February 22, 2019 at 4:57 p.m.
Ron Schultz presents 'Wolves of Winter Park'
Ron Schultz presents 'Wolves of Winter Park'
By Jordan Smedberg-
Timber Wolf Alliance was started by the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute based out of Northland College in 1987 to promote wolf recovery in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. At that time, only 18 wolves were estimated to live in Wisconsin and even fewer in Upper Michigan.
"In the mid-1950s, the wolf was actually treated as a vermin," Schultz said. "There was a bounty put on them so any wolf that was seen was killed."
Thanks to the efforts of organizations like the Timber Wolf Alliance, Wisconsin now boasts an estimated 235 wolf packs with around 905-920 some wolves. But that doesn't mean everyone's happy about it.
The big bad wolf
"European settlers came here with some pretty bad myths about wolves, because in Europe they did have some problems," Schultz explained.
He's not kidding. According to historical records, France saw nearly 7,600 people killed by wolves between 1362 and 1918.
While wolves would have been a problem for the Europeans who came here with the intention of animal husbandry, Schultz points out that Native Americans had not only been coexisting with wolves for thousands of years, but actually using them to their benefit.
"I'm sure many times the wolves would make a kill and the Natives would tear the wolves away and eat its kill, and they actually used the hide of the wolves to get close to animals to harvest them," he said.
So how many people have wolves killed in the United States?
"In the last 100 years in North America only two people were killed by wolves (and) one injured," Schultz reported.
To put that into perspective, 57 people were killed by dogs in North America in 2017 alone.
Both of the deaths that resulted from the wolf attacks involved wolves that were habituated with people. The injury was sustained by a camper in a sleeping bag outside of his tent in Minnesota. The camper's long black hair was all that could be seen.
The results of the necropsy showed the wolf couldn't hear or smell and was just going by sight.
"We assume the wolf thought it was some type of animal, " Schultz said.
'Bar room biology'
Wolves have also been blamed for the dwindling numbers of deer killed by hunters each year.
"We don't take political sides," Schultz said of the Timber Alliance. "We try not to, some times it's hard not to if we have sound facts."
While deer do constitute a majority of the wolf diet, Schultz said they found four out of five deer the wolves killed were injured or sick. They are less likely to go after healthy deer because, "they don't want to get hurt. So what they do is clean up the mess."
Others aren't quite so sure. Schultz said he's heard countless conspiracy theories over the years detailing how and why the wolves showed up, a practice he calls "bar room biology." A favorite was told to him years ago by a gas station attendant in Tomahawk who was convinced the wolves were dropped from C131 aircrafts. When Schultz asked the man why he thought the government would do such a thing, the man scoffed.
"Oh the government didn't do that," Schultz said the man said. "The paper companies do that. The deer are eating all of the little trees that they plant so they brought the wolves in to kill the deer."
Schultz theorizes that one practice which may have fueled such rumors is the translocating of wolves.
"It's been documented that if you translocate an animal for 50 miles ... there's about a 75 percent chance that it won't go back to the same spot," he said.
So whenever there was a degradation problem, say a wolf was killing livestock, Schultz would translocate them, often dropping them off in Nicolet National Forest. Perhaps it's fair to say some of these wolves did seem like they dropped out of thin air. Indeed, Schultz did have wolves in the back of his truck while entertaining the Tomahawk gas station man's theories.
Not so big, not so bad?
So what are the wolves in Northern Wisconsin really like? For one, they're not so big. Schultz says the largest wolf he's caught in Wisconsin weighed 106 pounds.
"You'll hear stories of 130, 150, 300 pounds sometimes (and) in Denali and Yellowstone (they) do get up (there) because they feed on larger animals," Schultz said, but the average female Wisconsin wolf weighs around 50-60 pounds, while the average male is around 70-80.
The pack size remains smaller here, too, for the same reason, averaging just three to four wolves to a pack compared to Yellowstone packs, which average 10.
Growing up wolf
When tracking wolves, Schultz and his colleagues will look for two animals exhibiting "Raised Leg Urination" (RLU). The alphas (also known as breeders) are the only animals allowed to do so because they're dominant.
"When we see double RLUs we know we have a pair bonding couple here and this time of year we know ... we're probably going to have pups," Schultz said.
After trapping a wolf with a modified foothold trap, Schultz and his colleagues will place a lightweight collar on the wolves to track their movements. In the early days the trackers would have to use an aircraft to spot the animal and plot its location. Now they use GPS collars, which don't last as long (three years as opposed to seven), but save in airplane fuel.
Dens are often made in old bear dens or uprooted trees, 25-100 meters from a good water source. The dens are usually on a south-facing slope so come April, when the pups are born, the solar heat will help keep them warm.
A good den can be hard to come by and when a pack finds one, it can keep coming back to it for decades.
Schultz said when he first started tracking the Bootjack Lake pack just west of Squirrel Lake Road in the 1980s, a local told him where to look for a den that had existed when he was a kid in the 1930s and '40s. Schultz had already spotted it. The pack was still using the same the den 50 years later.
In mid-July, when the pups are around 20 pounds, they move from the birth den to a rendezvous site where they'll stay for three to four weeks until they're old enough to accompany the pack on hunts. The rendezvous site, Schultz says, usually is in a windy enough area to blow away the insects and close to water supply and prey.
Although about 70 percent of pups will never see their first birthday, those that do will disperse around three years of age and look for other wolves to start their own pack.
Occasionally wolves will move out of their 50 square mile pack territory, meet a mate and start another pack right next door. Known as "budding off," this is what has happened to the Bootjack Lake Pack. Members budded off and started two other packs: the Wilson Flowage Pack and the North Willow Pack, which currently occupies the park.
Bootjack Lake Pack
When Schultz first began studying the Bootjack Lake Pack in 1982, he said the wolves were probably a dog hybrid. Though they didn't have the means to do DNA tests back then, the wolves were smaller than the average wolves are now, the largest weighing in around 45-50 pounds. They also had a sharper contrast in the colors of their fur, which Schultz says you don't normally see in wild animals.
After one of the first females he caught of that pack was killed by a deer hunter, her daughter took over the pack and a new male came in and she started having pups. Over the years the wolves started to look "more wolfy."
Schultz also collared the first black wolf detected in Wisconsin in the Bootjack Lake Pack, naming him Midnight.
"Three weeks after I collared him somebody shot him," Schultz said.
Unfortunately, a lot of Schultz's stories end this way. Once, a lactating female was shot during spring turkey season. Consequently her entire litter died.
In addition to hunters, disease and automobile accidents account for the high mortality rate for wolves in Wisconsin.
A sheep in wolf's clothing?
While many of the myths surrounding wolves are exaggerated or untrue, a sheep in wolf's clothing they are not. Though wolves account for less than one half of 1 percent of livestock deaths, Schultz concurs that if you're in that percentage "it's a problem."
Up until 10 or 15 years ago, rendering companies would pay fairly good money for dead cattle, Schultz said, using them to make glue among other things. Now it actually costs money to get rid of them, so farmers will often drag the dead cattle to the edge of the woods and leave them there.
When the wolves come to scavenge, "they're eating these calves (and) they're looking out on the field and seeing other calves being born, (they) kind of put two and two together and ... it's a lot easier than going out an killing a deer," Schultz said.
Because the wolf is listed as an endangered species, it's illegal to euthanize them. wolves are in most parts of Northern Wisconsin, so translocating isn't an option.
"We're kind of executing them by putting them there because other wolves will kill them if they come in their territory," Schultz said.
So Schultz and his colleagues are experimenting with different techniques to deter wolves from farms, including biofencing, shock collars, donkeys, llamas and Great Pyrenees dogs.
"Everything we use works for a short period of time until the wolves get acclimated to it and they start their degradation again, so we end up paying the livestock grower for his losses," Schultz said.
Which is also what the state does in the slight chance that a pet dog is killed by a wolf.
"Last year ... I think we had one pet dog injured and one killed, so the pet dogs are real low," Schultz said. "Hunting hounds used ... primarily (for) bear hunting and training, those are real high, it gets up to 27 dogs sometimes."
This is primarily because the bait stations set out for bears attract wolves, which then set up rendezvous sites around the station. When the hounds come, the wolves want to defend their pups.
Current status
"Many people think that the wolves haven't recovered because they haven't occupied their historical range," Schultz said. "There's no way they're going to occupy their historical range because a lot of their historical range is now fast food joints, supermarkets and ballparks, so that's not going to happen."
Schultz believes Wisconsin can't sustain too many more packs, but also points out that when wolves were delisted a few years ago too many were harvested, so it's a tricky balance.
Now that the wolves have recovered, the Timber Wolf Alliance has shifted its focus to managing and learning to coexist with the wolves.
While wolves are currently on the federal endangered species list, Wisconsin has them listed as a game species, so as soon as it's delisted federally it will become "fair game" in Wisconsin.
Currently, out of the over 900 estimated wolves in Wisconsin, 66 are collared.
"We probably have 35 packs collared out of 235, so we use that as an indicator of what's happening," Schultz said.
Quiet as a wolf
After Schultz's presentation, which included passing around wolf hides and tracking collars, the crowd headed outside for a short hike through Winter Park's trails to do some wolf calls. Although none called back, it was nice to know they were out there.
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