By JIM MANN/The Daily Inter Lake
Baited with scent and concealed under forest duff and sticks, the traps are set Thursday on the likely travel routes surrounding a newly discovered wolf denning area in the Salish Mountains southwest of Lakeside.
The goal: getting a radio collar onto an adult wolf.
But on this particular day and the day after, the traps were empty and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wolf biologist Kent Laudon will have to return, adjust his tactics and his trapline until there is success.
This is the patient, labor-intensive way of chasing wolves, and Laudon is no stranger to it.
He estimates he has trapped around 80 wolves in his career, which has mostly been centered in Northwest Montana over the last nine years.
Radio collars and satellite collars play a critical role in monitoring and managing the wolf population. A pack with a collar can be observed, typically with end-of-the-year telemetry flights, to produce the state’s minimum population estimates that are considered when setting state wolf hunting regulations.
A pack with a collar can also be tracked down and eliminated if it has been involved in livestock depredation or other problems.
“You have to know who’s who. You can’t stop the depredation if you’re beating on the wrong pack,” Laudon said.
Keeping track of packs has become increasingly difficult. When Laudon started in 2004, there were 11 packs identified in Northwest Montana. As many as 60 were identified at the end of last year. Finding new packs is an annual task.
“Every year we put this big puzzle together. Each pack breaks down into its own puzzle. With some packs you have missing pieces. There’s some packs that we know a lot about,” he said.
There is, for example, the Smoky Pack in the southern Whitefish Range. Laudon has never gotten a radio collar into the pack, but he has located sign and he has received reports to corroborate the pack’s presence, and therefore the Smoky Pack is officially acknowledged.
But there are other packs on which he has years of data, including the locations of multiple denning and rendezvous sites.
“Every year is built on what’s known from the years before,” said Laudon, adding that every year there are new packs to be found.
First-year packs are the most difficult to find because they start out with two wolves that can easily “fly under the radar.” Once a litter is born, however, they typically gain a higher profile — and eventually the attention of Laudon.
That’s the case with the pack he is currently pursuing.
“Two years ago, I’d guess they had their first litter and last year we started looking for them,” he said.
Just a couple of days before Laudon set his first trap, a local sportsman stumbled into one of the adults, which turned and walked away.
The man helped Laudon return to the area, and there was evidence of pups using a culvert under a forest road for shelter. There were pup droppings in the area and bones used for chew toys.
Laudon was onto the denning area, one of the best locations for trapping a species that establish home ranges that sprawl over about 200 square miles. Later in the year, when the pups are bigger and more mobile, packs will start using that larger area, with the adults commonly splitting up. Then they become much harder to locate and trap.
The drainage where Laudon is currently trapping is loaded with deer, including one rust-colored doe that stood no more than 50 yards from one of his trap sets and no more than 300 yards from the denning area.
“That deer is right in their living room … That flies in the face of what a lot of people think about wolves,” he said. While wolves certainly don’t eat salad and do have an impact on deer and elk, Laudon said many people have the impression that those ungulate populations evaporate in the presence of a pack.
Using automated trail cameras, Laudon has an interesting collection of footage showing deer, elk, bears, mountain lions and wolves moving through the exact same locations just hours apart. The trail cams have become time-saving tools in locating wolves, just as transmitters rigged on his traps save time in determining whether a trap has been triggered.
As the year progresses, a picture of the region’s wolf packs will gradually come together. Laudon will have collars in new packs and mortalities will.
“By the end of the year is when we’re flying them really hard,” said Laudon, referring to flights for counting wolves in each pack. The flights come after the general hunting season, partly to reflect pack numbers after wolves have been hunted.