‘THEY’RE OUT THERE’
After decades of conflict between humans and wolves, the Yukon is finding its balance with the top predator, which is thriving across the territory
After decades of conflict between humans and wolves, the Yukon is finding its balance with the top predator, which is thriving across the territory
IIT’S A RARE THING to spot a wolf in the Yukon wild. While grizzlies and black bears forage on the hillsides above the highway, and moose stand knobby-knee-deep i n the murky ponds below, putting themselves on easy display for passersby, the territory’s wolves play hard to get, offering only glimpses and hints: a dark flash on the riverbank as you’re paddling, a set of oversized paw prints on the snow-covered surface of a frozen lake. But they’re out there. There are an estimated 5,000 wolves in the Yukon — that’s roughly one wolf per seven human residents, or one wolf for every 96 square kilometres. Their range spans almost the entire territory, from the boreal forest to the alpine and Arctic tundra; only the vast Kluane icefield is wolf-free. While wolves have been driven out and exterminated in many parts of North America and only slowly, painfully, reintroduced in some, in the Yukon they’re still thriving. There’s nothing special or unique about the biology or physiology of the wolves in the territory — they’re grey wolves, Canis lupus, like the ones you might find in any number of wild areas. What’s different, though, is their surroundings: the ecosystem they move through so invisibly is intact. “What’s Clockwise from above: Prime wolf territory in central Yukon’s Ogilvie Mountains; a paw print on the bank of the Snake River; moose are a top food source for wolves; pups outside their den in the territory’s southwest corner. really unique is that they’re completely naturally regulated,” says Bob Hayes, author of Wolves of the Yukon. Mark O’donoghue, a northern regional biologist for the Yukon government, agrees. “We have a natural predator-prey system,” he says. The wolves and their ungulate meals — moose, primarily, and caribou and mountain sheep to a lesser extent — are largely in balance. Humans, of course, haven’t always been content to leave that balance alone. Wolves existed in the Yukon as many as 47,000 years ago, according to
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT THESE WOLVES IS THEIR SURROUNDINGS: THE ECOSYSTEM THEY MOVE THROUGH SO INVISIBLY IS INTACT.
archeological records — since the time when extinct giant mammals such as the woolly mammoth roamed the grasslands of what we now call Beringia, during the Pleistocene Epoch. But like the mammoths, the Beringia wolves vanished sometime during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, 12,000 to 6,000 years ago. Modern wolves, Canis lupus, subsequently migrated up to the territory from southern North America as the ice sheets receded, clearing the way. Wolves, a source of both fear and respect for Indigenous Peoples in the region, were often featured in imagery and stories. (Many First Nations people today, particularly in southern Yukon, belong to the Wolf Clan.) Wolf-human conflict did not become a major issue in the territory until the 20th century, after the Klondike Gold Rush brought thousands of newcomers to the area. After the gold rush, trappers in a booming and busting fur industry began to complain that wolves were harming their business; a growing number of sport and subsistence hunters blamed the wolves for the shrinking herds of ungulates, too. In the 1920s, trappers were authorized to set out poisonous strychnine baits for wolves, and a system of wolf bounties was set up. Eventually, the government took control of the strychnine programs, rather than allowing trappers to freelance the process, and efforts to poison the wolves into submission continued for decades. In his book, Hayes describes arriving by helicopter on the scene of a strychnine bait site in 1985: “There was a sow grizzly bear crumpled in the trees, two wolves, 10 ravens and
WOLF-HUMAN CONFLICT DID NOT BECOME A MAJOR ISSUE UNTIL THE KLONDIKE GOLD RUSH BROUGHT THOUSANDS OF NEWCOMERS TO THE AREA.
six magpies. There were hundreds of dead chickadees everywhere I looked — on the ground and in the willow branches, their tiny white feathers scattered like a dusting of fresh snow.” Strychnine use was restricted in 1972, but according to Hayes, its use continued illegally in some quarters for several years, including at the site he visited in 1985 (no one was ever charged in that case). Hayes, a biology grad who had dreamed of being able to study wolves someday, arrived in the territory during those years. He wound up working on birds, but was offered the position of wolf biologist for the Yukon government in 1982. The job fell into his lap — he remembers a supervisor casually asking, “Do you want to start working on wolves?” The carnivores were a hot topic at the time, with Whitehorse residents concerned about incursions into their yards and subdivisions, and hunters in the Southern Lakes region of the territory upset about low moose numbers. Hayes took the job and kept it for 18 years. He wound up being the face of Yukon government wolf policy during an extremely fraught and turbulent time. He’d been on the job for a decade when, in 1992, the government launched a new wolf management plan. The 1992 plan included some progressive and pro-wolf elements: for instance, it asserted that wolves had an inherent value in and of themselves — beyond their influence, positive or negative, on human concerns such as game availability or the safety of neighbourhood pets. But it also legalized aerial wolf control as a means to protect ungulate populations for human hunting. In the lead-up to the new plan, public consultations were held around the territory to determine the future of Yukon wolves, and tempers flared. One speaker at a public meeting had his tires slashed. After the 1992 plan was adopted, a large-scale aerial wolf-kill program was launched in the Aishihik region, near Kluane National Park and Reserve and the town of Haines Junction. Hayes, as the government’s lead wolf biologist, was responsible for overseeing the program. Dozens of wolves were shot from
‘PERIODIC, BROAD-SCALE WOLF CONTROL HAS LIMITED BENEFIT TO PREY POPULATIONS, DOES NOT LAST, AND SHOULD BE RELEGATED TO THE PAST.’
helicopters. Activists from outside the Yukon migrated north, chained themselves to the doors of the Yukon legislature, held protests on the highway, and trailed Hayes from his work to his home and back again, viewing him as Wolf Enemy No. 1. The debate over wolves got personal. In a 2011 story in Up Here magazine, “Wolves in our blood,” Whitehorse-based writer Peter Jickling looked back on his own family’s involvement in the territory’s wolf wars. His father was a leading activist for wolf conservation, and a member of the committee that produced the 1992 plan. He was also a close friend of Hayes, and the younger Jickling wrote about growing up alongside the Hayes family: “The Hayeses and Jicklings were an entwined unit.” But the Aishihik wolf kill ended the friendship permanently. “One month the Hayes clan was there, the next month, they weren’t,” Jickling wrote. “It was tough for an 11-year-old to understand.” Since the 1990s, the furor over the Yukon’s wolves has mostly died down. Hayes left his post in 2000, and eventually became a potent voice against aerial wolf kills and other lethal wolf-management methods. Hayes was convincing: he’d studied the methods even as he deployed them, and he argued that killing wolves was, simply, ineffective in addition to being potentially immoral and cruel. His research found that while large-scale wolf kills did temporarily increase the stock of moose in a given area, allowing hunters better chances at game, wolf populations rebounded quickly as soon as the killing stopped. “It only lasts as long as you kill wolves,” Hayes says. The result is an expensive and bloody cycle with limited benefits to hunters. “I believe science has answered the question of the periodic, broad-scale wolf
control,” Hayes wrote in Wolves of the Yukon, published in 2010. “It has limited benefit to prey populations, it does not last, and should be relegated to the past along with poison and bounties.” In 2012, the Yukon government released a new wolf management plan that put an end to government-run wolfkill programs. And this time, the plan and the process leading up to its release were relatively uncontroversial. Territorial biologist Mark O’donoghue was one of the authors of the new plan. “We went to every community in the Yukon,” he says, “and I think that was one of the real consistencies we found — and it was a little bit surprising that everybody pretty much said, ‘We don’t want to see any more of these big helicopter wolf-control programs.’ ” The change in public sentiment was based on a mixture of ethical considerations and concerns over the programs’ high costs and low efficacy. “People did not want to see government doing this.” Now, if there are strong concerns about wolf and ungulate populations in a given area, that sub-region’s trapping and hunting quotas are altered accordingly — a less blunt instrument. There is no expiry on the 2012 plan, no firm date on when it will be reopened for public debate. For now, says O’donoghue, the plan is working and the wolf population is healthy. It’s hard to say what the future holds. Bob Hayes thinks that some of the impacts of climate change could benefit wolves, at least temporarily: some of the territory’s tundra is gradually becoming taiga, moose habitat, and moose density is increasing in northern Yukon. That’s good news for moose-eaters. Writing in the conclusion of Wolves of the Yukon, Hayes noted that “There are many wolves ranging through the Yukon today as there were a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, five thousand years ago.” “They live everywhere around us,” he added. Even if we rarely see them.