I’ve never met a wolf close up, and I’m not sure if I would want to, but I’ve always been fascinated by these apex predators that live in our midst.
They are very intelligent, sociable and live in family groups, much like humans.
They were, and still are, revered by First Nations and thrived alongside them for thousands of years before Europeans showed up on these shores and determined that wolves were vermin that preyed on their flocks and should be eradicated.
Within just a couple of hundreds years, if not less, Europeans had cleared wolves from much of North America, leaving them to the more undeveloped fringes of the continent to eke out a survival.
But I find it disturbing that humans are still slaughtering these magnificent creatures by the hundreds, even in the deep wilderness of northern B.C. and Alberta.
It seems that wildlife scientists have determined that wolf predation was the cause of a drop in caribou populations by about a third in that area between 1991 and 2023.
The scientists concluded that logging and mining activities had created roads into heavily forested areas that are frequented by caribou and where predators had a hard time accessing and hunting, but the roads mean those areas are now open to wolves, leaving the caribou herds more vulnerable.
So, despite that fact that the problem was caused by human intervention, the solution was to introduce a wolf cull that has already wiped out hundreds of wolves in northern B.C. and Alberta, and the policy is expected to go on for decades now that the evidence appears to show that the caribou herds are rebounding as a result.
But, despite the apparent success in the wolf cull in rebuilding caribou herds, one has to wonder if other factors are at play as well and that wolves, once again, are taking a disproportionate amount of the blame.
I recently read a report on the Canadian gray wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the U.S. in 1996 in an effort to balance out that area’s natural order of predators and prey after they were wiped out a hundred years before as part of the human purge of the species.
Apparently, the populations of Northern Yellowstone elk, which is a major food source for wolves in the region, and other prey species were growing unchecked with the apex predator taken out of the food chain, and it was determined that reintroducing the wolf would help balance it all out.
But, since then, the population of the elk has plummeted about 80 per cent, down from nearly 20,000 to less than 4,000 today, and, because the decline in numbers began at exactly the same time the wolves came back, the blame was placed squarely on them.
A wolf cull was being considered but, fortunately, a decision was made to do more research before taking that drastic measure.
A scientist was brought in who shadowed the elk herds over many months and didn’t witness any overkill of the elk by the wolf packs.
In fact, the scientist hardly saw any wolves near the elk herds at all, and what kills took place were few and far between.
But when he followed the herds to their breeding grounds, the facts of the matter soon came to light.
What he witnessed was grizzly bears coming out of hibernation in the spring, the same time when elk give birth to their young, eating the young elk in large numbers.
Apparently, elk calves give off very little scent so wolves can’t smell them when they are in the grass lying still, but bears have a much stronger sense of smell and can pick them off easily.
It turns out that the bears would normally feast on spawning indigenous trout in the local waterways to get their protein when coming out of hibernation, but the trout were almost wiped out by a much larger non-indigenous trout that had been introduced into the water systems (by humans of course) that lay its eggs in deep water and don’t go into the shallow waterways to do so.
That left the bears looking for another food source, and that turned out to be baby elk, causing the elk population to crash over time.
So, instead of culling blameless wolves, scientists in Yellowstone are now focused on removing the large trout from the area.
I just wonder if the wolves are taking a disproportionate amount of blame for the depletion of the caribou in Canada as well.