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Wolves of the Yukon
by
Bob Hayes
This book is dedicated to my parents,
Leonard and Eileen Hayes, and to my wife, Caroline Hayes
Wolves of the Yukon
Published in 2010
by Bob Hayes
All rights reserved © Bob Hayes 2010
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1047-0
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Foreword
Wolves. The images that this word brings to mind vary tremendously around the world, both in scope and in their nature. This usually relates to what we have read (“Wolves Kill 30 Sheep”), seen in photos (what a marvelous looking animal….), or been told. But for a relatively few, also to what we have encountered where wolves actually occur.
My first encounter was from the back of a small airplane circling over a sleeping pack in forested northeastern Minnesota. That evening, from a cold, snow-packed trail less than a mile from those same wolves, a human howled into a still, black night and elicited a mournful, wild reply. After that, fate and a bit of determination put me on track to spend subsequent summers and then years studying wolves and their prey in several different places. Now, my own image of wolves is tempered by having caught and collared them, watched them from airplanes, collected and analyzed data that helped me understand them, and dealt with people who had intense feelings for them, both good and bad.
And to this extent, I certainly have an affinity to Bob Hayes and his experiences with wolves, the subject of this book. I passed through the Yukon one summer during college while driving to and from Alaska, and I remember endless black spruce forests, rugged mountains with a few white sheep specks, few but friendly people, and gorgeous northern lights. It also turned out that I first saw Dall’s sheep up close much later in life when I hiked with Bob and families high on the alpine tundra above Kusawa Lake in the southern Yukon, not far, I think, from his introductory narrative of wolves hunting sheep in Chapter 11. We had camped on the edge of the lake, a long boat ride from the nearest road access with no one else for miles around. It was a magnificent setting in a spectacular place, and the short time spent there and a few other locales in the Yukon made me appreciate even more this special place and the wolf biologist who thrived there.
Bob’s captivating historical overview of the Yukon from the wolf’s perspective is an auspicious beginning that sparks one’s imagination of what used to be. The interactions with the first humans in the Yukon give perspective to those which have followed, and helps one better understand the very recent and current circumstances under which wolf “management” has attempted to control this wild place. But because of low human density and a relatively light human “footprint”, the wilderness of the Yukon still provides a full complement of indigenous flora and fauna and natural processes. And because of its diversity, it is a microcosm of wolf/prey interactions throughout much of their northern hemispheric range. As Bob chronicles, wolves prey on migrating caribou on the tundra, hunt moose in thick spruce forests, and chase sheep on sheer mountain cliffs. From a scientist’s point of view, the circumstances of studying wolves in such a place are enviable. More importantly, the insights that Bob and colleagues have generated over the years have added importantly to the ability of we humans to intelligently interact with wolves and the systems in which they live. That is one major lesson of this book. Another is that it is a rare and valuable thing to have the opportunity to spend such time learning about wildlife, whether wolves or wagtails, and to make the most out of such chances. Bob Hayes certainly accomplished that, as well.
One lingering, pebble-in-my-shoe thought that has arisen as a result of reading this book has to do with wild places, in general, and how we experience them (or don’t, for many of the current generation). Many wolf biologists of Bob’s and my generation also took advantage of what was, at the beginning of our careers, a high-tech innovation called radio-telemetry. The benefit it provided was that we could jump in an airplane or helicopter and find marked wolves almost anytime we wanted to, watch them for a minute or two, and then move on to the next pack. It afforded the opportunity to collect significantly more data of certain kinds, and to generate tables and graphs that helped answer many questions more confidently. We caught wolves, handled them, followed tracks, investigated kill sites and den sites, and picked up scats. But I think previous generations of wolf biologists likely scoffed a bit, and even shook their heads in sorrow, at what we, the new guys, were losing by not spending even more time on the ground, like they did, collecting information the old-fashioned way, and experiencing the world of the wolf in a much more intimate way, albeit more slowly and deliberately. The “pebble” is that students I help today now often mark large mammals with satellite-connected collars and monitor nearly real-time hourly movements at their desk, then make inferences about locations of kill sites and test new ideas about travel paths and habitat use. But I think they are losing even more of the connection with the real environment than I did, and so I scoff and shake my head in sorrow. “Go to the Yukon,” I should tell them, “and experience what the natural world is really like… and if not, then read this book and you’ll yearn to go.”
Todd Fuller, Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Preface
The wolf is the most studied large mammal on earth and there are more books written about them than just about any other animal. So why write another one? As a biologist for the Yukon government, I had the fortune of studying wolves for almost twenty years and learned a lot about them. I have come to understand that the Yukon wolf story is unique and needs to be told. By sharing what I have learned about this exceptional carnivore, I hope I will help others understand more about the wolf’s role in the natural and human history of the Yukon.
Wolves are the primary natural force that has shaped and animated the Yukon wilderness through the last ice age to today. They are the key predator controlling and keeping Yukon moose and caribou populations in check. The Yukon wolf is also an important mythological animal to native peoples, and a central foundation of the culture, social system, spiritual world, and story myths of many tribes. But there is more. The evolution of the wolf as the symbol of wilderness – and our very perception of what is wild – first came from the imagination of a young writer who spent a brief winter in the Yukon at the turn of the twentieth century.
In addition, much of the history of the Yukon since the gold rush was shaped by our insatiable competition with wolves for wild game. Wolves rival the importance of the Klondike gold fields in driving the politics and economy of the Yukon Territory during the twentieth century. In nearly all decades, the Yukon government found ways to kill wolves, mainly to benefit trappers and big
