Scientists take new position in tracking 3 park wolves
By MIKE STARK
Gazette Wyoming Bureau
The wolves in Yellowstone National Park are a wily and elusive bunch, which makes it hard to track where they go, what they do and what they eat.
But wildlife managers are about to get a better fix on how the wolves — three of them, at least — make their living.
During the park’s annual radio collaring of wolves earlier this month, park officials affixed three wolves with special collars that will allow global positioning system (GPS) technology to track their movements.
Instead of checking on the whereabouts of a radio-collared wolf once a week or so, scientists will be able to pinpoint the location of a GPS-collared wolf up to 12 times a day.
“This will give us a significant gain in our understanding of wolves and the systems they live in,” said Doug Smith, Yellowstone’s lead wolf biologist. “We stand to learn a lot.”
The collars should provide information on how many elk calves are eaten during the summer, how wolves interact with other predators in the park and where wolves tend to roam and find food, Smith said.
Although some people object to putting collars on wolves, Smith said the information the technology provides is necessary.
“Collaring is the bread and butter in how we learn about wolves,” Smith said. “We’re required to know about wolves and we do that by collaring them.”
Young wolves from the Druid Peak, Swan Lake and Leopold packs received the three GPS collars.
Each wolf’s movement will be tracked. The data is then stored in a computer chip inside the collar. The information can be retrieved either by picking up the collar when its battery runs out or from the field using a special receiver.
Smith is planning on tracking down the Swan Lake pack today to remotely download information from the GPS-collared wolf. Once he has the data, he’ll return to his office, merge the information with maps on his computer and be able to see where the wolf has been since it began wearing the collar in early January.
“It’s unbelievable technology,” Smith said.
The primary drawback is that the battery is good only for about a year. Each collar is programmed to unlatch after 10 months and fall to the ground for scientists to recover.
Two Yellowstone wolves were affixed with similar collars two years ago but the latch mechanism failed and the collars didn’t fall off. Wildlife officials had to dart the wolves to retrieve the information.
“That caused us to rethink for a year. Now we’ve switched to a different company with a more tested type of collar with the drop-off mechanism,” Smith said.
Also this year, a few cougars, grizzly bears and black bears will get GPS collars. Scientists want to know how wolves and other large carnivores interact in Yellowstone.
“We should be able to piece together not only predator-prey relationships, but predator-predator relationships,” Smith said. “We’ll see how these different carnivores are using the landscape. Are they competing for food or not? How often do they fight? Those kinds of things.”
In the summer, GPS-collared wolves will be tracked closely so park officials can get a better handle on where wolves are feeding and how many young elk they are eating.
In the winter, it’s easier to see what and where wolves eat because packs tend to stay together, kill larger animals and can be spotted in the snow. They also will spend a day or two eating a kill.
In the summer, wolves often hunt alone or in pairs and then will take a dead elk calf back to the den.
“So now we’ll know what areas they’re using and get a better idea of summer kill rates,” Smith said.
The collars aren’t cheap. Each one runs about $3,000, compared with a radio collar, which is about $300. Smith said 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the GPS collars was covered by private donations.
The investment should be a good one, Smith said, because it will offer much more information than the tradition tracking of wolves using radio collars. In the future it may also reduce, though not eliminate, the need to conduct surveys from the air.
Later this year, Smith is hoping to put GPS collars on a wolf in the Geode pack and one in the Nez Perce pack.
But at the moment, no one knows where the Nez Perce pack is. There’s speculation that the 20-member pack wandered out of Yellowstone in late December, just weeks before one of its own was supposed to be fitted with a satellite-tracking device.