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.