Fishing with wolves
Nicholas Read
Vancouver Sun
Monday, October 14, 2002
BELLA BELLA — Until this year it was a phenomenon scientists had never
documented before.
A wolf, rust and ochre like the hues of the coastal shoreline surrounding
it, plunges its head into a stream estuary and, after a moment’s frantic
splashing, pulls out a 10-kilogram chum salmon, flapping like a flag in
its mouth.
Yes, a salmon. Until late last year scientists didn’t know wolves ate
salmon. Wolves, it was thought, lived on an exclusive diet of deer and
other terrestrial animals.
But evidence gathered by University of Victoria graduate student Chris
Darimont this summer and fall proves that wolves living along B.C.’s
Central Coast — wolves thought to be morpholocially, behaviourally and
ecologically distinct from their Interior cousins — also eat chum and
pink salmon — thousands of them, and as many as 20 in one hour. They also
eat mussels, clams and barnacles.
It is an extraordinary thing to see.
The wolves watch the salmon like seasoned anglers, following every move
the fish makes. Then, in one swift and lethal move, they plant all four
feet firmly in the water and strike. And four times out of 10, says
Darimont’s research, they catch something.
Sometimes they’ll eat the fish right then and there.
But as often as not, they’ll carry it ashore where they’ll throw it on the
ground, tear off the head, and devour it.
“Can you see him?” asks Darimont excitedly as it happens right before our
eyes.
By mid-October, he’s seen it a hundred times, but even now, it remains a
thrill for him to witness something so remarkable, and until recently,
unknown to scientists.
The fact the wolves only eat the head is also interesting to Darimont. His
research suggests that it may have something to do with the wolf seeking
out nutrients present only in the salmon’s head, or that the rest of the
body carries a parasite toxic to canids. No one really knows. But they do
eat the whole head, including the jaw and mouth. Nothing is left of it
when a wolf has finished.
Walking along one of the six salmon streams where Darimont has studied
coastal wolves this year, you see evidence of their fishing prowess
everywhere. There are carcasses every few metres along the water’s edge,
all in varying stages of decomposition and all decapitated as neatly as if
the cuts had been made by a guillotine. Had bears eaten them, they
probably would have devoured the brains, dorsal muscles and egg sack.
Eagles would have ripped them to shreds. The clean, almost geometric, cuts
tell us these fish were taken by wolves.
There is also wolf scat everywhere — some of it very fresh — so it all
stinks to high heaven, a curious occurrence in what is otherwise a
pristine old-growth rainforest of red cedar and western hemlock.
“Sometimes people look at what’s left and say ‘what a waste,’ ” Darimont
says. “But it isn’t. Because the salmon feeds the whole forest. Every part
of it is used by something somewhere.”
Salmon provide rainforests with nitrogen, he explains. Bears and, it now
turns out, wolves, bring the fish ashore, eat part of it, then leave the
rest for small birds and insects to eat, digest and ultimately excrete all
over the forest floor.
“Every part of it is used,” Darimont says.
Seeing the wolves is no easy feat. “They’re so elusive,” he warns as we
head out on his small boat towards the islands where they live. “But
because of that when you do find them, it makes it that much more
special.”
He is conducting his study under the auspices of UVic biology professor
Tom Reimchen and University of Calgary wildlife biologist Paul Paquet,
with funds provided by the National Science and Engineering Research
Council.
Even though science has only just found out about them, chances are that
fishing wolves have been around since life dawned on the coast. They are
undoubtedly an integral part of the ecosystem.
Chester Starr, a junior elder with the local Heiltsuk tribe, says some
elders have referred to such wolves in their stories, but it has only been
recently that members have begun to rediscover and appreciate the
uniqueness of the wolves in conjunction with biologists.
“They’re part of our family,” Starr says of the wolves. “What we are is
what they are too.”
Darimont has spent the whole summer in this coastal archipelago observing
packs of fishing wolves, in addition to collecting their fur and feces and
analysing it for its contents.
It shows. His black hair is a Medusa tangle, and his beard is growing all
over the place. “I have the luxury of not looking at myself in the mirror
for weeks at a time,” he says.
“People think what I do is sexy,” he adds, but the truth is that much of
it is painstakingly tedious. Wolf scats have to be collected by hand from
10 islands and an adjacent mainland area over an area of roughly 2,500
square kilometers, and that takes hundreds of hours in weather of every
kind. It rains up to four metres a year in this part of world, and the
wind can churn the sea like a furnace.
Because the wolves live in a system of islands, Darimont goes everywhere
by boat. But wolves are exceedingly wary of humans, and alert to every
gesture, scent and sound they make, especially the roar of a motor, so he
has to be judicious about when to gun the engine and when to cut it.
Approaching one river where he thinks we might see a pack, we first have
to moor the boat, then paddle in silently by canoe.
It’s a misty morning, shrouded in sepulchral shades of silver and grey.
Eagles perched in the trees are silhouetted against the dawn sky like
black ornaments, and the rush of gulls’ wings fills the cold air. The
wolves are calling to us like sirens, but even though we creep in as
silently as we can, we never see them. The wind has shifted and as a
result, our odds of confronting them have plummeted.
When we finally do see them it is in another estuary approached almost as
an after-thought. It’s late morning and the fog has suddenly lifted.
Wolves are most active at dawn and dusk, so at any moment they likely will
be heading into the woods to sleep. But we’re lucky. They’ve tarried for
some reason, so we’re able to catch sight of them collecting and eating
the end of that morning’s catch.
There are three adults and three pups, now about six months old and almost
as big as their parents. One of the adults has a weak hind leg, which he
never allows to touch the ground. Darimont calls him “Gimpy”. We don’t
know how long they’ve been there, but through a telescope — any closer
and they’d run away — we’re able to observe them for about 20 minutes.
The salmon runs start in August and continue abundantly until mid-October,
says Darimont. A few late runs will continue until December, but the real
bounty occurs only for a couple of months.
Unlike coastal bears, which gorge on salmon in preparation for
hibernation, wolves are physiologically unable to store large reserves of
fat. “Wolves are like Ferraris,” is how Darimont puts it. “They travel
fast on a small tank of gas.”
What salmon does is provide them with an opportunity to fill up on a food
supply that, unlike deer, doesn’t fight back.
It also is the one time of year when wolves like Gimpy — those at the
bottom of the pack who must wait to feed until the others have their fill
— can eat with the same gusto and speed as the leading male and female.
Darimont has observed and recorded six individual wolf packs that rely to
some extent on marine life for their diet. He also has identified six
denning sites within the coastal archipelago.
Of concern to him is that several of these sites are in unprotected forest
valleys earmarked for logging. Road construction has already begun in some
areas, and logging is due to start soon.
It concerns conservationists too. That’s why Raincoast Conservation
Society project director Ian McAllister wants the government to recognize
rainforest wolves as globally unique and deserving of special recognition
in land-use plans.
“It’s frustrating that just as we’re learning so much about this unique
wildlife population, we continue to lose so much rainforest habitat to
industrial logging,” says McAllister. “Also, no special hunting licence is
needed for these wolves to be hunted legally.”
Darimont and Paquet have already approached Western Forest Products about
the possibility of protecting one of the denning sites with a 2,000-metre
buffer zone. Two hundred metres have been agreed to, but negotiations are
continuing.
“The big thing that I always try to make clear is that we’re just
beginning to learn about this population and all inhabitants of the
rainforest,” Darimont says. “These wolves are continually surprising us,
It makes me wonder how many more mysteries there are in the rainforest.”
© Copyright 2002 Vancouver Sun