By Camara Miller
Special to the Canmore Leader
It was a buzzing and packed house at the Canmore Collegiate Theatre for Nathan Webb’s ‘Following the Pack: Wolf Research and Management in Alberta’ presentation last Thursday.
The first Wildsmart speaker series of the year hosted Webb, a carnivore specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Division of Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. He completed his PhD on wolf population dynamics and predation rates at the University of Alberta. His work focuses on the conservation and management of bears, cougars and wolves but in his presentation last week, he shed some light on a wide variety of topics like wolf habits, management and interactions within the ecosystem.
Webb started the presentation saying that he wouldn’t shy away from controversy, a nod to the proposed wolf cull in the caribou reintroduction plan. While Webb’s presentation was only about how wolves live on the landscape, the audience’s questions afterward focussed on the debated issue.
Currently, wolves are dispersed throughout most of Alberta, with little wolf activity in the southeastern section of the province. At best guess, there are about 7,000 wolves in Alberta, with the vast majority living in the north.
“The theorized threshold for woodland caribou is six wolves per 1000 square kilometres, and we’re above that basically everywhere we’ve looked,” Webb added.
In some areas, this density is almost doubled at 22 wolves per 1000 square kilometres.
While Webb never delved too deep into the caribou issue, his comprehensive presentation did bring many issues and facts to attention, including the above wolf density and their robust population.
“Wolves have had a tumultuous history over the past century, punctuated by a couple of pretty major population declines and increases,” Webb said. “So wolves were basically controlled, there was a bounty, there was a wide-spread poisoning throughout the late-1800s and early-1900s and they really reached a low around 1920 or so.”
He said though that conjecture was based on the best anecdotal information the province has. After the 1920s, there was a fairly rapid recovery during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, there was a rabies outbreak in Alberta. The disease was detected in wolves and the government initiated a massive control program that knocked wolf numbers back down to low levels. Once the poisoning stopped, however, the numbers came back up, he said.
Another decline came in the early to mid-1980s when there was a substantial decline in moose in northern Alberta due to winter ticks and some severe winters, and so again there was a blip in wolf numbers. However, since then, wolf numbers have been on the rise due to increases in prey, primarily whitetail deer and moose. Climate change and industrial activity on the landscape has improved habitat for these ungulates.
In many communities, wolves are a contentious issue for a number of reasons. Livestock depredation by wolves can bring up emotions in ranching communities and harvesting of wolves or prey will get plenty of attention within hunting circles.
Animals like coyotes, that can sustain their populations are sometimes considered pests. Wolves are excellent at keeping their numbers high and a study that might best illustrate this point was a case out of Yukon.
Webb talked about an occurrence in Yukon in the early-1980s when wolf control was implemented for increasing ungulate populations for hunting purposes.
In 1983, a population of 245 wolves were culled down to 30. For the next five years, each year the numbers would bounce up to 70 wolves and each year they would be brought back down to 30.
The control ended in 1989, and four years later the number of wolf packs had returned to the same number as when the control had started. Within six years, there was the same number of wolves on the Yukon landscape as in 1983.
Webb also identified an interesting link between wolves and competing predators, especially cougars who live in the same home range and eat the same things.
“(It’s) the whole idea of niche separation theory from high school biology, you shouldn’t be able to have two species doing the same thing,” said Webb. “One should out-beat the other and one should go extinct, but they don’t. “
Are wolves and cougars competing directly or are they facilitating each other in some way? While answers to this question are still being found, Webb mentioned many differences with how the two predators interact on the landscape, when you look closely at the microhabitats. Webb discussed the findings that cougars don’t like the open spaces, a habitat wolves thrive in. Wolves like hunting near waterways, like rivers, and have this in common with male cougars, but not females. Terrain ruggedness and steep slopes deter the female cougars and wolves, but not the male cougars. And, unlike cougars that are ambush predators, wolves hunt by travelling.
Another interesting finding is that wolves tend to kill more prey in poorer condition and more yearling and adult prey than cougars.
These hunting differences brought on many questions from the crowd at the Canmore Collegiate last week. In a multi-prey system, how will the caribou survive with wolves, cougars and grizzly bears on the landscape?
Webb also discussed wolf biology and wolf interactions with prey, as well as the current wolf management plan and the obstacles that are navigated throughout the province.
What we do know is that wolves are important to the ecosystem. Something Webb found interesting and positive was from a study done in Banff National Park and duplicated in Yellowstone since wolves were reintroduced there.
“We know that wolves, and really all top carnivores, are capable of structuring entire ecological communities,” Webb said.
In his example, wolves have an impact on elk by reducing elk numbers and changing their behaviour like moving around to avoid wolf predation. Elk then prey on aspen and willow and if there’s fewer elk, that allows the aspen and willow to regenerate better than it would otherwise. That benefits a whole host of species like allowing more beavers to exist which benefit songbirds, he said.
This trickle down effect is essential to understanding an ecosystem as a whole, but Webb added that the caveat is that “this means that wolves do limit prey populations.”
Again, the audience didn’t miss tying this fact to the timely issue of caribou reintroduction last Thursday.
Webb quickly admitted that he is not a caribou specialist, but he did say that because wolf populations are so sturdy, current management strategies, including very liberal hunting and trapping actions, are not threatening populations. Some solutions for a caribou reintroduction should include habitat protection, habitat restoration and possible wolf control. He added at the end that issues other communities in Alberta face include livestock depredation, which will continue to be an issue.
The controversial federal government’s caribou plan had the room charged — the Sierra Club has an action in place for those who wish to voice their disapproval or concern. The deadline to file comments on the proposed plan is Wednesday, Feb. 22. Visit sierraclub.ca.
At the next Wildsmart presentation, Gordon Stenhouse will share ‘Grizzle Bears’ focussing on roads, access and grizzly bears in Alberta, as well as what we really know about grizzly bear reproduction. The talk will be Thursday, March 1 at 7 p.m. at the Canmore Collegiate Theatre.