Innovative Bear Management Program

This team of teachers venturing into the wilderness the summer will be a little outside of our comfort zones, and bears are one of our biggest fears.  Jokes and nervous laughter have surrounded discussions of our "bear"anoia. I've learned how bear management policies have changed through the years helping to keep humans safe from bears and bears safe from humans.

Mr. Hancock Sixth Grade Science

Karelian Bear Dogs are employed as part of a program of "aversion therapy" used by experts to keep grizz and human separated. They are essential for conditioning the bears to return to wilderness areas and away from human settlement. They help educate the bears to avoid human contact.

Click on the following websites to learn more about this innovative bear management program:

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife - Karelian Bear Dog Program 

Wind River Bear Institute

Wise Up On Wolves

Mr. Hawkin's Fun Facts

Do wolves seek shelter during bad weather in their dens?

Research and observation shows that wolves tend to be prepared for weather with their thick coats and daily intake of protein to not need shelter from weather.   Wolves will usually never enter a den unless there are new young pups there and then it will usually be the alpha female or the alpha male bringing food. Wolves in blizzards actually often find the center of a meadow to ride the weather out.  Wolves travel well worn paths in the snow to conserve energy and usually travel single file with the alpha pair at the lead and subordinates following behind. Wolves use visual and olfactory senses to determine where trails are even when the snow is gone. Wolves also have some members of the pack that patrol the boundary zones to avoid intruders coming in to steal resources. Wolves scent post their territory with urine and feces. Most urine posts on the boundaries range about 900 ft apart.  Unwanted visitors are often killed by the territorial pack.

Do wolves look up into the sky more than dogs?

Wolves tend to look up into the sky often because fresh kills are often signaled by magpies or other scavenger birds. Wolves defend their kill against these birds.  Studies have shown that predatory scavenger birds such as magpies can eat up to 30 % of an available kill.  Wolves cannot afford to lose this amount of energy every time they make a kill.

Do wolves have natural parasites?

Wolves tend to get worms just like dogs do. Wolves tend to survive this though.  Wolves will eat grass just like your dog does. The eating of grass scours out the intestine and gets rid of microscopic parasites. This is why your dog eats grass from time to time.  It can prevent oncoming illness and it can also aid in getting rid of some of the parasites already in the intestine. There is absolutely no food value to the grass for a wolf.  Ungulates or hooved animals that chew a cud are those who have multiple stomachs for digesting grasses. However, in the spring the diet for elk, moose and deer changes during a brief period and the stomach must adjust to this change. This causes prey species to be very anemic and weak at this time and offers prime opportunity to make kills during the primary whelping or birthing  times for female wolves. This is when the alpha will need much energy for herself and the new pups.  Nature has a way of providing for itself.

Field of Dreams

Mr. Hawkins, 8th Grade Science

I was searching the internet today for wolf research and came across this interesting image. I think it reveals the secret to man's attempt at modifying and managing things in the natural world. The key to wildlife management is habitat management. It is almost like the movie, "Field of Dreams", if you manage the habitat the wildlife will come. We must be very careful when we introduce wildlife species that are not native to an area. Trout were released in the upper Yellowstone that were not native and almost depleted the natural trout waters because of competition for resources. Many times in history we have learned the hard way about introducing new species into an area where they were never intended to be. The Yellowstone wolf project was a success at re-introducing the top carnivore to an area where it did exist naturally in the past.

In Oklahoma we have the success story of the Whitetail deer. In the early 50's you could scarcely find a deer in Caddo county where I learned to hunt with my grandfather. He recalls the first Oklahoma deer season which was bucks only. I was able to experience the first doe bonus tags in Oklahoma as a teenager. Today I can hunt does almost all season long due to the abundance of wildlife brought on by much hard work by biologists over the years who used wise practices to enhance habitat and also selectively control wildlife numbers to avoid going over carrying capacity of the land.

One of the keys to a sustainable wolf population or any prey population is large breeding numbers of animals which diversify the bloodlines and also allow for predation and other natural processes in nature. We are connected to the world. Everything we do affects another part of our world ecosystem. Just today I was contacted by a graduate student from OSU asking me to take part in a climate change survey and how great the need was for climatological education at lower levels.

Signing off for today and hoping this blog entry stirs some concern and respect for our role as man in safely and responsibly acting as part of our ecosystem and its relationships.

The Success

A BOOK SUMMARY ON “The Return of the Wolf To Yellowstone”  Author  Thomas McNamee Part 4

by Brad Hawkins

The original wolves released in the Yellowstone were marked with red tags and given numbers.

Number seven and number two became the first to become a mating pair in the wild and became the first naturally formed Yellowstone wolf pack in 70 years.  They will be known now as the Leopold pack named after the great conservationist, Aldo Leopold.  He was the first naturalist to dream of the return of the wolf to Yellowstone.   In the late 1990’s there were 43 wild wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  There were five fully established packs, two others nearly so, two new likely pairs……..and more to come.

Wolf Ecology and Nature

A BOOK SUMMARY ON “The Return of the Wolf To Yellowstone”  Author  Thomas McNamee Part 3

by Brad Hawkins

Wolves will generally run in packs of 2-8.  Large packs of up to 36 members have occurred in Alaska.  This is not normal.  Pack size is generally related to food availability.  When food is available packs cooperate but when food becomes scarce fighting causes dispersion and this makes the original pack smaller.

A wolf pack is usually made of a dominant male called the alpha male.  He will mate and breed with an alpha female.  The rest of the pack is usually pups or related members of this union.  Occasionally a pack will let a drifter into the pack if it deems that the drifter can be of value to the pack in protection or hunting.  The norm however is that a pack will kill an intruding wolf.    Wolves know not to wander into pack boundaries marked by urine scent posts.   These markings are found only hundreds of yards apart.

This means that it is like putting up neon no trespassing signs every 900  ft.   Ignorance can be deadly for a wolf. Generally the alpha will lead the pack in a string of wolves that decrease in importance from front to back.   The alpha will carry the tail high above the back.  Wolves in the pack that are in the middle will carry the tail horizontally behind or off to one side slightly.  Inferior wolves will carry the tail very low or tucked between the legs.

A group howl usually signals a change in activity.  Dominance between two wolves can be shown when one wolf places his head and neck over the body of the more submissive animal.  Inferior  wolves will grin showing their teeth, tilt the head back exposing the neck area, or fall to the group and with belly up showing submission to a more dominant pack member.

Wolves are very social.  They play together, hunt together , and are not shy about smelling and licking on each other.  Wolves tend to follow trails and paths in their territories habitually.   They will eventually have grids and meeting points within the pack territory that can be reached quickly and often in near straight lines.  Packs seem to have a very comprehensive mental image of their territory.   They know their territory “like the back of their hands, oh, sorry – paws.”  Wolf travel patterns generally follow ridge tops for visibility or waterways.

When a female is ready to den up and have her pups.  The other wolves form a barrier around her to protect her from any intruders.  The pack will go out and kill and bring the meat back in their stomachs and regurgitate it for the female and pups.   They all invest in the new pups as part of the pack.  The alpha female will discourage breeding with younger females and will interrupt breeding to maintain her dominance in the pack.  The average litter size is about five pups.  Wolves are old enough to form breeding pairs at the age of two.

Pups who reach age are then forced to disperse and find new territories on their own.   They must be very careful not to intrude on the territory of another pack.   There is usually a “neutral overlap” of pack boundaries that a loner wolf can travel in until it finds an area where it can claim territory and find a suitable mate.

Wolves have a gestation period of 63 days.  Whelping time is nicely coordinated with the period of maximum vulnerability of wolf prey species.  Pups are generally weaned by the end of May each year.

Most wolves will stay as far from humans and human scent as possible.  They have learned over many years that human scent usually means death to a wolf.

Wolves develop what biologists call “prey image”.  The young are taught over and over what to hunt. If wolves are raised around buffalo and buffalo is what the adults feed on, the young will develop a prey image for buffalo and will not go off hunting sheep….. etc.  The Yellowstone wolves were raised in packs that hunted deer, moose, and elk.   Yellowstone was a perfect match for the first batch of wolves reintroduced.

 

Wolves will test their prey when hunting.   If a wolf comes up on a bull elk and the elk bulges his muscles and raises his rack, the wolf will simply see how the elk reacts in the next few minutes.   If the elk runs then the wolf may pursue him.  If he lunges at the wolf, the wolf may decide an easier meal is found elsewhere.  Wolves can understand when prey animals are sick or wounded.  They can smell the scent of a rotten tooth.  Wolves take their time on a kill.  They wait for a chance to go for the neck.  Often a wolf will nip at a heel while another waits near the head and will latch on to the neck until the animal dies trying to support the weight of the dangling wolf.  Wolves will generally start entering the kill at the gut or paunch and then may move to hind quarters.

Wolves usually will not eat meat left by other hunters.   Wolves learned early on that dead meat may mean dead wolf.   Poisons such as strychnine were added to kills to eliminate scavengers that fed on the kill.  If you do not trap a wolf the first time, you just educated him, and there probably won’t be a next time.

History of Wolves in Yellowstone

A BOOK SUMMARY ON “The Return of the Wolf To Yellowstone”  Author  Thomas McNamee Part 2

by Brad Hawkins

The wolf population, as well as other animal populations, including the beaver, were decimated by uncontrolled hunting and trapping in the early 1860’s by companies like the American Fur Trading Company.  Yellowstone became a national park in 1872.  In the 1870’s, the slaughter of the buffalo took place greatly affecting wolf populations in the Yellowstone area.  Cattlemen moved in as the land was tamed and the wolf had very little natural prey.   Wolves began to kill cattle.  This led to more hatred and slaughter of wolves.  This “cow killer” theme has prevailed in the hearts of many to this day.  In 1918 in the name of good, the National Park service declared war on wolf populations by trapping, shooting, and burning pups in dens.  In 1923 the last known natural wolf den was destroyed in Yellowstone National Park.   The last photo of two adult wolves was taken in the Lamar Valley in 1926 feeding on a buffalo carcass.  Then they were gone.

In 1944 Aldo Leopold, one of America’s greatest conservationists, killed a wolf in New Mexico and it changed his view of the wolf.  He wrote an essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which described the fierce green fire dying in the eyes of the wolf as it breathed its last.   Leopold described that that look in the wolf’s eye convinced him that his itchy trigger finger had done something unnaturally wrong against the wolf and the mountain.   He was one of the first major players in looking into reintroduction of the wolf to North America.

In 1972 President Richard Nixon issued an executive order that predator poisons could no longer be used on federal  lands.  In 1973 President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, which set in motion the process that eventually led to wolf reintroduction in the Yellowstone area.  The key to this legislation is the fact that the grey wolf could be considered endangered in one area and have fully growing populations in others.  This meant that the population of wolves in one state did not affect the adding of wolves to an endangered species list in another.  Technically there were no breeding pairs of wolves that called Yellowstone home.  This meant that we could transfer wolves from wolf rich Canada to wolf poor Yellowstone under the Endangered Species Act.

The original plan for reintroduction of the wolf to the Yellowstone involved capture and transportation of two major groups of wolves into Idaho and the Yellowstone valley from Alberta , Canada.  Approximately 15 wolves would go to Idaho with blue ear tags and radio collars and the others would go to Yellowstone and have red ear tags and radio collars.

One of the chief biologists in on the transfer from the start is wolf specialist David Mech (pronounced “meech”).    He strongly believed that wolf predation on cattle and other livestock would be minimal from the start.  Mech was a student of the famous wolf biologist, Durward Allen.  He was involved in the Minnesota study of wolves on Isle Royale.  Isle Royale was an island cut off from other land masses that had wolves introduced onto it in 1957.  Allan wrote a classic book on wolves called “The Wolves of Minong.”   The problem with the Isle Royale packs was that there was much inbreeding due to most of the members of the packs originating from one alpha female.   This was compounded by the fact that there was no way for the bloodlines to diverge because there was no method of dispersion.  This made these wolves highly susceptible to diseases such as Parvo introduced accidentally by a dog brought to the island.  The packs also had breakdowns in hierarchy due to territory limits and relatedness on such a small area

We learned much about managing new wolf populations from the mistakes made on Isle Royale in the early 50’s and onward. 

  

In the mid-80’s around 1985 a movement began to re-introduce the wolf to Yellowstone.   Many tried to stop this movement.  Some claimed that there was no need for a reintroduction because there were wolves already in Yellowstone.   This was never scientifically verified and most of the wolves accounted for were probably drifters from the North.  There was no permanent population of wolves in Yellowstone before the reintroduction began.

The Battle

A BOOK SUMMARY ON “The Return of the Wolf To Yellowstone”  Author  Thomas McNamee Part 1

by Brad Hawkins

The critical factor for wolf survival in human habitat is mutual understanding.  Fear and hatred thrive on ignorance and ignorance thrives on isolation.  We must be well informed when we make decisions about wildlife.

Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the Northwestern corner of Wyoming, Eastern Idaho and southern Montana is “the largest remaining essentially intact ecosystem in the temperate zones of the earth.” The Yellowstone is the longest free flowing river in the United States.  The grey wolf, Canis lupus, was the dominant predator in this original area.

Of the 18 million acres in the Yellowstone region, only 2.2 million acres inside Yellowstone National Park are off limits to cattle, Bos Taurus.  

Of the 18 million acres in the Yellowstone region, only 2.2 million acres inside Yellowstone National Park are off limits to cattle, Bos taurus. 

One of the central struggles with Yellowstone wolf populations is the battle with ideologies of ranchers and sheepherders and their understanding of wolf ecology.  The wolf, to some, not only poses a threat to domesticated livestock, but also, threatens the “cowboy way of life”.

There is always a constant struggle between entrenched ideas passed down through generations versus scientific data to the contrary concerning wolves and their relationships to livestock.

Wolves will kill livestock at times, but it is not the way they are wired ecologically.  Wolves that have been conditioned to certain prey species tend to continue to search out and depend on those species.

The original wolves in the Yellowstone came from Alberta, Canada and were mainly predatory on elk.  These wolves would rarely feed on dead elk because meat already dead had been used to poison other pack members and they had learned not to eat meat already killed in the past.  Yellowstone wolves have been known to den and rest in the midst of cattle herds and never bother a single animal.

However, there are wolves that do obtain a taste for domestic animals and would need to be removed from the population.   This is not the norm in wolf populations of Yellowstone.

Riparian zones, green bands of plant life along creeks etc… which provide fodder for cattle, are very important to wildlife and plant species in the Yellowstone area.  Many populations are centered in life around these riparian zones just like fish are drawn into estuaries.

Varied habitat components make these riparian zones small sub-ecosystems in their own right.  Cattle herds, left to their own in these zones, cause drastic changes in vegetation and this leads to bank erosion which in turn affects many aspects of the ecosystem in terms of fish populations and certain tree populations.  Eroded overgrazed land leads to a weed called leafy spurge that takes over in an area and depreciates the value of the food chain.   We have a similar problem with weeds such as yellow broomweed in Oklahoma.  These weed species are a warning of over grazing.  This in turn causes major losses to consumers up the food chain.   With this being said, it is important to note that both ranching and wolf reintroduction need to be done with caution because of the sensitive balances between all parts of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Ranch practices have improved in the Yellowstone area by fencing cattle out of these riparian zones that are right next to the first 15 feet of bank.   This has allowed protection of the sensitive waterways.

Wolves must be managed also in order to allow for an ecological balance that provides acceptable options for the wildlife, ranchers, tourists, and all political forces involved in making such major choices.

Our Fund for Teacher Study Fellowship Destinations:

Boxwork Formations at Wind Cave National Park

Devils Tower National Monument

Bison Grazing at Yellowstone National Park

The Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River

The Grand Teton Range Grand Teton National Park

Thank You for Believing in Teachers

Fund for Teachers, Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, and Tulsa Community Foundation have made it possible for  four teachers from Cushing Middle School to have some "face time" this summer while we travel 2900 miles to study the geology and biology of four National Parks. Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, Devil's Tower National Monument, Yellowstone National Park, and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming will be the focus of our study. We will then plan a cross-curricular research project for our students to research and suggest solutions to dilemmas facing the Parks Service today. Bears, marmots, wolves, and bison will only be the beginning of a wonderful adventure. Join us June 28 - July 14, 2013 as we laugh, learn, plan, and become a team.