Wolf Blues
Posted February 19, 2008 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
He could have been the lead singer in a blues band, the lone gray wolf. His voice was wild, tremulous and it filled the valley with the sound of longing. His message was unmistakable: “I want a woman”.
His audience was the Druid pack, 16 wolves strong, languishing in the snow, meat drunk from a recent kill. They looked at the lone wolf from across the Lamar River with mild interest.
No one knew where he had come from, but everyone knew what he was there for. For days he had shadowed the Druids, one of the most bad-ass packs in Yellowstone, and he hadn’t been picked off yet. He was taking his time, keeping a respectful distance, hoping with his serenade to be accepted into the pack, or to seduce one of its females into joining him.
It’s wolf mating season here in Yellowstone, when pheromones—the smell of sex—fill the air. Alpha females are cranky—and every wolf around knows it. The alpha female usually breeds with the pack’s alpha male, but in the soap opera history of the Druid pack, that’s not always been the case. (This pack has violated a lot of what scientists think are the norms of animal behavior, including once, the incest taboo).
Pups will be born two months after mating, in April, in a den sheltered from the wind and weather. The Druid’s litter will likely be four to six pups, which will be born deaf and blind. More than half the litter will likely die—from diseases, hypothermia from later winter storms, and sometimes other predators.
Pups will be raised not just by parents, but by members of the whole pack, who demonstrate enormous generosity with the little terrors. Playing, eating, and sleeping, pups grow up surrounded by adults with seemingly infinite patience for their sharp teeth and boundless curiosity.
By this time next year, the wolf pups will be physically full grown—about 80 to a maximum of a 140 pounds. If they are lucky, they may live 13 or 14 years. For life in the wilderness is rough. There are parasites and diseases, like mange and canine distemper. There are injuries inflicted by moose and other prey—skull fractures, broken ribs and legs. And there are the highly publicized incidents of wolf being killed by wolves from other packs—a kind of gang warfare.
Surviving in the wild when you rely on killing animals 2 to 10 times your body weight is no mean feat—even if most of the pack is engaged in bringing down dinner. But wolves somehow make it. All they need is a little compassion from their only real predator: the one with two legs. The ones who wiped out 95% of them in the lower-48 states. The ones who are set to do it again in the Northern Rockies in a few short weeks, after so much work to restore wolves here—unless we stop them.
As this lone wolf sings the blues, let’s help him with the chorus: keep the wild in our lives—and the wolves.
Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
Charles Kovalck — Feb 22 2008 02:26 AM
Hey Louisa:
I see that you are the director of the Wild Bears project,...
Is there a Director for the Wolves,...
I've read your blog,... lovely!
But I was hoping to get this message to the director for wolves, if there is such a position.
I have an idea, for the up coming wolf slaughter...
How about replacing the bullets with darts,
and re-locating them to other National Parks in other states?
I live in New England,... we have a lot of room, for some wolves.
The deer population is more than,... abundant!
We have coyotes,... but most people shoot them.
Maine is the only state up here that has a National Park,... Arcadia.
Maybe some one should talk to that Park about
releasing the excess wolves there.
And then there is Vermont, New Hampshire and even Northern New York, not New England, but close enough, and lots of woods!
There is resistance out there to stop this massacre from happening.
Nick J. Rahall, II (WV-3); Norm Dicks (WA-6); Wayne T. Gilchrest (MD-1); George Miller (CA-7); Jim Saxton (NJ-3).
Maybe these states would be able to set enough land aside to accommodate a wolf pack?
Just a thought!
I'd hate to see these wolves,...
disappear, at the hands of human hunters for the kill-joy aspect of hunting!
There were here long before we were, and should remain.
I mean come on,... how many sheep and cows do they actually kill?
As, for the deer,... Up here, they're so prevalent, we cull them!
Besides, if California, can live with Cougars, and Michigan with wolves...
Why can't New England?
I believe,... WE can!
... as far as I've researched... there has never,... NEVER,...
been a documented human death caused by a wolf,... ever!
Even a pack of wolves!
again,... just a thought.
P.S. A lot of us have guns, I don't think walking alone in the woods would hazardous
to humans,... the wolf on the other may meet it's demise!
Can stop people from killing.
Best regards,
Chuck
Anthony Eastment — Feb 23 2008 02:44 AM
Thanks, Louisa, for a balanced and hauntingly beautiful essay on canis lupus. Had the good fortune to see black wolf302M in Lamar recently. Nearby was a gray...also a beta M and they played, wrassled and howled in turn. A herd of bison foraged in the snow a 100 yards away, unperturbed. Two days later the Druid Peak pack took down a bison, near the ranger station in Lamar valley.
Montana PBS (out of Butte) runs a 10 minute spot every Sunday eve about truth in wolves.
I read -source n/a that in IDA more than 50% favor wolf clemency.
A very telling sentence in yesterday's Congressmen's letter that "OUTFITTERS FOR [ELK HUNTINGARE BIGGEST PROPONENTS FOR SLAUGHTER]. No surprise, this 'shoot-on-sight' edict is driven by GREED. (and I agree, ignorance and fear).
And yes, according to exhaustuve studies under aegis of YIA, humans have been killed by wolves. This in the wild. How does that compare to bear and cougar?
I will support anyone NRDC, who will challenge and stop this slaughter. I thought our emergency expenditure of an ad in Friday 2/1/08's NY Times was targeting an indifferent audience and waste of energy.
Please advise if I may be of assitance in any way,
Tony Eastment, NRDC member,
Denver
anthony eastment — Feb 23 2008 02:56 AM
thankyou for the insightful and haunting essay. The more I follow this issue of 'shoot-on-sight' the less the ranchers and cattlemen seem to be proponents as much as HUNTING OUTFITTERS, as the Congressmen state in their letter.
Idahoans are split on their consensus; I believe, according to Yellowstone Association there have been human casulaties. In the wild.
PBS Montana(Butte) ran spots to dispell ignorance.
let me know if I can assist in any way, to encourage these great creatures coexistence.
Tony
Connee Robertson — Feb 23 2008 03:48 AM
How I love reading about the wild wolves and your essay is so hauntingly beautiful!I have a suggestion. That NRDC and Defenders and Earthjustice and all of the conservation groups (to which I belong) start a grass roots movement by utilizing members to have meetings in their communities across the US to educate the public and ask for support to protect and safeguard these animals. The reason that I have become involved with all of the above listed conservation groups began with my own involvement with captive wolves in the early 1970's and beyond to my own wolf, William, who graced our lives and gave me intimate knowledge up-close and personal relationship with a member of this magnificent species. I am a Biologist who lives in a centrally located town in Arkansas. I would love to help educate people by holding town meetings and forming groups to support the efforts of people like yourself and the bigger organizations to protect our wildlife and wildplaces. My husband and I started a wild life hospital here and we have hands on experience with injuries of various creatures, almost all inflicted by something of man or domestic animals. We find that most people are totally unaware of what is the truth about wolves, or bats, or many other animals that they live around every day. People are now becoming more curious about wild creatures and want to know more about them. Why not give teaching tools to volunteers around the country that could spend once a month or once a week lecturing to schools and community meetings? It begins with each and every person...but, I have yet to be approached by any of the groups for more than signing online petitions and sending money for the various campaigns.I am the only person I know that would sit up in the middle of the night after a long day of work and write letters to my Congressmen to stop wolves from being taken off the ESL. I am willing to bet there are more people out there with a passion for wildlife that do not know where to direct it. The more we really educate the vast majority of the populous, the more support we can garner for our causes. I recently asked NRDC if I could personally pay to run the national ad on wolves that was run in the New York Times in my local newspaper. It dawned on me that if I had a group of local people that could meet that they could share the costs of running one of those ads (our paper greatly reduced the rate to $183)and we could garner local support, as well. We need to do more...we are more powerful than the elk outfitters and there are more of us who love wolves than want to kill them. I am so frustrated at this point after all of these years of working to restore the wolf for a few people in the US to turn around and allow their slaughter without an outcry so great that it would garner more than a brief mention and a picture in National Geographic and a 45 second spot on CNN News and if a person did not catch that or did not read that magazine.....only those of us who have been following this from before the inception of bringing the wolf back from the extirpation would know. I want more people to know and respect their right to be.
Merle Lien — Feb 23 2008 02:59 PM
Hi Louisa,
I am a resident of the Candian Yukon Territory for 37 years although born and raised in Montana. A Wolf Kill slaughter was carried out in the 90's by our government by aircraft gunners and trappers. It was done on the excuse that caribuo herds were in danger of extinction caused by too many wolves. The problem was in fact caused by over-hunting causing an imbalance. Hunters wanted more wildlife on their dinner plate. Although there was opposition to the kill, the majority hunter mentality prevailed as they are a larger voting block. The problem was also that wildlife officers and biologists are themselves often hunters, and greed rules. The game officers wear shoulder patches which say "Conservation Officer". This patch should rather say "Destruction Officer" as their work is primarily the issueing of hunting licenses.
At the time of this slaughter, an award winning Yukon musician produced an album entitled "Bleeding Wolves" inspired by his campaign against the slaughter. He has gone on to be famous in Taiwan. For those interested his web page is www.matthewlien.com.
JohnLopresti — Feb 24 2008 03:49 PM
The wolf and grizzly stories the blog owner wrote add a dimension to what is an obscure story in modern American life. Some of the tale's passages recall an interview in which I participated at a local university that was accepting a transfer of a field biologist expert in coyotes, together with his government funds targeting ways to eradicate coyotes. The entire nefarious enterprise was kept secret until the actual meeting in person between me and the prospective transferee. Having read in the media of the fading government sources of funding for coyote extinction, when the interview with the coyote exterminator professor took the unannounced turn of encouraging a clinical brand of approbation of the process of helping ranchers kill coyotes by legal methods, I opted for a ruse to exit the meeting quickly, averring I was not either activist nor environmentalist. Before the participants disbanded from the meeting, some attempted to turn a crumbling interview process into a praise of integrated pest management, an underlying theme supported by research many field biologists in the university saw as a key initiative in their individual and collaborative lifework. But there is lucre aplenty to be had in scouting for modern safaris, and thrills more vivid than the vicarious prurience of viewing programming on the nature channel. How does one balance boredom against the scales of natural predation ecology, the rhetorical question begins to form. The courts need to protect the investment and science which restored the wolves in that sparsely populated by humans part of the US. There is precedent for halting by restraining order these jaded ploys by the current federal executive branch of government; advocates halted the government plan to log first growth sequoia, and a temporary restraining order has extinguished the government's lame excuses for 'taking' 140,000 incidentally killed cetaceans in a nearshore exercise to practice with loud low frequency designs in a new sonar equipment wargame. I leave it to the experts to halt BushCo grandstanding in the same way these successful court fights have staved off the attempt to regulate by executive fiat rather than seeking actual science inputs. The west coast fishing of salmon has been in various states of collapse since the vice president and the then principal advisor to the president for politics marched out a reclamation project berm to help tractor driving locals open the Klamath diversion gates, robbing spawning anadromous fish of the instream waters required for their species survival; instead, our bluedog congresman sponsored relief check mailouts to unemployed ocean salmon small business fishing tradespersons a few months ago. So the populace pays the price of the safari bravado and vote-getting demos of dam diversions manyfold, as if lawmakers have tunneled their capacity to sense outcomes, papering over injury to both wildlife and pecuniary budgets with yet more doling of tax cash to some of the most affected people; yet, there is a sense in which none of those folks will know how nature produced pest species, nor do the lawmakers hear the yowl; and certainly the elected representatives miss the elemental feeling of passing thru an ecosystem which is rich with counterbalancing populations. d.c. al fine. Yowl.
sheila saunders — Feb 26 2008 04:28 AM
Any update on the lone wolf finding a mate or being accepted into the pack?? thanks, sheila