wolves

default blog post image

Ghost Trees

The standing dead trees were everywhere, their boles weathered silver where the bark had peeled. The carcasses of their fallen comrades littered the understory, with few aspen sprouting from the deadfall. The occasional mangled saplings we observed provided graphic evidence of heavy elk browsing.
default blog post image

Aldo Leopold and the Mark of the Wolf's Tooth

In the early 1900s, while cruising timber as a young forester, American conservationist Aldo Leopold, founder of the science of wildlife biology, encountered a female wolf with her pups. The common wisdom of that era was that the only good predator was a dead one, so he and his crew opened fire. But as he stood there watching the “fierce green light” fade in the wolf mother’s eyes, he felt a sharp, surprising pang of remorse. It would take him decades to parse out his feelings about her death.
default blog post image

Earth Day at the Shack

Three springs ago I visited the Leopold Memorial Reserve—the depleted Wisconsin sand county farm Aldo Leopold bought in 1930 known as the “shack.” In the 1940s he recorded in his field notes that without large predators such as wolves to regulate their numbers, deer were eating aspens and other trees and shrubs to death. I wanted to see whether this was still so.
default blog post image

Wolves in the Pacific Northwest: Ecology’s Tangled Web

Washington State’s old-growth rainforests are among the richest communities on earth. These ancient forests support astonishing biodiversity due to their high moisture, nutritious soil, and architecture. The Douglas-fir, a formidable tree giant that can live over 1,000 years, embodies these forests’ physical characteristics. Its 500-foot-tall, multilayered canopy, thick trunk, and enormous volume (called “biomass”), whether living or dead, provides home for many species.
default blog post image

Wolves and the Ecology of Fear in Action

Recently, I spent time with a friend in a northern part of the Rockies with thriving wolf population. My friend was skeptical about how wolves affect ecosystems—was—because an event that morning rapidly changed his mind.
default blog post image

Combating Global Warming with Wolves

I recently attended the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the theme was global warming. Eminent ecologists presented models that projected climate change into a bleak future where species that require unique habitat may be unable to persist.
default blog post image

The Mark of the Wolf’s Tooth by Cristina Eisenberg

Spring comes to the northern Rocky Mountains like a lion and often leaves like one too. This spring proved no different. I spent it in Waterton, Alberta, resampling eighty miles of track transects I had created three years earlier, looking for changes in wolf and elk use of this critical wildlife corridor. My study area in Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park spans the US-Canada border and harbors most wildlife species present at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Track transect surveys are among my favorite fieldwork, because this method allows me to experience landscapes intimately. Walking along the same pathways that wolves and elk use, I pull measuring tape in fifty-yard increments and record all the large mammal animal sign I find along a two-yard strip on either side of the tape. Along the way I often find unexpected and fascinating things and secret places—coyote dens, wolf rendezvous sites, a newborn elk bedded in the shrubs, and the place where a grizzly sow has lain with her cubs. However, this method can only be applied between snowmelt and when the grass grows tall enough to hide the data (wolf and elk droppings, carcass pieces). This May, five snowstorms made our work more challenging than usual, effectively burying my data and immuring us in our quarters for days.

Pages