Manitowish Waters at center of efforts to restore timber wolves to western Great Lakes
Timber Wolf Alliance makes move to North Lakeland Discovery Center
Eric Johnson
Reporter
Manitowish Waters is figuring prominently in ongoing efforts to restore a sustainable population of timber wolves (Canis lupus) to the western Great Lakes region, now that the Timber Wolf Alliance has relocated its headquarters from Northland College’s Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute to the non-profit North Lakeland Discovery Center, W215 Hwy. W.
The move from Ashland to the Discovery Center was made in August during a period of major transition for the Timber Wolf Alliance, following the Nov. 9, 2007 death of 15-year coordinator Pamela Troxell, recipient of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’s Silver Eagle Award and the Department of Interior’s Cooperative Conservation Award.
Relocation to the Discovery Center seemed a logical next step for the Timber Wolf Alliance as it sought to regain its footing.
“Pam was so committed, so dedicated to the Timber Wolf Alliance,” noted Discovery Center executive director Bruce Greenhill. “After she passed, it (Timber Wolf Alliance) didn’t have the same energy. It was hard to find someone as energetic as she was…”
As a small organization somewhat lost within the confines of a large educational institution, Greenhill said the Timber Wolf Alliance’s advisory council began searching for “a young, energetic organization to take it (Timber Wolf Alliance) on.”
After three months of negotiations, an agreement was reached between Northland College, the Timber Wolf Alliance and the Discovery Center to relocate the 400-member Timber Wolf Alliance to Discovery Center’s 63-acre Manitowish Waters campus on the DNR’s old Statehouse Lake Youth Conservation Corps site.
Greenhill said the Timber Wolf Alliance relocation was a good, complementary fit for both organizations.
“We were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time,” he noted. “The Discovery Center has a commitment to science-based policy and research. The Timber Wolf Alliance has a similar commitment to sound wildlife policy based on scientific research. They also fit well with our philosophy of citizen environmental research … It also raises the profile of the Discovery Center across the country – and that’s very exciting for us. It builds public awareness of the Discovery Center … Bottom line, it (Timber Wolf Alliance) was a good fit for us.”
On the flip side, Greenhill said the Timber Wolf Alliance is able to draw upon the resources of the Discovery Center, including its “competent professional staff and terrific volunteer base.”
Overseen by a 14-member advisory council of conservation-minded citizens and representatives drawn from the Wisconsin DNR, the Michigan DNR and the U.S. Forestry Service, the relocated operations of the non-profit Timber Wolf Alliance are now overseen day-to-day by coordinator Anna Cellar, who also serves as the Discovery Center’s program director.
Relocated to Manitowish Waters, Cellar is a “born and raised” native of Ashland, Ohio, a 21,155-resident community located 60 miles southwest of Cleveland.
The daughter of career teachers and avid outdoor enthusiasts, Cellar has pursued a career in wildlife education, earning her Bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Ohio University in Athens and her Master’s degree in wildlife conservation from Mount Pleasant-based Central Michigan University.
“I’ve always been involved in the wildlife field,” Cellar said, noting she’d done field work with Mexican gray wolves, foxes and fishers in California, worked at an outdoor school in Ohio and performed field work in the U.P., studying the use of livestock-guarding Great Pyrenees as a non-lethal wolf predation control tool. “I’ve always had an interest in wildlife and wildlife conservation. I love what I do. I feel lucky that I found something that I’m really passionate about and I get to do it for a career.”
A transplanted Buckeye, Cellar said she’s been enjoying her new Northwoods life in the Badger State.
“I like it up here,” she said. “It’s beautiful up here. I don’t think many people realize how much wildlife there is and how beautiful it is up here in northern Wisconsin. It’s incredible.”
Cellar said she’s also been enjoying working side-by-side with the “great” staff at the North Lakeland Discovery Center.
Wolves: Back from the brink
Gray wolves had called the western Great Lakes home since the last glaciers melted around 10,000 years ago. At their height, wolves were one of the most widely-distributed land mammals in the world, covering most of North America.
The largest member of the Canidae family, which also includes coyotes and foxes, gray wolves are identified by their round ears, square snout and grizzled gray and brown coat with whitish underparts. Unlike domesticated canine tracks, which tend to be rounded, wolf tracks are oval, measuring 4.5 inches long and 3.5 inches wide.
Averaging 65 pounds in weight, 4-1/2 to 6-1/2 feet in length and 28-34 inches in height at the shoulder, gray wolves typically live in hierarchical packs of 4-5 wolves that includes the breeding pair and their yearling offspring and pups. Packs typically range a 100-square-mile area, which shrinks to 40 square miles in the winter.
Meat-eating carnivores, gray wolves typically prey on white-tailed deer and beaver, but also often supplement their diet with snowshoe hares, birds, small mammals and vegetation.
It’s estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 wolves inhabited Wisconsin when the first European immigrants began settling the Badger State in the early 1800s.
Cellar said settlers brought with them negative attitudes about wolves and other predatory animals, setting up bounty systems to spur eradication efforts.
“There was a large predator campaign throughout the U.S.,” she noted. “In Michigan and Wisconsin, there were state bounties put on wolves.”
In Wisconsin, the first wolf bounties were established in 1865. By 1900, wolves were eradicated from southern Wisconsin and by 1950 fewer than 50 remained in the Northwoods. Listed as a protective species in 1957, when only a handful of wolves remained in the state, wolves were considered extinct in Wisconsin by 1960.
Under the protection of the federal government’s 1974 designation of the gray wolf as a national endangered species, the Wisconsin wolf population began to make a slow but steady comeback.
From an estimated 25 wolves in five packs in 1979-80, Cellar said that its estimated today that Wisconsin is now home to 537 wolves in 144 packs across the Northwoods and in central Wisconsin’s forest region, based on the findings of the DNR’s 2008 winter census.
It’s a similar story in neighboring Michigan, where wolf bounties were first established in 1838. Wolves were eradicated from lower Michigan in 1935 and only a handful remained in the Upper Peninsula by 1960, when the last wolf bounty was repealed.
Under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act, wolf numbers in the Upper Peninsula have steadily risen. Today, it’s estimated that more than 509 wolves inhabit all 15 U.P. counties.
Eradication of wolves, Cellar said, put the ecosystem into imbalance as natural predators were removed from the equation, leading to a large spike in the populations of predator-free prey.
“Wolves are an apex predator,” she noted. “Whenever you take one link out of the ecosystem, it affects the whole system – other animals, other plants … It’s a great thing to have a top predator back in the system. It keeps prey populations in check…”
Cellar said the western Great Lakes region is today home to the largest wolf population in the lower 48 states, with an estimated 4,000 gray wolves populating the region, including an estimated 2,500-2,900 in Minnesota, followed by Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula.
In March 2007, the federal government removed gray wolves in the western Great Lakes from the endangered species classification.
Information of wolf populations is collected and researched by a cadre of interested volunteers and professional wildlife biologists.
In addition to tracking and howling surveys, the movement of wolves is also tracked by researchers using radio telemetry technology, which employs the use of a battery-powered collar radio telemetry transmitter on captured-and-released wolves. Radio telemetry is used to track information on territory scope, pack size and wolf distribution.
Biologists currently utilize radio telemetry to monitor 46 percent of Wisconsin’s 144 wolf packs, as well as 16 percent of lone wolves. Two wolves are currently being tracked in the Lakeland area.
Looking to gather increasingly detailed information on wolf movements, Michigan biologists recently placed Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) collar systems on five wolves, allowing researchers to record the location of the collared animals several times daily with the help of Earth-orbiting satellites.
Unlike the successful wolf reintroduction initiatives in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, where wildlife biologists physically relocated wolves into the region, Cellar said “remnant population” wolves reintroduced themselves naturally into Wisconsin and the U.P. as they ranged from the Boundary Waters wilderness areas of northeastern Minnesota and, during winter freeze-up, from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior.
“It’s exciting that the wolves … have come back naturally,” she said. “It’s relatively unique. You don’t hear of too many large mammal species like this coming back on its own … It’s exciting to see how it’s all happening.”
Thanks to the protections offered by the federal Endangered Species Act, wolves naturally re-populated as they spread into their historical ranges in Wisconsin and the U.P., including Vilas and Oneida counties, where wolves have been detected through radio telemetry, field signs and reports of wolf sightings.
But despite their rise in numbers, Cellar said wolves continue to suffer from a number of rumors, myths and misconceptions.
“One misconception is that they’re dangerous, that they pose an immediate threat to people,” she said. “Any wild animal you need to be cautious of, respectful of, because they are wild animals. However, wolves try to stay away from people and are not going to look at people as prey or attack a person…”
As carnivore predators, Cellar said many people express concerns that wolves decimate deer populations.
“Wolves prey on deer – that’s their number one food source,” she noted. “However, the impact that it makes is relatively minimal compared to the number of deer that are killed by winterkill, the number of deer that are killed by cars.”
While the average wolf takes 18 deer annually – an estimated 10,000 statewide based on current population estimates – Cellar said car accidents claim 50,000 deer per year and winterkill claims even more. And in 2007, Wisconsin hunters killed 518,573 deer out of an estimated population of 1.5-1.7 million deer, a number that stands 70 percent over the DNR’s established deer population goals.
“Wolves do hunt deer,” Cellar noted. “However, they’re not going to decimate the whole deer population.”
A longstanding legacy
Founded in 1987 to provide support for wolf recovery in the Upper Great Lakes region, Cellar said the mission of the non-profit Timber Wolf Alliance is to use “science-based” public education to promote and achieve a “sustainable population of wolves in the western Great Lakes,” with a “focus” on Michigan and Wisconsin.”
“There has to be a social tolerance for wolves,” she said. “If people have a negative opinion of wolves, and a social tolerance of zero wolves, then management of wolves won’t be as successful as it would be if you had people backing it and supporting it. The education aspect will always be up at the forefront of our efforts…”
Timber Wolf Alliance programs, she said, promote strategies which enhance wolf populations and stable interrelationships within the natural community.
The organization provides training in wolf biology and ecology, educational materials on wolves, support for state wolf monitoring efforts, and a variety of opportunities for volunteers, including wolf education outreach, assistance with wolf tracking surveys and the distribution of educational materials about wolves.
Among the major educational outreach initiatives of the Timber Wolf Alliance, Cellar said, is the organization’s active participation in National Wolf Awareness Week, held annually during the third week of October to dispel misconceptions about wolves and teach the public about the important role these predators play in maintaining healthy ecosystems.
As part of its National Wolf Awareness Week activities, the Timber Wolf Alliance annually produces an educational four-color wolf poster that’s distributed to schools, libraries, nature centers and interested citizens. The 2008 wolf poster, “New Territory,” highlighted the artwork of famed Canadian wildlife artist and naturalist Robert Bateman.
Over 50 federal, state and tribal agencies and non-profit organizations nationwide partner with the Timber Wolf Alliance to sponsor and distribute the educational posters.
Locally during the Timber Wolf Alliance’s recent Oct. 12-18 National Wolf Awareness Week observances, the organization sponsored a free-to-the-public Oct. 16 wolf seminar at the Discovery Center, which explored the biology, history and current status of wolves and took a hands-on look at research tools and wolf pelts, skulls, scat and tracks.
Other Timber Wolf Alliance educational efforts include the publication of two twice-yearly educational newsletters – “Wolf Tales,” which offers updates, information and special interest topics relating to wolves of the Midwest, and “Paw Prints,” which features wolf information, updates and special wolf activities geared for children.
Another public education outreach offered by the Timber Wolf Alliance is its popular Volunteer Speaker’s Bureau program, which offers informational presentations on wolves and wolf habitats to schools, libraries, clubs, special interest groups and the general public.
The Timber Wolf Alliance also offers periodic educational programs, including workshops.
Upcoming events include a Dec. 6-7 “Wildlife Track Training Workshop” at the Discovery Center. The workshop, headlined by professional tracker Dr. James Halfpenny, will teach wildlife tracking skills and provide opportunities to learn more about large carnivores.
Learn more
For more information about the Timber Wolf Alliance, contact Cellar by emailing to anna@discoverycenter.net or calling the North Lakeland Discover Center at 715-543-2085 or toll free at 877-543-2085.
More information is also available online by clicking the Timber Wolf Alliance link on the Discovery Center website, www.discoverycenter.net.
Cellar spearheads Discovery Center programming
By Jean Rein
Special to The Lakeland Times
In addition to her work as coordinator of the Timber Wolf Alliance, Anna Cellar wears another wildlife education hat as program director for the North Lakeland Discovery Center.
Currently, Cellar is busy completing the Discovery Center’s winter schedule of activities. She looks forward to presenting a variety of programs for all ages based on her knowledge and experience with native wild animals.
Cellar said there will be a program scheduled there every Saturday, in addition to the winter “Brown Bag” noon programs at local libraries and the popular second Thursdays “Nibbles n’ Knowledge” series, featuring beverages, appetizers and a variety of speakers.
In addition, Cellar reminds the public that the center’s trails are open for hiking and biking. After there is a sufficient snow base, they will be groomed for cross country skiers and snowshoers.
Cellar said she is looking forward to meeting area residents and visitors at the center, and presenting programs of interest to all ages.