HAVE PACK, WILL TRAVEL
Experts learn from Skoki
They moved as a pack throughout the Bow Valley in the winter and hunted. When Skoki’s mom had another litter of pups in April 2010 they hunted for her, too.
“It’s entirely fascinating to see how far these wolves were travelling each day to go out, hunt, find food and then bring it back to the pups and the mom,” said Jesse Whittington, a wildlife biologist with Banff National Park.
By summer, Skoki went up to higher elevations — heading up on Bonnet Glacier and Wapta Icefield. He travelled through a former caribou range near Lake Louise and even hunted mountain goats as they came down from the craggy cliffs to cross through valleys in search of water.
He left his pack in midDecember 2010 and went to Kananaskis Country, where he formed a pack of his own after finding a mate and fathering at least one set of pups the following year.
It’s unknown where he ended up, because his GPS collar fell off the next summer, but much more is known about the Bow Valley pack and how wolves live in the Rocky Mountains because of Skoki.
Throughout Western Canada, there’s a love-hate relationship with wolves.
Wolf culls have been used for years in Alberta as a way to protect the endangered caribou in areas such as the Little Smoky near Grande Cache. It has been called inhumane by a group of scientists from Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.
B.C. also introduced a wolf cull in January, killing 84 wolves in a few months. Both provinces have defended the culls, which involve shooting them from a helicopter or, in Alberta’s case, also trapping them in snares or poisoning them with strychnine.
It has led to a heated debate and calls for change, but the controversial policies to manage wolves remain in place — even with the change to an NDP government in Alberta.
Officials with Alberta Environment and Parks said this week that the province will be assessing its management strategies as part of the work they are doing toward meeting the federal Species at Risk recovery plan for endangered caribou. Whatever they decide, wolves are considered an important part of the ecosystem.
“They are a major influence on any system that they live in,” said Paul Paquet, one of the world’s leading wolf scientists who’s a professor with the University of Calgary and has studied wolves in the Rockies. “They’re what we refer to as an apex predator in these systems. Most species they are associated with, and those they aren’t even directly associated with, are influenced by them.”
His research over the past 30 years has shown wolves not only impact their prey; they impact everything from insects and birds to trees and rivers.
“When wolves kill another animal, such as an elk or deer or caribou, what’s the response of other species near them or around them,” said Paquet, noting they kept a simple scorecard and tracked up to 52 species visiting each kill site.
It ranged from grizzly and black bears, cougars and lynx to weasels, wolverines and all kinds of birds (ravens, magpies, owls and even smaller birds), along with small rodents such as voles.
Similar research in Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s, showed even broader effects.
“They found extensive changes were occurring, including larger trees such as aspen had started to recover,” said Paquet. “They found changes in the bird community ... changes in streams and rivers — a whole variety of things.
“They (wolves) are very influential, probably more so than any other species that lives in the Rockies.”
Paquet said the history of wolves in Banff National Park reflects the greater situation for wolves throughout Alberta.
“For decades, they were persecuted — inside the park, outside the park,” explained Parks Canada’s Whittington.
“We had several decades without wolves in Banff National Park.
“As a consequence, our elk population just boomed.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, he said wolves were given a chance to recolonize the park and learned to navigate around all the people in the Bow Valley.
“Some of the large packs, in the backcountry especially, had this abundant prey population,” said Whittington.
“We had some large packs. You would travel the backcountry and you would be seeing wolf tracks and find lots of wolf kills and see wolves chasing elk up open slopes. “It was just a fascinating time.” Then, as nature often does, it balanced out.
“The wolves eat lots of elk,” he said.
Data from Skoki’s GPS collar in 2009 and 2010 showed wolves in Banff were also killing coyotes, deer, moose and mountain goats.
There are no caribou left in Banff National Park, because the last herd was killed by an avalanche around the same time Skoki was collared, but there were plans to reintroduce the species as part of a captive breeding program announced by the federal government back in November 2011.
“Right now, from a caribou perspective, things are much better in terms of wolf density,” said Whittington. “There are fewer wolves so caribou would have larger survival rates.
“The other question, if we do decide to reintroduce caribou to Banff, is how much time wolves are spending in caribou range? If wolves are spending a lot of time in the summer in caribou range, then they are still not safe.”
That’s why they continue to monitor wolf populations, with plans to radio collar a couple of wolves from each pack in Banff National Park to learn more about the packs and their hunting habits.
There are at least five wolf packs in Banff National Park: the Bow Valley pack, which is now down to three members; a pack in the Cascade-Fairholme area; a Red Deer pack around Saskatchewan River Crossing; a Panther-Cascade pack; and, sometimes, a pack in the Spray Valley.
“We have 25 to 40 wolves that use Banff, depending on the time of year,” he said.
As a former member of the Bow Valley pack, Skoki’s collar showed their range went from the Banff townsite all the way to Bow Summit along the Icefields Parkway.