tom Meier, Vic Van Ballenberghe, Johnny Johnson, Barbara Brease, Troy Dunn, Gary Baker, Tom Walker, Joel Bennett, and Karen Deatherage. With enthusiasm and a discerning eye, my editor, James Engelhardt, helped make this a better book—as did reviewer Mark Rauzon. My residency at the inspirational Mesa Refuge came at a critical time in the writing, and Denali National Park's Artist in Residency Program helped provide ground-truthing.

With this book I hope to share with a broader audience Gordon Haber's unique, insightful, valuable conclusions; affect the way we understand wolves and help change the course of wolf management; and inspire the next generation of scientists, for the world desperately needs more scientists like Gordon who work independently, do real field research, advocate the application of their conclusions, and retain their sense of wonder.

INDEX

abundance as endangered species criterion, 229

adaptation for hunting, 128, 133, 142, 230

(ADF&G) Alaska Department of Fish and Game. See Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G)

adult rest areas, 58

advocacy. See protective buffer zone

aerial hunting

approval of, 260

cessation of, 204

in Fortymile, 214

Haber's publications on, 85

helicopter shotgunning, 35

Jack Frost case, 204–205

permits for, 210–211

population increases after, 215

as predator control, 121, 217f

of Savage River family group, 85, 105, 142, 193, 238, plate 17 (after p. 118)

vs. snares, 200n29

aggression, lack of, 181–182

aircraft, wolves' reaction to, 106, 119

Alaska Board of Game

aerial shooting permits, 210–211

“bad science,” 213

buffer zone establishing/removing, 191–192, 259–260

Haber's testimony to, 204, 209

peer review proposal, 209–210

rejection from, 5

wolf control policies, 121

wolf management techniques, 255–257

Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G)

Alaska Peninsula killings, 219–220

“bad science,” 213

buffer zone action, 191

ethical challenges of, 221

illegal snaring, response to, 11, 118, 149

numbers emphasis, 196

peer review proposal, 209–210

personnel as off-duty trappers, 206

publicity choices, 179

rejection from, 5

snowmachine use, 222, 223f

species population counts, 65, 216

trapping by, 200–203

wolf management techniques, 35–36, 121, 222, 223f, 255–257

Alaska during/after the Pleistocene, 26–27, 52

Alaska magazine, Haber's interview/articles, 9, 65

Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), 185, 187, 192

Alaska Outdoor Council, 196n27, 215

Alaska Peninsula killings, 219–220, 222

Alaska Public Television, wolf control debate, 235

Alaska Resources Library and Information Service, 13, 234

Alaska Wolf Management Planning Team, 3, 105

Alaska's wolf-killing programs

overview, 209–211

Alaska Peninsula killings, 219–220, 222

bad science, 213–214

ballot initiatives to limit killing, 204

basis for challenging, 220

command-and-control, 216, 218–219

ethics/values costs, 220–222

hidden agenda, 210, 211–212, 261

hunter hardship, 214

imbalance from, 214–216

systems management, 216, 218–219

See also specific family groups

alpha pair, 14, 36, 37, 38f, 40f

altruism, kin-selected, 27, 53, 61

ambushing techniques, 123, 124–125, 142, 241

Anchorage Daily News, reporters for, 201

bag limits, 210, 212

baiting, illegal, 11, 118, 149

Baker, Gary, 8, 28–29, 49

ballot initiatives to limit wolf killing, 121, 204

bear predation, wolves and, 159, 161

bears

confrontation with, plates 14–16 (after p. 118)

defending a kill, 158f

Haber, encounters with, 168–170

predator control of, 214–215

pups lost to, 41–42

wolves' interaction with, 159, 161, 164–166, 167f, 168, 171

Bennett, Joel, 173, 204–205, 209, 255

bereavement

of Toklat alpha male, 42–43, 44f, 110, 111f, 112

in Yukon–Charley Rivers family group, 206

beta males

in courtship triangles, 37

LT, 33, 37, 38f, 39, 53, 75, 145

role of, 36

“biological emergencies,” 121, 198, 209

biological impact of trapping/shooting, 197–198, 227, 229–233

biologists

research by, 3

shortcomings of, 185, 186, 213, 221–222

birds as prey, 68–69, 74, 163

Board of Game. See Alaska Board of Game

Brease, Barbara, 206–207, 248

breeding, cooperative, 35, 50, 106, 220, 239–241

buffer zone. See protective buffer zone

Café del Mundo, Haber's audience at, 234

carbon dating of early humans, 180

caribou

under attack, 120f

at Fortymile, 3

harvesting, 219

hunting

by humans, 121

by wolves, 120f, 123–125, 135–136, 137f, 138, 139–141f

overharvesting of, 6

population declines, 96

protection for, 192

for pups, 68–69

severe weather availability, 53, 87

wolf kill rates, 123

chase-to-alpha ambush for sheep, 124–125, 241

Chignik teacher incident, 219n33

Chitsia family group, 120f

choosing battles, 225

Citation for Valor Award, 5, 7f

climbers, rescue of, 207

climbing skills (wolves), 128

command-and-control in wildlife management, 216, 218–219

Copper Creek family group, 119

copulatory locks, 39

core adults, 231–232

cornering (entrapment), 124, 125, 142, 241

Cottonwood family group (Yellowstone), 262

courtship. See mating

coyotes, 5

culture/traditions of wolves

overview, 25–26

evolution of, 27

importance of, 64

intergenerational, 26, 35, 51, 75–76, 133, 230

refining, 68

richness of, 26

See also hunting (by wolves)

daily lives

overview, 85–86

playtime, 86–88, plate 6 (after p. 118)

river crossing, 97, 100, 101f

summer heat, 88, 92, 93f, 94–95

winter travel, 95–97

darting drugs, 186

data, shortcomings of.

See wolf population numbers

Deatherage, Karen, 33, 62–64

deception/decoy techniques, 123, 125, 142, 241

delisting, 227, 229–233, 262

Denali National Park and Preserve

boundary area. See protective buffer zone

as study area, 19

visitors

advice to, 173, 174, 180

hazards to, 184

number of, 172f

wolf viewing success, 192, 256, 260

dens

overview, 46, 51–53, 55, 250

cleaning, 42, 52, 54f

complexity of, 49–50

maps of, 55–56f

species succession, 163

Teklanika, 62–64 plate 3 (after p. 118), 62–64

Department of Fish and Game. See Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G)

dependency of the young, 26, 50, 51, 67, 75–76, 230

difficult escape terrain (cornering), 124, 125, 142, 241

discipline, learning, 69

disease transmission from dogs, 27, 183

distant setup and pursuit hunting, 124, 241

divisions of labor, 36

dogs

disease transmission from, 27, 53n12

mushing in Denali Park, 183

as prey for wolves, 184

dominance hierarchy, 36, 59, 60f

Dry Creek snowmachine trapline trail, 194, 196

Dunn, Troy

on aerial research, 86

with aircraft, 226f

on Haber, 2, 46–47, 67

as Haber's pilot, 8, 30–31, 225

Thanksgiving dinner with Haber, 13–14

on wolves

with bears, 171

reaction to aircraft, 106, 119

with snowshoe hares, 157

Son, recollections of, 83

Eagle family group, 43

early humans

from Asia, 26–27

carbon dating of, 180

homesites used by, 52, 53n12, 55

wolf dens used by, 49, 57f, 163

wolves as parallel to, 9, 25, 35, 37, 238

East Fork family group. See Toklat family group

ecosystems

balance in, 216

complexity of, 6

dynamics of, 3, 218

wolves' roles in, 209

wolves within, 2–3

educational programs, 105

Eisenberg, Cristina, The Wolf's Tooth, 262

Elbert, Paul, 51

elevation, wolves at, 16f

emergency visitor use closure, 183

emotional expression, howling as, 110, 111f, 112

endangered species, evaluating, 227, 229–233

endurance (wolves), 128

entrapment (cornering), 124, 125, 142, 241

ethical considerations, 220–221

evolution

hunting- and fishing-induced, 232

strategies (wolves)

cooperative breeding/hunting as, 35, 220

extended families as, 65, 67

multiple lactating females and, 59

extended families

overview, 9, 35, 36

evolutionary advantages of, 65, 67

learning opportunities within, 76

social organization of, 244–246

family bonds

overview, 33, 35–37

pair bonding, 34f, 37, 38f, 39, 239–241

Toklat family tragedies, 39, 41–43

trapping mortalities and, 42, 110, 112

family groups

overview, 9, 11, 209, 257

critical roles within, 2

dispersal during scarcity, 95–96

evolutionary advantages of, 35

fragmentation/disarray after deaths, 25, 36–37, 39, 41–43

as functional unit, 231

genetic continuity/dilution/lineages, 244–246

seasonal changes in, 96, 124

social organization of, 244–246

territories, 255–257 plate 25 (after p. 118)

See also extended families

fearlessness, 174–177, 178–185

feeding. See provisioning

Feral, Priscilla, 11, 105, 147, 224, 235

field notes, 8

flight paths, anticipating, 134–136

food conditioning, 177, 183

Fortymile

caribou at, 3

predator control in, 149, 209

wolf control in, 121, 213–214

Fossey, Dian, 6

foxes, wolf dens used by, 163

Friends of Animals

fine paid by, 11, 118

funding from, 11, 105

mission of, 147

public debates and, 235

tourism boycott by, 121, 200n29

Frost, Jack, 204–205

functional characteristics, 227, 229–232, 233

funding

from Friends of Animals, 11, 105, 224

from National Science Foundation, 17

sources of, 12, 65

Gandhi, Mahatma, 12

gassing wolf pups in dens, 260–261

genetic continuity/dilution, 244–246

genetic diversity/genomes, 229–230

genetic loads, purging of, 242

gestation period, 53

glaciations, wolves and, 26

Glaser, Frank, 3

Goodall, Jane, 6, 17

Granite family group, 36, 211

Grant Creek family group. See Toklat West family group

gray jays, 161

Great Lakes region, delisting in, 230, 233

growth advantages, multiple lactating females and, 59

Haber, Gordon

bio sketch

childhood experiences, 85

as consummate scientist, 6

Denali work history, 1, 18, 28–29, 33, 49

education, 33, 49

lifestyle, 6

physical fitness of, 5

death of, 1, 8–9, 12, 234, 248

Alaska residences, 85

outrage of, 206–207

bear encounters, 168–170

buffer zone proposal, plate 26 (after p. 118)

See also protective buffer zone

lawsuit against, 11, 118, 149

National Park Service, conflicts with, 173

photos

aerial tracking, 258f

with dead wolf, 207f

in Denali National Park, 4f, 10f, 263f

with snared wolf, plate 19 (after p. 118)

public appearances by, 105, 235

research

archival collection, 13, 234

summary of, 2–3, 249–253

update since Haber's death, 255–257, 259–262, 263

wolves' observations of, 24, 108, 119, plate 5 (after p. 118)

habituation. See fearlessness

hamburger drop, 189

Hankins, Joe, 29, 49

harassment of Haber's pilots, 225

hare population. See snowshoe hares

harmony in family groups, 36

Harris, Chalon, 8

Hayes, Bob, Wolves of the Yukon, 262

Headquarters family group

human-caused turnover, 176

newcomer acceptance, 96

in Savage River family territory, 105, 142–143, 238

viewing of, 193

hearing as hunting asset, 128

helicopter shooting, 35

Hickel, Walter

school children's petition to, 105

wolf control policies, 121

Wolf Summit (1993), 11, 224

hidden agenda, 210, 211–212, 261

Highpower Creek (early human campsites), 52

homesites, 51–53, 55, 56–57f

hooves as ungulate defense, 122–123, 125, 128

hostility toward Haber, 12, 225

howling

overview, 105–106

as bereavement, 44f, 106

concurrently with Haber's plane crash, 106, 248

cooperation and, 106–108

emotional expression as, 110, 111f, 112

energizing through, 111f, 112

hunting and, 115f

in intergroup strife, 96

locating others with, 108, 109f, 110

Toklat alpha male, 104f

humans

disturbance by, 71

hunting. See hunting of wolves

wolf kills by, 252–253

wolf lineage terminations, 186–187

See also Denali National Park and Preserve: visitors; early humans

Hunter, Celia, 49

hunter hardships as rationale, 214

hunting (by wolves)

overview, 122, 123, 251–252

adaptation for, 128, 133, 142, 230

caribou, 120f, 135–136, 138

communicating kill site locations, 68

consumption quantity, 144–145

cooperation in, 35, 106, 220, 239–241

homesites choices and, 52

howling and, 106–107, 112, 115f

learning, 51, 73–76

loss of prey after a kill, 145, 148f

moose, 122, 133–135, plates 7–10 (after p. 118)

preparing for, 113–117f

pups/yearlings, 14–15

scavenging (winter kills), 122, 123, 143–144

selectivity of, 182–183

sheep, plate 11 (after p. 118)

snowshoe hares, 62, 150, 151f, 152–153, 154–155f, 156–157, plate 12 (after p. 118)

sociality in, 128, 133

during summer, 92, 94–95

teaching, 67

techniques for, 122, 123–125, 128, 142, 146f

terrain challenges, 138, 142

during winter, 87, 95

See also meals; specific prey

hunting- and fishing-induced evolution, 232

hunting of wolves

overview, 121–122, 252–253

aerial. See aerial hunting

along park boundaries, 194, 196

bag limits, 210, 212

evidence of, 85

family fragmentation and, 36–37

helicopter shotgunning, 35

during Kantishna subsistence hunt, 185

licenses for, 212

lingering impact of, 230–231

optimal restrictions on, 192–194

outside Alaska, 261–262

seasons for, 210, 261

with snowmachines, 222, 223f

species degradation by, 230

under-reporting of kills, 211–212

See also protective buffer zone

Ice Age glaciations, wolves and, 26

inbreeding, 242

information transfer, intergenerational. See culture/traditions of wolves

intelligence, 128, 133

intensive management statutes, 215, 218

interdependencies within family groups, 35

intergenerational traditions, 26, 51, 75–76, 133, 230

intergroup strife, 96, 124, 231

Interior, Dept. of, 227, 229–230

intimacy of family groups, 35

Isle Royale National Park (Michigan)

as fire control aide in, 5

research in, 3, 17, 18

Jarvis, Jonathan B., 188

Johnson, Johnny

on Haber, 2

on the hamburger drop, 189

on lawsuit against Haber, 11, 118

Thanksgiving dinner with Haber, 13

on visits with Haber, 45, 49

Kantishna subsistence hunt, 185

Kennedy, John F., 5

Kennedy, Robert, 5

kills, stealing, 158f, 165

knowledge, intergenerational. See culture/traditions of wolves

Knowles, Tony, 121

lactation by non-mothers, 59

lawsuit by trapper, 11, 118, 149

legislation, drafting of, 209–210, 234

lineages, 24, 244–246

Lower 48, wolf reintroduction in, 227

Lower Savage River family group, 134–135

Lower Toklat (early human campsites), 52

LT (Savage River beta male), 33, 37, 38f, 39, 53, 75, 145

“managing for abundance,” 215, 218

mating

of alpha pair, 14, 36, 38f, 40f

copulatory locks during, 39

courtship behavior, 37, plate 2 (after p. 118)

family fragmentation and, 36–37

females in, 36, 40f

signs of, 30

maximizing system capacities, 219

“maximum sustained yield,” 215, 218

McGrath area, hunter success rates, 214

McKinley Slough family group, plate 25 (after p. 118)

meals

frequency of, 87, 123

speed of, 144–145

volume per wolf, 131f

Mech, David, 224

Meier, Tom, 6, 173, 259

mew gulls, 161

migration, population counts and, 213–214

mineral-lick ambushing, 124, 241

monogamy, 37

moose

bear predation, 164–165

census shortcomings, 213

as difficult prey, 51, 67

exploitation of, 35

harvesting, 219

hunting

by humans, 121

by wolves, 122–125, 126–127f, 128, 129–132f, 133–135, plates 7–10 (after p. 118)

as ignored prey, 92, 94

overharvesting of, 6

physical fitness of, 143

for pups, 68–69

severe winter, recovery from, 144

weather challenges and, 53, 143

as winter meal, 87

wolf kill rates, 123, 133

wolf observing, plate 24 (after p. 118)

mortality

alpha female, starvation death, 181–182, 246–247

from intergroup strife, 96

natural vs. human-induced, 209, 231

outside Alaska, 261–262

from radio-collaring, 41, 97, 182, 185–187

of recolonizers, 231

from relocation, 36

since Haber's death, 261

See also specific family groups

mortality caller, beep tracing, 206

Mount Margaret family group

bears, interaction with, 171

dogs as intruders, 183

human-caused turnover, 176

in Savage River family territory, 105, 142–143, 238

trapping deaths, 42

viewing of, 193

mountain climbers, rescues of, 207

mountain sheep. See sheep

Murie, Adolph

as Haber's predecessor, 3

on homesites, 53

scouting for wolves, 29

The Wolves of Mount McKinley, 1–2, 22, 238

work methods, 62

Murie, Louise, 29

myths about wolves, 122, 144

natal dens, 52, 71

National Academy of Sciences, predator control study, 121

National Geographic

“Dance of Death,,” 179

documentary interest, 159

National Park Service

biologists' research, 3

buffer zone proposal, 191, 260, plate 26 (after p. 118)

Haber as advisor to, 3

hunting policies, 185

publicity choices, 179

radio-collaring by, 41, 85, 185–187

Scientific Advisory Panel for Yellowstone

wolf reintroduction, 105

visitors. See Denali National Park and

Preserve: visitors

wolf management by, 176–177, 259

National Science Foundation, research assistantship, 17

natural behavior. See fearlessness

Nenana Canyon. See Wolf Townships

Nenana River family group, 257, plate 25 (after p. 118)

New York Times, Haber's op-ed for, 65, 105

newcomer acceptance, 96

Northern Rocky Mountain Wolves, delisting, 227, 229–233

nose-to-hind-end killing, 124, 125, 128, 129–132f, 242

nursing

length of, 61

by multiple lactating females, 59

Toklat family group, plate 20 (after p. 118)

wolf call for, 63

Ott, Charlie, 29

overharvesting, 6

packs. See family groups

pair bonding

overview, 37, 39

as survival advantage, 33

Toklat family, 34f

parenting. See pups

pecking order, 36

peer review of wildlife management proposals, 209–210

people, hazards to, 184

persecution, fear and, 174

phenotypic variation, loss of, 242

photography, aerial, 13

physical prowess, 142

pilots for Haber's work, 8–9, 225

playtime, 86–88, 89–91f, 116f, plate 6 (after p. 118), plate 23 (after p. 118)

Pleistocene glaciations, 26, 52

poisoning by market hunters, 27

polygyny, 240

porcupines, wolf dens used by, 163

predator control

aerial hunting as, 217f

basis for challenging, 220

in Fortymile, 149

National Academy of Sciences study, 121

saturation snaring, 11, 194

since Haber's death, 255

See also Alaska's wolf-killing programs

predator-prey relations, Haber's graduate work in, 33

predators, guarding pups from, 61

prey

abundance of

since Haber's death, 259

in study areas, 200–201, 239

“biological emergencies,” 121, 198, 209

culling, 124

as den siting factor, 52

ignoring, 61, 86, 92, 94

loss after a kill, 145, 148f

during the Pleistocene, 26–27

scarcity as dispersal factor, 95

testing, 122

wintering grounds, 199

wolf migration and, 213–214

wolves' conservation of (prudent predation), 239

See also specific prey

problem wolves, 232–233

protective buffer zone

overview, 191–192

advocacy for, 2, 33, 35, 85, 191

Bennett on, 204

elimination of, 191–192, 259–260

population numbers. See wolf population numbers

proposals for, 195f, plate 26 (after p. 118)

traplines, 194, 196

trapper lifestyle protection, 198–199

as wildlife conservation issue, 2

wolf viewing, decline in, 256

wolf vulnerability, 193–194

provisioning

of pups, 50, 67–69, 70f, 71, 107–108, plate 4 (after p. 118)

weather challenges and, 53

prudent predators, wolves as, 35, 239

public process, avoiding, 210–211, 212

pups

overview (research summary), 250–251

birth of, 14, 50

dens for, 51–53, 54f, 55

early weeks, 14, 50–51

emergence of, 55, 58–59, 61

gassing in dens, 260–261

growth rate, 68

human hunting impact on, 212

at sheep kill, 147

survival rate, 68

Swift Northeast family group, 48f

teaching

hunting, 67, 73–76, 133

swimming, 67, 76, 77–82f, 103

on walks, 71, 72f, 73

Toklat family group, 23f, 66f

pups, cooperative upbringing

overview, 65, 67–68, 250–251

provisioning, 68–69, 70f, 71, 107–108, plate 4 (after p. 118)

Son (Toklat alpha male), 83

teaching

hunting, 15, 73–76

swimming, 77–82f

on walks, 71, 72f, 73

radio-collaring

buffer proposal data from, plate 26 (after p. 118)

deaths from, 41, 97, 182, 185–187

in Haber's research, 85

as lineage documentation, 244–245

of Toklat family group, 238

ravens

scavenging kills, 160f

teasing wolves, 74, 159, 162f, 164

in wolves' daily lives, 163

reasoning ability (wolves), 128, 133

recreation. See playtime

recreational values of wolves, 221

See also Denali National Park and Preserve

regurgitation for pups, 68–69

relocation/sterilization, 35–36, 121, 211

reproductive bonds. See family bonds

research, Haber's

archival collection, 13, 234

summary of, 2–3, 249–253

update since Haber's death, 255–257, 259–262, 263

reunions through howling, 108, 109f, 110

rituals, 39, 42

river crossings

during summer (Aug 2008), 97, 100, 101f

during summer (Aug 2009), 76, 77–82f, 103

during winter, 102

“rotating pulse harvest” approach, 219

running as recreation, 87

Ruth, Bill, 29

safety, siting of dens for, 51–52

Salazar, Ken, wolf delisting by, 227, 229

Sanctuary family group

bereavement, 110

extinction of, 186–187, 207

human-caused turnover, 176

radio-collaring mortality, 185–186

in Savage River family territory, 105, 142–143, 238

viewing of, 193

saturation snaring, 11, 194, 256

“satyagraha,” 12

Savage River family group

bear encounter, 167f

bereavement, 110

dens, 181

extinction of, 85, 96, 105, 142, 193, 238, plate 17 (after p. 118)

fearlessness of, 180

homesites, 52, 53, 55, 57f

howling, 45

human-caused turnover, 176

hunting kill success rates, 123

seasonal food supply changes, 124

techniques, 122–123, 124–125, 126–127f, 133, 142–143, 145, 146f

inbreeding, 242

intergroup strife, 96

locating, 28–29

LT (beta male), 33, 37, 38f, 39, 53, 75

at play, plate 23 (after p. 118)

polygyny in, 240–241

prey, ignoring, 92, 94

with ravens at winter kill, 160f

reproductive bonds in, 240

research value of, 238

scavenging (winter kills), 143–144

sheep kill, 74–75

teaching pups, 71, 73

tenure in Denali Park, 27

territory of, 22

viewing of, 193

winter travel, 95

scavenging

finding winter kill, 122, 123, 128, 143–144

killing vs., 87

from other predators, plate 13 (after p. 118)

scent marking, 24, 96

Schaller, George, 6

science, flawed, 210, 213–214

search-and-pursuit tactics, 142

seasonal food changes, 68–69, 87, 96, 124

sexual maturity, 95–96

sheep

challenges of, 74

as difficult prey, 51

reliance on, 67

Savage River family ambush of, 74–75

as seasonal fare, 68–69, 87

wolf hunting techniques, 123–125, 138, 142–143, 145, 146f, plate 11 (after p. 118)

Sheldon, Charles, 3

Sheldon, Don, 8, 225

sled dogs

in Denali Park, 183

disease transmission from, 27, 53n12

smell as hunting asset, 128

snow, wolves' hunting techniques in, 122

snowmachines

hunting of wolves with, 222, 223f

in trapline maintenance, 194, 196

snowshoe hares, 62, 150, 151f, 152–153, 154–155f, 156–157, plate 12 (after p. 118)

social attributes, research summary, 249–250

social organization. See family bonds; family groups

socializing. See playtime

societal cruising speed, 9

sociobiology, definition, 244

Son (Toklat alpha male), 83

“Sound Science Act,” 209–210

species integrity, 232–233

species population counts, 65, 213

See also wolf population numbers

spring thaw, den entrances and, 52

squirrels, wolf dens used by, 163

Stampede family group

howling together, 111f

hunting, 138, 139–141f

river crossing, 97, 100, 101f

Stampede Trail. See Wolf Townships

state land transfers, human activity and, 193

state-snared wolves, 200–203

steady-state population objectives, 218

Steiner, Rick, 191, 209–210, 234–235, 260

sterilization/relocation, 35, 121, 211

Stolzenburg, William, Where the Wild Things Were, 262

storm-and-circle testing for moose, 122, 124–125, 126–127f, 133, 241

study areas, 19, 20–21f

summer lifestyle (wolves)

heat discomfort, 88, 92, 93f

travel

river crossing (Aug 2008), 97, 100, 101f

river crossing (Aug 2009), 76, 77–82f, 103

on tundra, plate 21 (after p. 118)

survival success

factors in, 239–242

family bonds and, 33

rates of, 68

sustainability in ecosystems, 218–219

Swift Northeast family group

bears, intrusion of, 165

playtime, 88, 89–91f

pups, 48f

survival challenges of, 46–47

Swift West family group, 16f

swimming

teaching, 67, 76, 77–82f, 103

technique, 63, 97, 100, 101f

weather limitations, 97

systems management, wildlife, 216, 218–219

systems theory, 65

teaching pups. See pups

Teklanika (early human campsites), 52

Teklanika Campground trail, 55

Teklanika denning area, 62–64, plate 3 (after p. 118)

telemetry equipment, 30, 31

temperatures, aircraft performance and, 31

terrain challenges, 138, 142

territorial disputes, intergroup, 96

territory, wolves'. See study areas; and specific family groups.

testing prey, 122

threshold number of wolves, 198

tit-for-tat trespassing, intergroup strife, 96

Toklat East family group

in Savage River family territory, 105, 238

viewing of, 193

Toklat family group

alpha female, starvation death, 181–182, 246–247

alpha pair, 228f

bereavement, 110

challenging prey, 67

communicating kill site locations, 68

courtship, plate 2 (after p. 118)

decimation of, 150

and Denali park visitors, 172

dens, 181

disappearance of, 85

dogs as intruders, 183

female with pup, 70f

“group photo,” plate 1, plate 22 (after p. 118)

Haber's plane overhead, 7f

homesites, 52, 53, 55, 56–57f

howling by, 104f, 107, 110, 236f

human interface with, 176–177, 179–180

hunting

detection skills, 128

flight paths, anticipating, 135–136, 137f

kill success rates, 123

preparation for, 113–117f

seasonal food changes, 96, 124

sheep, plate 11 (after p. 118)

snowshoe hares, 62, 150, 151f, 152–153, 154–155f, 156–157, plate 12 (after p. 118)

techniques, 123, 124–125, 129–132f, 134, 138, 142, plates 7–10 (after p. 118)

terrain challenges, 138, 142–143

inbreeding, 242

intergroup strife, 96

long-running study of, 17

mortality of, 39, 41–42, 197

newcomer acceptance, 96

NPS impact on, 175, 187

pair bonding, 34f, 36

at play, 84f

polygyny in, 240

pups, 23f, 59, 66f, 76, plate 20 (after p. 118)

radio-collaring, 185–186, 244–245

reproductive bonds in, 239–240

research value of, 238, 245–246

reunion by howling, 110

river crossing, 76, 77–82f, 103, 190f

road travel, 178f

scavenging (winter kills), 143

Son (alpha male), 83

stealing a kill, 158f

survival success factors, 239–242

teaching

feeding, 147

swimming, 76, 77–82f, 103

on walks, 71

tenure in Denali Park, 27

territory of, 22, 255, 256–257, plate 25 (after p. 118)

tragedies, 39, 41–43, 111f, 243f

trapping, 207

viewing of, 193

winter travel, 95, 98–99f, 190f

Toklat Springs family group, plate 7 (after p. 118)

Toklat West family group

“group photo,” plate 18 (after p. 118)

mortality and fragmentation, 256

at play, plate 6 (after p. 118)

territory of, 255, plate 25 (after p. 118)

Tonzona family group. See Swift West family group

tourism boycott, 121, 200n29

traditions. See culture/traditions of wolves

trapper lifestyle protection, 198–199

trapping

ADF&G inconsistencies, 11, 118

along park boundaries, 194, 196

licenses/bag limits, 210, 212

mortalities

evidence of, 85

family member emotions, 110

Stampede family group, 111f

Toklat family group, 39, 42, 111f

Toklat West family group, plate 18 (after p. 118)

optimal restrictions on, 192–194

snaring techniques taught by state, 200n29

state snaring, 200–203

two-year-olds, lactation by, 59

Udall, Stewart, 5, 7f

unprotected state lands, plate 25 (after p. 118)

U.S. Department of the Interior, 227, 229–230

U.S. Geological Survey, biologist shortcomings, 185, 186

Van Ballenberghe, Victor, 224

video of state-snared wolf, 11, 121, 200n29, 202

vision as hunting asset, 128

Voltaire, 12

walks, pup education on, 71, 72f, 73

Walters, C. J., 219

“wanton waste” of trapped/hunted animals, 212

weasels, 161, 163

Where the Wild Things Were (Stolzenburg), 262

wilderness protection limitations, 85

wildlife conservation issues. See protective buffer zone

wildlife management proposals, peer review of, 209–210

wildlife population fluctuations, 65, 216

See also specific wildlife

winter kill. See scavenging

winter lifestyle (wolves)

meals, 87

travel

overview, 95–97

photos, 98–99f, 254f

pups, 14, 50–51

river crossing, 190f

wolf killing programs. See Alaska's wolf-killing programs

wolf population numbers

ADF&G methodology, 65

after family fragmentation, 215

estimates, plate 25 (after p. 118)

flaws/shortcomings of, 196–197, 210, 213, 257

fluctuations, 216

increasing, 37

low period, 27, 53, 53n12

since Haber's death, 255, 257, 259

The Wolf's Tooth (Eisenberg), 262

Wolf Summit (1993), 11, 105, 121, 224

Wolf Townships

deaths in, 192

as protective buffer zone, 2, 191

Toklat family group territory in, plate 25 (after p. 118)

trapping and hunting in, 3, 33, 35, 105, plate 18 (after p. 118)

wolf traplines, 194, 196

wolf-human conflicts, 264

wolverines, 163

wolves

as check on bear predation, 165

harvesting of, 6, 231

observing Haber, 18, 24, 108, 119, plate 5 (after p. 118)

observing moose, plate 24 (after p. 118)

outside Alaska, 261–262

update since Haber's death, 255–257, 259–262, 263

See also specific family groups

The Wolves of Mount McKinley (Murie), 1–2, 22, 238

Wolves of the Yukon (Hayes), 262

Wonder Lake family group, 52, 71

Wood, Ginny, 49

work methods, 6, 8, 13, 19, 22, 62–63

Yanert—Moody Creek family group, 200

yearlings

lactation by, 59

with pups

bonding with, 67, 69, 76

caring for, 15

swimming lessons for, 77–82f

Yellowstone National Park

wolf reintroduction in, 3, 105, 227

as wolf viewing area, 193, 262

Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve

family groups in, 3

illegal snaring

overview, 149–150

ADF&G, response to, 11, 118, 149

trapper lawsuit, 11, 118, 149

video of, 11, 121, 200n29, 202

predator control adjacent to, 209

as study area, 19