Wolves are clearly on the rebound in terms of their populations in northern North America and parts of Europe.
In Alaska and in the rural parts of the prairie provinces of Canada, British Columbia, the Yukon & Nunavit, populations have remained quite healthy all along.
In the lower 48 states of the US, the wolf population has increased primarily in the area of the Yellowstone National Park, where it was deliberately reintroduced, and succeeded spectacularly.
A more modest increase has been seen in the northern border areas of Minnesota, the Dakotas and even, according to reports of sightings, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is mostly due to crossovers from Canada, over prairies, forested areas, and around the shoreline route of the Great Lakes.
In Europe, geographically separated populations in Spain and Italy have rebounded modestly.
But there has been more vibrant regneration of wolfpacks in heavily forested areas of Poland, the Baltic States (particularly Lithuania, where the wolf is the equivalent of the bald eagle in the US in terms of national folklore and iconography) and in the Northern European parts of Russia.
Wolfpacks in trans-Ural Russia, especially Siberia, have not been significantly under wide area pressure, although the fur trade can be only marginally regulated from afar, and local wolf populations can be stressed through overtrapping and excessive shooting.
With What Predators (Other Than Man) Do Wolves Compete?
Wolves will eat anything from small mice to moose and elk, but demonstrably favor deer in most of North America, at least.
In Canada, and most of North Eastern Europe, the only frequent natural carnivorous top competitors of wolves for deer and larger game are lynx and bear.
Badgers and woverines compete for some of the same living prey at the small end (e.g. rabbits, hares, beavers), but not commonly for larger living game. Both badgers and wolverines are capable of taking down large game on rare occasions, but compete with wolves mostly for carrion, which they will defend ferociously from not only wolves but from lynxes, mountain lions, and bears of all types.
Compartive Hunting Styles & Killing Efficiencies of Top Predators
Cougars have a very high rate of killing efficiency: if they can get close enough to leap onto their prey, they will very likely make a kill. In terms of killing style, the cougar attempts to land onto the back or neck of the prey and kills it with a single decisive bite through its spinal cord. The claws of a cougar, while formidable, appear to be primarily defensive in nature, except when snagging small game. Cougars tend to kill and eat some of their prey in the open and then drag their prey back to a more secluded spot, or den.
Wolves almost always goes for the throat, flanks or underbelly when they lunge, and will rip holes in its prey, causing death by multiple wounds leading to exsanguination. Most reports suggest that individual adult wolves and wolf packs in general, eat all they can possibly retain right at the spot of the kill, feeding up to 25% of their individual body weight.
Mother wolves will subsequently vomit up some of the meat for their wolf cubs, although some 2007 studies suggest that they may have adapted the behavior of limiting the amount of meat fed to their youngest pups, because it reduces the number or “load per pound” of internal parasites that come from the prey animal meat going into the pup, thereby encouraging the pup’s survival. (90% of pups do not see adulthood.)
Fighting Among Predators: How Often Does It Really Happen?
A major question has been how do cougars and wolves go on without killing one another on a regular basis, something that has been observed far more on YouTube videos on the Net than in nature.
It turns out that the best answer for at least the North American Rockies is that cougars who share the same general hunting range will favor higher (and generally drier and rockier ) ground, particularly mountains and hillsides (the better to ambush) than do wolves. This provides a kind of predator separation or specialization by terrain feature, even when these two different predators live within a few miles of each other, and compete for the same food sources.
This terrain differentiation also fits in with the relative biomechanical advantages of each predator. A cougar’s paws are built for climbing and cougar will attack prey from above. Wolves prefer wetter, flatter, somewhat softer ground, although it can be either forested or more prairie-like. Surfaces like these may better support their running hunting style, perhaps favoring speed or at least, demanding less wear and tear on their paws. Wolf paws often allow them to run on snow better, an important consideration in northern climes.
Do wolves and cougars often fight over the same prey, nonetheless? This past year, studies suggested that this is most likely to happen only in winter, when cougars descend from the mountains and hill country into the valleys where the wolves have remained all year. Even then, wolves and cougars will more likely fight over carcasses of already killed animals, than they will when coming across one another on the hunt for the same prey animal.
In one systematic study of a four-way competition involving wolves, cougars, and both brown and black bears, fighting over carcasses was observed far more often between the differing types of bears than between cougars and wolves. (And, once again, it appears that wolverines and perhaps badgers will fight any of them off.)
Wolves vs. Coyotes: Making Love & War
One often observed case of active warfare among predator/scavenger clans has been between wolves and coyotes. It has been very commonly observed that the typically larger and more powerful wolves will kill coyotes on sight, presumably to eliminate a rival for scarce prey, even though the wolves typically do not eat the resulting carcass, and even though coyotes do not routinely compete for deer, the North American wolf's favorite prey.
It has now been shown in 2007 through analyses of wolf and coyote genes that wolf-coyote hybrids do exist, and that the power of estrus cycles can at least occasionally attract males of either species to the point where they would rather have sex than fight. Nonetheless, one study noted that 56% of kills of coyotes in areas where both wolves and coyotes inhabit, are due to wolves.
The Running of the Wolfpack
Cougars (and bears) can and do chase game, but long distance chases are a much more common feature of wolves hunting in packs. Despite a wolf’s better biomechanical capability to sustain distance chases than cougars or bears, wolves do not have as high a rate of kill-per-prey- chase as do cougars (I could not find any papers on the success of bear kills per chase). This comparatively poor success rate was ironically thought to be confirmation of the high intelligence or superior decision-making capability attributed to wolves owing to two commonly observed situations:
First: Wolves will often quit a chase that looks to them as it eventually develops that it is going to cost them more in energy to actually run down and kill their prey than it is worth in the calories or proteins in order to accomplish what they started. They appear to know when to cut their losses in light of changing circumstances.
Second: Wolves will often prudently back off from prey in situations when there is a high potential for one or more members of the wolf pack to be injured . Wolves , for example, will not always initiate or continue a fight with a well-horned, particularly combative male deer or elk or moose that can gore, or more likely, kick effectively in its own defense.
But as we will see shortly, new studies are showing that wolves are apparently getting either even smarter or more willing to take calculated risks in some of the prey they do take, and have apparently evolved more successful strategies for higher-danger-risk prey than was generally supposed.
Behavioral studies now show that wolves actually use their knowledge of the terrain for better coordination of “divide and conquer” tactics when wolf packs split up and attack prey simultaneously from different sides, or when one part of the group chases while the other lies in wait. Studies in Yellowstone and other natural areas where wolves have been re-introduced shows some wolves appear to be able to improvise plans which force their prey into dead-end maze-like or encircled situations from which there is no escape for the prey.
For example, imagine that a wolf pack divides itself into two co-ordinating but unevenly sized hunting parties, one large, one small.
The larger number of wolves in a pack might would be required to chase a deer from the relatively smooth ground of the prairie, because the deer would have greater maneuverability and speed, and more escape routes would have to be sealed off.
But this larger number of wolves from the divided pack seems to know enough to chase the deer to the margins of the prairie facing denser woods, effectively forcing it into an area of necessarily slower speed, with fewer clear escape routes.
There, a smaller group of wolves is lying in wait, and come at the deer from the wooded thicket side, and cut off the deer’s escape.
It also now appears that wolves in Yellowstone and similar re-introduction sites have learned to use geysers and hot pools as places to set up pursuits that end up in trapping their prey with no feasible escape route.
Further, it has now been recorded that wolves in the Arctic will attack and eat polar bear cubs, something hitherto unobserved, and seemingly more dangerous than any other prey, given the presence of a very powerful mother. Eurasian Arctic wolves have now also been shown to be far more frequent and skilled in bringing down musk-oxen, an animal famous for its defensive herd formations and a generally robust ability to defend itself. European wolves in Germany and the Baltics are also now known to take more wild boars than deer in hunting during the summer, despite the fact that wild boars can and do defend themselves, and their piglets, with ferocity. While it seems pretty clear that deer and elk are the favorites of wolves in North America, studies in Yellowstone shows that wolves have evolved strategies and tactics for attacking bison and bison calves, when their preferred food supply diminishes. Once again, bison do present strong defensive challenges that wolves must overcome, but the wolves seem up to it more often than was previously expected.
Wolf-Human Human Interactions & Attitudes
Numerous studies now show that governmental efforts to extirpate wolves in the past has actually damaged the diversity of plants and trees in wild areas. In the absence of predators, deer, elk and moose eat whatever they prefer, and as much as they want, initially favoring some plants and trees over others, and but eventually they will eat almost everything, generally increasing soil erosion. Re-introducing wolves has actually started to redress this imbalance of plants & trees, and perhaps even soil erosion, in the streams and rivers of the northern Rockies.
One commonly expressed fear of reintroduction is that the newly arrived predators will “Blitzkrieg” (the term actually used in the scientific discourse on the subject) unsuspecting deer and the like, and will kill them off in very short order. But there are now a number of studies that show reintroducing wolves to a wilderness that contains naïve prey (for example moose) will NOT wipe out that prey, because the prey evolve counter-strategies rather quickly. Images of a dim-witted Bullwinkle aside, moose mothers learn from early losses when to take an aggressively vigilant stance to fend off attacks, when to shift their foraging and calving sites, and how to respond to howls and scent markings.
Likewise, it is now being theorized that wolves are good for the overall health of wild herd animals, since they cull out the sickest, and presumably reduce the exposure of the remainder of the herd to contagion. This argument has made little headway, however, with owners of domestic herd animals. Recent studies have shown however, that the two best predictors of whether on not calves (or presumably sheep) will be killed by wolves is not the overall population of wolves in the area, but rather:
· Whether or not wolf dens (temporary shelters used for part of the year, usually Spring, when a mother wolf is raising her pups) are close by the livestock farm. If the dens are close to the edge of the farmer's property, there is a greater chance the wolves will hunt on their property. However, if the wolves are noisily rousted from their dens by scouting parties of humans, the wolf mothers will move themselves and their cubs farther away from farm boundaries, and will be much less likely to intrude.
Whether or not a farmer's fences are good enough to keep wild game out of the farm. If deer, elk, or moose can easily break through, or jump over, fences, and get onto a farm, the wolves will follow them in chases. However, given that wolves "think" bioenergetically, they may find it easier at that point, to chase and and kill livestock which is unaccusomted to fighting back or running from predators, as opposed to going after skilled evaders and defenders.
All of the following are demonstrated methods to support wolfpack revitalization without entirely angering livestock farmers whose support is often needded for longterm success:
1. Financial support for better fencing to restrain prey animals from coming on the farm. (Since the prey often eats farm crops, this is in the mutual interest of many farmers and wolf conservationists.)
2. Restrictions (with financial compensation) on further human encroachment on known wolf habitats, particularly for indigenous peoples whose traditional lifestyle as herders involves roving grazing, rather than enclosed pasturing.
3. A more generous system of compensating fenced-in farmers or free-ranging herders for each kill that nonetheless happens.
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