Classes with wolves
Friday, April 18, 2003
By TARA KANE
STAFF WRITER
In Professor Les Lynn’s class, students learn from the experts how to howl at the moon. “It’s real exciting when they [the teachers] howl back,” said Lynn, who lives in West Milford.
“They” are wolves. And Lynn, a biology professor at Bergen Community College in Paramus, offers the only course in the state that allows students to interact with live ones.
Twice a year, Lynn, 55, and a dozen students fly to the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., the leading educational facility for wolf research. There, the class spends a week observing a captive pack, tracking radio-collared wolves from a plane, and inspecting abandoned dens.
Intensive Wolf Study, as Lynn’s course is called, does not meet in a classroom at all, but has prospered in the last five years it has been offered, attracting college students from all over the nation and as far as Switzerland. It’s apparent why: Though a handful of colleges across the country offer wolf seminars, Lynn’s course is considered by the wolf center to have the most depth. More interesting, perhaps, is why it attracts students from New Jersey, a state that hasn’t had resident wolves in more than 200 years.
Could the densely populated and overdeveloped Garden State ever be home to Canis lupus again?
“There will never be wolves again in New Jersey,” Lynn said. “If you reestablished a wolf pack in New Jersey, they’d be here for a day before they got hit by cars.
This is one of the places where wolves don’t work.”
Wolves have been gone from the state for so long that their ecological niche has been filled. Today, New Jersey’s population of Eastern coyotes – a small group of which live in Lynn’s hometown – have become the top predators in their environment.
“However, if we had wolves and coyotes in the same place,” Lynn said, “eventually we’d only have wolves.”
At one time, wolves existed in nearly 40 states, including those of the Northeast. The species was nearly wiped out during the 1900s as its habitat disappeared to development and many animals were killed for bounty for attacking sheep and cattle.
In the mid-1970s, gray wolves became protected by the federal Endangered Species Act. The population has thrived since, according to recent wolf census figures. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this month changed the status of the gray wolf from “endangered” to “threatened” in some parts of the country.
Although the animal remains federally protected under the relaxed status, and is still endangered in the Southwest, the federal government plans to completely delist wolves in 2005. That will allow states to manage their own wolf populations.
That’s great news for Wyoming and Utah, which want to organize a wolf hunting season once the animal is delisted. In Minnesota, however, there is huge debate over the need for a hunt.
Lynn said the arguments are similar to those in New Jersey over the growing black bear population. Last month in New Jersey, the state Fish and Game Council voted in favor of a December hunt as a way to reduce bear interactions with humans. If approved, the hunt would be the state’s first since 1970.
“There’s a lot of parallels between bears in New Jersey and wolves in Minnesota,” Lynn said. “We’re trying to come to grips with a growing bear population, and in Minnesota, they are coming to grips with a fairly large wolf population.”
A big difference, which is what originally sealed the wolf’s fate in New Jersey, is the degree of predation it represents: Although the majority of bear nuisance complaints involve “someone’s knocked over bird feeder or trash can,” Lynn said, a wolf will “desecrate people’s cattle and sheep – you can’t blame a farmer or a rancher for not wanting to have wolves around,” he said.
As a native of New York City, Lynn ought to know. The biology teacher – whose educational background is plant ecology – became interested in wolves about 20 years ago after adopting a Siberian husky named “Butchy.”
A few years ago, Lynn traveled to Minnesota to visit the International Wolf Center. Upon returning, the educator asked Bergen Community College administrators if he could teach a course on wolves in conjunction with the center, and they agreed. Since 1997, Lynn has taught the course in addition to plant biology.
“There was a niche to be filled and I filled it,” Lynn said. “There are certainly better-qualified people, but no one was doing it. Not in this state.”
And that’s how the unlikely course came to Bergen Community College. It’s offered in the winter and summer, and is open to any high school graduate willing to pay tuition plus the cost of the course. Students also pay for their own transportation, and Lynn offers them the opportunity to link up with him on his flight. The cost for New Jersey residents is about $1,500, including estimated transportation costs, lodging, meals, and use of the Wolf Center. It’s $300 more for out-of-state students.
The hefty cost is money well spent, said Emily Fernandez, a former student who went on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in music.
“We got a chance to step into the wolves’ world for a week and be visitors to their habitat,” said Fernandez, 29, of West New York. “Not everything you can learn in a classroom.”
Prior to the trip, students are asked to prepare an in-depth paper on the future of wolves, with information on how states are prepared to deal with wolves once they become delisted.
Minnesota, for instance, has proposed a management program offering different levels of protection for wolves throughout the state. Wolves would be allowed to roam freely in wilderness areas but would be trapped on farmland.
Wolves in Minnesota and Wisconsin are briefly captured and radio-collared. That allows Lynn’s students to field test Minnesota’s tracking system from a plane and on foot. Occasionally, students get a close glimpse of an animal before it ducks into dense woods.
“You know where they are, but they’re not going to stand there until you get to them,” Lynn said. “When they hear 13 people snow-shoeing through the woods, they’re gone.”
Students also perform a necropsy on a wolf to determine the cause of death and examine the animal’s “scat” -feces -to learn about its diet.
“After the initial shock wears off,” Lynn said laughing, “they understand the importance and participate.”
Lynn generally doesn’t use that as the course’s selling point. Instead, he emphasizes the once-in-a-lifetime experience. Former students have gone on to study organisms and wildlife ecology at the graduate level; one other became a seasonal forest ranger in Montana. Lynn said one student even moved to Ely as a result of the course.
“This is an experience that most suburban people in New Jersey can’t imagine,” Lynn said. “If they never study wolves again, it’s an experience they can talk about for their entire life.”