The Company of Wolves (56 page)

Several excellent books discuss competing theories of predation. Paul Errington’s
Of Predation and Life
(Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1967) summarizes his studies of minks and muskrats on Iowa marshes, and develops the general theory of predation that underlies most of today’s biological studies. Chapters in Durward Allen’s
Our Wildlife Legacy
(New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1954) provide a spirited and well-reasoned critique of the persecution of predators that was still going on when it was published. There is not yet a popular account of the revisionist view that predators indeed
control prey populations; those who wish to find that contending view will have to look in the scientific literature. A good place to start might be William C. Gasaway, Rodney D. Boertje, Daniel V. Grangaard, David G. Kelleyhouse, Robert O. Stephenson, and Douglas G. Larsen, “The Role of Predation in Limiting Moose at Low Densities in Alaska and Yukon and Implications for Conservation,”
Wildlife Monograph
, vol. 120 (1992), or William C. Gasaway, Robert O. Stephenson, James L. Davis, Peter E. K. Shepherd, and Oliver Burris, “Interrelationships of Wolves, Prey and Man in Interior Alaska,”
Wildlife Monograph
, vol. 84 (July 1983), or Robert Hayes, “An Experimental Design to Test Wolf Regulation of Ungulates in the Aishihik Area, Southwest Yukon,” a report prepared by the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Branch in December 1992.

A few excellent works focus on the ways wolves are interpreted in myth and legend. Far above the rest is Lopez’s
Of Wolves and Men
, which looks in especially fine detail at the ways Plains Indians saw themselves in wolf behavior and describes how humans imitated and celebrated wolves in ritual and daily life. A second work—available only in French but well worth the effort—is Daniel Bernard’s
L’Homme et le Loup
(Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1981), which describes in rich detail European traditions of wolf legend, wolf lore, and wolf hunting.

Stanley Young and Edward Goldman’s
The Wolves of North America
(Washington, DC: The American Wildlife Institute, 1944) deserves mention here. As a collection of trappers’ lore and explorers’ tales it is still rich, colorful, and enjoyable reading. But it views the wolf chiefly as an economic factor in the lives of stock ranchers and deer hunters, and its anecdotal approach is far from reliable. If one reads Stanley Young’s
Last of the Loners
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), a collection of highly lurid anthropomorphic accounts of legendary stock-killing wolves of the West, one is less likely to trust Young at all.

As of 1994, the International Species Information System, a listing of the animals in member zoological collections, listed about three dozen zoos holding North American species of gray wolf, and a number of others holding red wolves. Dozens of additional zoos and nature centers not participating in this breeding registry also keep wolves. Wolves are therefore relatively common in North American zoos, but they are rarely displayed in such a way as to give a fair idea of the nature of the animal. A wolf’s most insistent natural quality is its motion, and the long-distance travel of a wild wolf is prohibited by the moats and cyclone fences of exhibits. Also, wolves tend to sleep most of the day in a zoo enclosure, and that makes them far less interesting to visitors.

The large metropolitan zoos have increasingly concentrated upon the breeding of endangered species as their chief mission, and in consequence they have been phasing out their timber-wolf exhibits. Explains Doris Applebaum, curator of mammals at the Detroit Zoo,
“They’re not that endangered. And if you want to breed timber wolves, it is difficult to find a place to send the offspring.” Zoos have, where possible, substituted red wolves or Mexican wolves for forest and tundra subspecies of gray wolf. The San Diego Zoo no longer displays gray wolves, nor does the San Francisco Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, or the Detroit Zoo. Where wolves are still displayed, they tend to be put into large “wolf-woods” exhibits, where there is much space and lots of cover. Such exhibits tend to hide the animals from the visitors, and perhaps make the wolves less popular zoo attractions.

There are a handful of centers devoted exclusively to the study or educational display of captive wolves which welcome visitors and provide interpretive programs.

The International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, has live wolves on display during summer months, and it is the permanent year-round home to the “Wolves and Humans” exhibit that helped interest the American public in returning wolves to Yellowstone. A membership organization, the center serves as an educational resource aimed at the conservation and understanding of wolves. It publishes a quarterly magazine which focuses on wolf research, conservation, and education.

Working with the International Wolf Center, Vermilion Community College, in Ely, Minnesota, conducts wolf-study weekends in winter months and week-long wolf-research expeditions in summer. On the winter weekends, participants go out at night to try to get wolves to reply to their howls, and ski or snowshoe to remote lakes to inspect fresh wolf kills. On some weekends, participants may take brief airplane flights to view previously located radio-collared wolves.

Wolf Haven, in Tenino, Washington, started as a home for wolves whose owners could not reorganize their lives to care for the animals, and by 1994 had thirty-nine captive wolves in spacious pens, full of trees and shrubs that give the wolves space and cover to get out of sight if they aren’t in the mood to deal with the daily human visitors. There are small white Arctic wolves and large gray-brindled plains wolves. Wolf Haven tries to pair all the wolves in the pens, to give them the close companionship of a mate. Tubal ligations and vasectomies are performed on the wolves to prevent breeding. Says
Paul Joslin, director of research and education, “The intention is not to perpetuate the wolf-puppy mill.” About twenty thousand visitors tour Wolf Haven each year.

Wolf Haven has broadened its objectives to assume leadership in several areas of wolf conservation. It commissioned biologist Gordon Haber to critique proposals for wolf-control programs in British Columbia and Alaska, and sent spokespeople to testify at hearings on wolf controls. Joslin has trained howling brigades to go out and look for tracks and listen for howls wherever the status of wolves in the wild is uncertain. In 1992 and 1993, Wolf Haven-trained howling brigades searched for wolves in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Arizona, and Mexico. Wolf Haven sponsored an International Wolf Symposium, attended by most of the wolf biologists in the world, in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1992.

Wolf Park, in Battle Ground, Indiana, was started in 1972 as a center for the study of wolf behavior by Purdue University ethologist Erich Klinghammer. Scientists at Wolf Park have developed a wolf ethogram, an outline of the typical gestures and expressions of wolves, which can serve behavioral scientists as a common language for wolf study. Monty Sloan of Wolf Park has become a leading expert in distinguishing wolves from wolf hybrids. Wolf Park publishes
Wolf
, a quarterly newsmagazine about wolf conservation and research issues worldwide. It offers six-day seminars on wolf behavior several times a year. In summer months, Wolf Park admits the public to evening wolf talks at which visitors sit in bleachers in front of a large wolf pen containing a captive pack that is socialized enough to have lost most of the wolf’s innate shyness of humans. Visitors will find that here the wolves look as hard at the visitors as the visitors look at the wolves, and there is a level of interplay unusual to the display of the animals.

The Wild Canid Research and Survival Center in Eureka, Missouri, was started in 1971 by the noted zoo director and television star Marlin Perkins. Focusing chiefly upon the breeding of endangered varieties of wolf, such as the Mexican wolf and the red wolf, it provides tours, seminars, and campfire programs by prior reservation on alternate Saturdays from August through January, but is closed to the public during the months when the wolves are breeding and rearing young.

The North American Wolf Foundation, a wolf-education organization in Ipswich, Massachusetts, offers structured presentations to the public on weekend afternoons, and by reservation to groups larger than twenty on weekdays. It draws about twenty thousand visitors a year.

The Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minnesota, dates back to a private facility established in 1976 for the study of the behavior and psychology of captive wolves. Studies there explored such things as seasonal hormone changes among female wolves, the effectiveness of drugs used to immobilize wolves in the field, and methods of persuading wild wolves brought into captivity to eat prepared foods. Studies of captive wolf packs at the center yielded much of our knowledge of territoriality, dominance hierarchies, and other behavior. Research is still conducted at the facility, but since 1989, as the Wildlife Science Center, about half its effort has gone to education, and fifty to seventy-five thousand visitors come by each year, most of them students from Minneapolis-area schools. It is open to the public by prior arrangement.

The Julian Science Center is a fledgling wolf-research-and-education center in the mountains east of San Diego, California. Founder Paul Kenis hopes to develop a facility at which Mexican wolves and other endangered canids are captive-bred, and to which the public can come for extensive study of wolves. It is currently open to the public only by appointment.

In 1994, Wolf Song of Alaska, a membership wolf-education organization in Anchorage, Alaska, was hoping to begin work on a large facility, perhaps thirty-five miles from Anchorage, at which it would ultimately display as many as sixty wolves of different subspecies from around the world. Wolf Song hoped to stay out of the political controversies over wolf controls in Alaska, and to concentrate on education. It hoped to open a facility by 1996.

There are also many places where one may try to see wolves in the wild. In Canada, there are ranger-led campfire programs or nighttime wolf howls conducted at Jasper National Park, Prince Albert National Park, Riding Mountain National Park, and Algonquin Provincial Park, but the likelihood of seeing wolves in the dense forests of these parks in summer is low. In Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park, for example, despite a century of wolf-tourist sharing
of the environment, wolves haven’t lost their shyness. Visitors get only quick and interrupted glimpses. The exceptions are few and far between: In the early 1960s, some men were playing baseball on a diamond scratched out into the old airfield at Mew Lake when a wolf came out of the forest and stole a base. In the early 1970s, a wolf loitered around the campground at Whitefish Lake. In 1987, a wolf began to run up to groups of human wolf-howlers at night. It stood on hind legs with its front paws on car doors and it chewed bumpers; it tugged on a man’s collar and pulled a woman’s hair. None of this seemed to be aggressive behavior, but one night two boys chased the wolf. As it ran by a fire, it came within arm’s reach of a sixteen-year-old girl, who shone a flashlight in its face. The wolf bit her, breaking the skin though not seriously injuring her. Then it let go, scratched at a nearby tent, and picked up a shoe, and shambled off with it. The wolf was destroyed and tested for rabies, but it proved not to be rabid. Those are the only three records in the park of wolves associating with people.

The best odds of actually seeing a wild wolf today are probably to be had by backpacking into the wild country of Denali National Park in Alaska. It is open country, but difficult to travel in. Fogs and rainstorms obscure the view, and the presence of grizzly bears requires additional care and planning on the part of the visitor. But care and effort may reward the patient seeker. Some park rangers there estimate that as many as 15 percent of back-country travelers see wolves. Gordon Haber reports that, as more and more backpackers visit Denali, the wolves are becoming increasingly habituated to humans. “It’s an everyday event for wolves to walk up to people in the back country or campgrounds and sit down three feet from them,” says Haber. “They pick up a book and walk off with it. They sniff a hand. People will say they looked over their shoulders and there was a wolf sniffing at their heels. It’s a touching kind of relationship. The wolves are totally at ease. It’s like, ‘I see you as a friend.’ ”

One of the hopes for reintroduction is that we will have more encounters with real wolves. Yellowstone and White Sands alike offer broad grassy valleys and hillsides on which people may some day wait, as Robert Stephenson did with Nunamiut Eskimos, to watch wolves.

E. R. Hall’s
Mammals of North America
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1981) recognized twenty-four subspecies of gray wolf
(Canis lupus)
in North America: