Wolves Play Fetch! At Least Some of Them do, When They are Pups! A Big but not Necessarily Unexpected Finding Sheds Light on Wolf Domestication and the Origins of Dogs

According to a study published January 16 in the journal iScience, a minority of wolf pups are willing and able to play fetch with "strange" humans. 

Let's unpack this odd finding. 

Photo by Christina Hansen Wheat

Basically what it means is that several wolf pups, among a group of 13, displayed a level of reactivity and attention to random humans such that they were willing and able to return thrown balls in a way that necessarily indicates an understanding, on their part, of the intent of said strangers. 

Why it matters;  both anthropologists and biologists have long wondered how wolves and anatomically modern homo sapiens managed to come together to form the iconic partnership of "man/woman and dog."

Cool video of the study in action, again, the work of Christina Hansen Wheat

It's long been supposed that especially tolerant, observant (in terms of human body language and vocals) and willingly cooperative wolves were selected for over time by various hunting and gathering populations with which they came into contact, and that eventually said populations, through selective breeding, evolved into modern dogs. 

This study matters because it supports at least one component of the above hypothesis --that certain wolves are more attentive to, and willing to cooperate with, humans-- and by extension lends further credence to the greater narrative.  This in turn matters because it helps us understand the larger context of canid/human evolution and by doing so sheds more light on the long and often troubled relationship between humans and wolves. 

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Related Links:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/796715763/fetching-with-wolves-what-it-means-that-a-wolf-puppy-will-retrieve-a-ball

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/cp-suw010920.php#.XiCQ_Y0afGk

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(19)30557-7

http://www.cell.com/iscience

25 Years of Wolves! January 12, 2020 Marks 25 Years to the Day Since Canadian Gray Wolves were Released in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho.

On January 12, 1995, 14 Canadian gray wolves were released into a fenced enclosure in Yellowstone National Park, while another 15 were released straight into the wild in Central Idaho.  

The releases were the culmination of a long process that started back in the 1980s and  proceeded in fits and starts since then.  There was nothing at all inevitable or smooth about the project to reintroduce wolves to the Northern Rockies, and even at the last moment a judge enjoined the Yellowstone wolves from being released from their boxes.  The wolves accordingly spent their first night in Yellowstone sleeping --or at least lying silently-- in the metal shipping containers in which they'd been transported from Alberta.  

What they, the wolves themselves, made of this is anyone's guess.  One suspects they were wolfishly aloof and inexpressive, regarding the world with their pale yellow eyes, silently resigned to whatever might come.        

January 1995, the release.  Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the late Mollie Beattie, then national director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Yellowstone Superintendent Mike Finley take advantage of a photo op to carry in the first group of wolf transplants to their pens in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. Norman Bishop can be seen in the photo at far right.

Jim Peaco/National Park Service. 

The science that preceded the reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rockies was meticulous, compendious and not at all controversial.  The consensus, dating back to the work of Aldo Leopold --widely regarded as the "father" of wildlife management in the US-- was that wolves had always played a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and that their reintroduction, far from heralding catastrophic consequences for herbivorous prey species, would actually result in a healthier and more resilient ecology in which all species benefited through a predator/prey balance more nearly approximating that which they'd ostensibly evolved to live in.  

What wasn't known with any precision was the degree to which wolves would impact adjacent livestock operations.  Nor was it clear that wolves would stay in the remote areas of the Northern Rockies to which they'd been reintroduced.  

In the event, with the benefit of 25 years of knowledge, we now know that while wolves do occasionally prey on livestock, their impact is minimal and is easily countered through compensation programs paid for by the increase in tourism that the presence of wolves engenders.  

As for where wolves go, they have easily outstripped even the most optimistic predictions.  No wolf biologist looking at the reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rockies 25-years-ago would or could have predicted that we'd now be at least three years out from a wolf pack having established itself in Northern California, while other packs are primed to move across the Klamath-Siskiyous and into coastal Oregon's lush Coast Range.

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        In the summer of 1993 I took a menial kitchen job at Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone National Park.  How I got there is a story in and of itself, but one that can be told elsewhere.  The upshot is that as a deeply impressionable 19-year-old I found myself living and working in the middle of the world's oldest national park.

I loved it.  The pay was pitiful and I had no real plan for what I would do after the job, but to me Yellowstone felt like a sort of semi-mythical paradise.  I was an avid outdoorsman and an accomplished backcountry backpacker, but I was also a poor kid who'd never really been outside of Northern California.  

I say this to underscore how smitten I was with the park, how formative it was for me, and to hopefully give a sense of the place Yellowstone held, and still holds, in my heart and imagination.

I left the Northern Rockies in the fall of 1994, a few months prior to the release, on January 12, 1995, of 14 Canadian gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and 15 in Central Idaho.  I had followed the entire process through local media while I still lived in Wyoming, so even though coverage in Northern California was predictably less thorough, I watched it as closely as I could --in that pre-internet era-- and took a great deal of satisfaction in the event. 
               

I say the above by way of establishing why yesterday is an important anniversary for me.   

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Related links;

https://mountainjournal.org/lessons-learned-25-years-after-wolves-restored-to-yellowstone

http://www.timberwolfinformation.org/wy-mt-25-years-of-re-living-with-wolves-in-yellowstone/

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/yellowstone_national_park/carrying-history-years-later-the-wolves-of-yellowstone-and-the/article_0b2dea1b-6ce6-53a9-b51b-b9c6e033281c.html

https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/yellowstone-marks-25-years-since-wolves-were-reintroduced
https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=9806A11F-C806-DEED-AD27FE69EDADA0FB
https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-big-scientific-debate-trophic-cascades.htm
https://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/years-later-politics-myths-and-the-reintroduction-of-wolves-to/article_2d9d1687-3ae7-570d-9a59-ff1775d74565.html

World's Laziest Wolf Howls

And now for something slightly different.  This mildly amusing video was posted by the nice people at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, NY.

From their Youtube description;

"Alawa (the lazy howler) is a captive-born Canadian/Rocky Mountain gray wolf at the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC), a 501c3 non-profit organization, in South Salem, NY. She is one of the four 'ambassador wolves' at the WCC that help teach the public about wolves and their vital role in the environment. If you want to watch Zephyr, Alawa, Nikai, Atka or the WCC's critically endangered Mexican gray wolves or red wolves in live time, visit our live wolf webcams at http://www.nywolf.org/webcams. If you see something cool, let us know!" For more information about wolves and the WCC's participation in wolf recovery, please visit our website at www.nywolf.org and follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/nywolforg) and twitter (https://twitter.com/nywolforg), and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/wolfconserv...)

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Wolves Already in NW Colorado! Newly Released Evidence Appears to Indicate that Wolves are Already in Colorado

Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department announces credible evidence of wolves

So here's the gist:  Wildlife officials in Colorado revealed Wednesday that there's solid evidence of wolf presence in the northwest corner of the state as indicated by a series of eyewitness accounts, including a video taken by hunters, as well as an elk carcass that appears to be surrounded by large canine footprints.

 Elk carcass, found by locals.  

“We have no doubt that they are here, and the most recent sighting of what appears to be wolves traveling together in what can be best described as a pack is further evidence of the presence of wolves in Colorado,” department regional manager J.T. Romatzke said in a statement reported by the AP.  

This is big if true --and there's no reason to think that it's not-- because it comes, as NWLobos has recently reported, directly on the heels of a Colorado ballot initiative seeking voter approval for the reintroduction of wolves into the state.  Since wolves are federally protected, should wild wolves recolonize Colorado on their own, they would be federally protected which would largely obviate the need for a state ballot initiative.  Of course, especially now that the initiative has qualified for the November ballot, it will be voted on regardless.  

A photograph of a suspected wolf footprint. (Photo courtesy Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

As for what the larger implications are for the future of wolves in Colorado, if other states are anything to go by, the new pack will thrive, spread, and eventually form a stable population.  This will of course be stridently opposed by ranching and resource-extraction interests who will portray the coming of wolves to Colorado as something near an existential threat, but who will, over time, begrudgingly adjust and learn to live with them.  Many will, as has happened in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, eventually come around to admitting that far from posing an existential threat, wolves are actually a net benefit to Colorado's ecology and the various fish and game populations it supports.  

A Final Note;

NWLobos has wrestled in the past with the question of how it's possible for wolves to have made it all the way from Yellowstone to California, but not to the much closer Utah and Colorado.  Some preliminary internet research failed to unearth anything like a compelling and obvious explanation.  One imagines that there must be biologists capable of accounting for this seeming anomaly in straightforward terms, but if so, their knowledge was not readily available.  Accordingly NWLobos admittedly took the easy way out and went with the vague explanation that said recolinization had not happened due to a combination of man-made and natural barriers that, together, had thus far proved insurmountable to wolves.  

We did so while noting that individual wolves are known to have made it into Colorado (and Utah), while erroneously imagining that they could not easily do so with mates capable of creating viable packs based on procreation.  

Of course this was an absurd proposition, and once again, in recolonizing Colorado on their own, wolves make a mockery of our notions.   

Related Links;

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/01/09/wildlife-officials-find/

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/08/wolves-likely-living-northwest-colorado/

https://www.craigdailypress.com/news/forget-the-ballot-wolves-are-already-in-northwest-colorado/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUttOACKiw8

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Colorado Wolf Initiative Officially Makes Ballot! Follow-up to our post of 12/22/19.

Wolves One Step Closer to Colorado

After decades of effort, various conservation groups in Colorado are in for a pay-off as a ballot initiative providing for the reintroduction of wolves to Colorado has recently qualified for a statewide vote.  

According to AP reporting, the Colorado Secretary of State's office said Monday that backers of the initiative have gathered enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot.  

AP also reports that The Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, which is campaigning for the initiative, says "voters have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to introduce the wolf, whereas efforts in other states are directed by federal wildlife officials."  

This isn't quite true --reintroduction in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming was certainly federally guided, but reintroduction, or more accurately, recolonization in Washington, Oregon and California has almost exclusively been managed at the state level, albeit, not under the aegis of  voter-approved ballot initiatives.  

The initiative is opposed by the usual assortment of ranching and resource extraction interests who argue that it would threaten livestock as well as wild ungulate populations that generate revenue through hunting.  The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission also opposes the initiative, which on its face seems damning, but a little digging quickly reveals that at least six of said commission's 11 members must represent hunting and ranching interests.  

Here is the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission's official page explaining how, among other things, the commission's membership is to be constituted.  

Here is a link to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission's resolution regarding the initiative.  

No surprises there.  

The last wolves in Colorado were killed off by the federal government in the 1940s.  It was the culmination of a long-term campaign whereby the federal government basically subsidized ranching interests by using taxpayer money to run programs meant to eradicate wolves and other large predators (and coyotes, but with almost zero success, for reasons that we'll get into in a future post) from the lower 48 US states.

The campaign was, of course, ill-advised, and as early as the 1930s was widely opposed by all credible wildlife biologists who studied the western US.  Nonetheless, through a combination of ignorance and pocketbook considerations, the continuing absence of wolves and other large predators from vast swathes of North America continues to be seriously represented as a public good by those who think they stand to lose were the continent's fauna to shift back to a trophic balance more nearly resembling that which existed prior to European colonization.  

As we've argued here before, it's basically a farce.  When it comes to the rural west, the very interests that most loudly trumpet the benefits of self-sufficiency and personal accountability while also decrying the federal government, are exactly the same interests that never would have existed in the first place were it not for the federal government bending over backwards to make their lives as easy as possible whether it be through expedited infrastructure related to resource-extraction, or anti-predator wildlife policies meant to benefit ranching on the taxpayer's tab.  

NWLobos has a lot more to say.  

Please do check back with us.  

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Floating Overseas Feature; Bears and Wolves in the UK!

This is a somewhat dated story, from this past summer, but it's so cool that I thought it worth posting.

The original reporting can be found here and here.  The gist of it is that through a project run by The Bristol Zoological Society, Eurasian brown bears and gray wolves will, for the first time in more than 1,000 years, live side by side in the British Isles.  The project is based around a 10,000 square meters wooded paddock that already contains three male bears.  Five male wolves will be introduced --and perhaps already have been, given that this story is old-- initially through an adjoining enclosure where they can acclimate to the bears presence, then later into the larger paddock. 

Among other things, the project seeks to study the trophic effects the species have on the flora and fauna in the paddock.  The project also houses Eurasian lynx and Eurasian wolverines and pine martens, though so far they are being kept in separate enclosures. 

Here's a link to a short BBC video that is a little more recent and that claims that the lynx and wolverine are being put into the paddock together with the wolves and bears, so that's even more exiting and will hopefully produce even greater scientific insight to the ways in which large carnivores interacted with each other and their local ecology prior to being hunted to extinction in the UK. 

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