Tracking a mystery
By Misty Edgecomb, Of the NEWS Staff
if wolves are in maine, the state ought to admit it, says glenburn hunter
The winter night begs for the plaintive echo of a wolf, howling across the
wild, icy hilltops that mark the boundary between civilized Maine and
civilized Quebec.
It’s cold and clear in the Little Black River watershed, and the northern
lights are flashing across the sky, an otherworldly green mimicking the
“fierce green fire” that naturalist Aldo Leopold once famously saw in a
dying wolf’s eyes.
But this just isn’t the night.
Dana Smith packs up his microphones and tape recorder and wills his old
truck to start in the subzero temperature.
Officially, there are no wolves in Maine, and there haven’t been since the
1880s.
But Smith, who lives in Glenburn, is in a growing community that doesn’t
buy the official word. He says his life changed when, on a hunting trip
six years ago, he saw a wolf in these woods west of the town of Allagash.
Since then, he has spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of
hours searching the North Woods for any sign – a track in the snow, a bit
of fur, a faraway howl.
“If you see one, you’ll never forget it. … They look right through you,”
Smith said. “Once you make eye contact, blink and they’re gone.”
Smith describes himself as “a deer hunter at heart.” He hates the idea of
reintroducing wolves to Maine, and has no patience with animal-rights
activists. But he doesn’t like being told he’s wrong. If wolves are here,
the state ought to admit it, he said.
“I hunt [for wolves] just as hard as I hunt anything. Probably harder,” he
said.
Lately, Smith has been joined in his hunt by wildlife activists who
desperately want to find proof of wolves in northern Maine. The National
Wildlife Federation has trained volunteers to look for tracks, and it
hired a wolf biologist to independently verify Smith’s reports of tracks,
howls, carcasses and other signs of the elusive canids.
Time is of the essence, because in March, the National Fish and Wildlife
Service downgraded gray wolves in the eastern United States from
endangered to threatened status. If all goes as planned, the wolf is
scheduled to be dropped from the listing entirely after about a year.
That leaves Maine’s wolves – if they exist – with absolutely no protection
come next year, said Lisa Osborn, spokeswoman for Defenders of Wildlife in
the Northeast. Defenders has filed a lawsuit to fight the change.
“They’re packing up their tools before the job is done,” Osborn said. “A
lot of this is politically motivated. It doesn’t make scientific sense.”
Weighing the Odds
Maine does not recognize the wolf as a state endangered species because,
as Ken Elowe of the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife
said, “How can you protect something that’s not [officially] here?”
Everyone – from state and federal biologists to wolf reintroduction
advocates and hunters like Dana Smith – agrees that a wolf probably makes
its way into Maine every now and then. Two wolflike animals were killed
here during the 1990s, and the Laurentides Provincial Wildlife Reserve, a
preserve in eastern Quebec, is only 75 miles away.
A wolf can travel 50 or more miles in a day without breaking a sweat, and
when young animals are seeking out new territories, they can disperse over
tremendous distances. Three years ago, a radio-tagged wolf from Michigan
made news when it turned up 500 miles away in Missouri.
Then last fall, wolves spotted just 30 miles from the Maine border near
the Quebec towns of Sherbrooke and Lac-Megantic had activists and
biologists abuzz with the prospect of a natural wolf recovery in Maine.
“There’s nothing to keep them from crossing that invisible line,” Smith
said.
Biologists had long believed that wolves weren’t able to cross the
powerful St. Lawrence River nor the heavily populated Quebec City urban
area that lie between the Laurentides Preserve and the Maine border.
“Wolves have a real gantlet to run if they’re going to come from north of
the river,” said Mark McCollough, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service based in Old Town.
In addition to contending with the river and four-lane highways, wolves
are affected by intensive trapping sanctioned by the Canadian government.
If wolves cross the St. Lawrence, there’s nothing to keep them from
populating the Gaspe Peninsula in far northern New Brunswick, where a rare
population of wild caribou is struggling to survive, McCollough explained.
Still, wildlife ecologists have published theories on which routes wolves
might take. They estimate Maine could support 784 to 1,575 wolves.
Thousands of acres of habitat are available. In fact, much of the habitat
in Maine is wilder than the land in Michigan and Wisconsin where wolves
have rebounded in recent years.
“Once they get a foothold in Maine, they’ll just take off,” Lisa Osborn
said.
That’s precisely what’s happened over the past decade in the upper
peninsula of Michigan. Wolf sightings began with a few tracks, some
fleeting glimpses like Smith’s. A decade later, wolves have become a
tourist attraction, according to Jim Hamill, a retired state biologist.
So why isn’t every moose hunter in northern Maine seeing packs of wolves?
“There are a lot of unanswered questions, and the only thing that’s going
to change it is a radio collar,” Smith said. “And for that, you’ve go to
catch one.”
Tracking with the Wolf Man
The roof of Smith’s truck reads “wolf man” in big letters made of tape,
just in case he gets stranded on these snow-covered logging roads and
needs to be rescued by helicopter. As he works alone, an hour into the
woods from Allagash village in early March, becoming snowbound isn’t as
far fetched as it sounds.
The flash battery on Smith’s motion-triggered camera has frozen solid, and
an angry moose crushed one of the $7,000 cameras with its hoof.
Last New Year’s Eve, Smith spent the night camping in his truck, with the
temperature well below zero, hoping to hear a howl. His propane stove
froze, so he had to build a fire in the snow. In the spring, he has waded
knee-deep into a cedar swamp to follow a hot trail.
“You name it, it’s happened,” he said.
Our March journey with Smith to the drainage of the Little Black River
west of Allagash was uneventful by comparison. In two days, we traveled
168 miles by truck, and another 70 by snowmobile, searching for signs of
life – and life was everywhere. Long skinny snowshoe hare prints, deer
tracks like quotation marks in the snow, graceful wing prints of ravens
and a mishmash of little dog tracks – coyote, Smith said.
Once we got a few miles into the woods, however, the coyote prints
disappeared.
“The first five minutes out of the gate is where all the coyotes are. Why
would that be, unless there’s something bigger and badder in here?,” he
asked.
According to Jim Hamill, who was hired by the National Wildlife Federation
to verify Smith’s sightings during a February tracking expedition, that’s
exactly what should happen when wolves and coyotes interact.
“Wolves are one of the most effective tools for controlling coyote
numbers,” he said. “They kill them on contact.”
Smith stared at his map, tracing lines with his finger, then rubbing his
forehead, trying to think like a wolf.
“They always make some kind of a circle. There are several places they
frequent. What they do in between is anybody’s guess,” he said. “They
could be here right now, and they could be gone tomorrow morning.”
Finally, Smith found tracks, deep depressions as though someone had
punched a fist into the powdery snow. Something heavy, with big feet,
walked though these drifts. It wasn’t a lynx, which leaves perfect round
cookie-cutter cat tracks atop the snow’s crust. Neither did this big track
look anything like the small, erratic coyote prints we saw clustered
around a deer carcass near Allagash.
The snow was too soft to make a good impression, so we didn’t take plaster
casts. Still, Smith measured the track, which was just smaller than the
officially sanctioned 4.5-inch-long wolf track. He was not deterred by a
couple of millimeters.
“That’s a crock,” Smith said. “It’s not a perfect world.”
Smith strode along, mirroring the tracks. At 6-foot-4, Smith has a stride
that matched the animal’s.
The tracks stretched far out ahead. Perfectly aligned, they were like a
zipper running the length of this unplowed woods road. We followed them
for a few yards, then saw the one track diverge into two. Smith talked
about the pair of wolves he believes he has seen several times, a big
black male and a smaller gray female.
“They’re well put-together, not skinny or scrawny. They’re pushing 100
pounds,” he said. “They’re in the neighborhood, but we’re a little late,
as usual.”
We followed the tracks on snowmobile, Smith urgently pushing through the
soft drifts, hoping that we can make good use of the photographer’s
telephoto lens. Then the tracks abruptly stopped.
“There’s times when I think they must fly away – they just disappear,” he
said.
A Wolf is a Wolf – Right?
Right now, the only concrete proof that Maine ever had wolves is in
storage at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Mass., and the Museum of Science in Boston. There’s not much
here to work with, just a few skulls, a pelt and a desiccated snout –
evidence of New England’s history of bounty killing.
At one time or another, Maine had bounties in place on every predator, but
wolves were a favorite target, with local bounties to protect livestock
starting in the late 1600s, and a 71-year state bounty program that wasn’t
discontinued until 1903. Certainly thousands of wolves were killed, and
most biologists time the wolf’s disappearance from Maine around the turn
of the century for this very reason.
A few decades later, a strain of unusually large coyotes found an
ecological niche as the North Woods’ top dog. Some biologists suspect
Maine’s coyote has interbred with wolves, creating a genetic hybrid that
makes it almost impossible to answer the question, “What is a wolf?”
Genetic testing indicates that the Harvard specimens seem to be red
wolves, a smaller species that feeds on deer, interbreeds with coyotes and
can be found in New York and Ontario. But northern Maine’s habitat is
better-suited to the more powerful gray wolf, which is found in northern
Quebec and the Great Lakes region, kills coyotes on sight and hunts moose.
Maine straddles an ecological boundary, and it’s entirely possible that
the state once had both types of wolves, or that they bred with each other
and with coyotes to form hybrid animals with muddied genetics.
The basic rule is that different species don’t interbreed. But that
doesn’t mean that they can’t. Biologically, a wolf could breed with a
poodle, but behavioral differences keep it from happening, Ken Elowe
explained.
“Wolf genes have been shifting for hundreds of years.” Mark McCollough
said.
Genetic puzzle
The genetics puzzle fascinates scientists and bores the general public,
but it’s critical to wolf politics. Maine can’t prove that it has wolves
through genetic testing alone, because such studies are imprecise and the
animals may have traveled here.
The fight over whether an animal is primarily wolf, coyote or domestic dog
could keep any attempt at an endangered species listing here tied up in
the courts for years.
In 1996, an 81-pound “wolf” was trapped in eastern Maine, then tested and
found to have coyote genes, despite its massive size and wolf-like
behavior. There still isn’t agreement on what to call the animal.
Then in 2000 a reported wolf was captured west of Baxter State Park after
it approached people and ate from garbage cans. The animal, which now
lives at a wolf-dog sanctuary in western Maine, was likely raised in
captivity.
Many Mainers believe that predator advocates are releasing these tame
wolves into the wild.
“They think they could be doing nature a favor by starting a
reintroduction, kind of a ‘Born Free’-type situation,” Elowe said.
All of Maine’s wildlife groups discourage such action, they say.
“We feel the same way about releasing wolves illegally as we do about
people killing wolves,” Osborn said.
Rather, they believe that the tame animals that DIF&W claims explain most
of the Maine wolf sightings, are probably pets released by owners who
can’t handle their wild wolf-dogs. Maine tends to draw such people because
it’s within striking distance of Boston and New York, and the state looks
like such a good home for a wayward wolf, Elowe said.
“No one in the city would believe that you could turn a wolf loose in the
Maine woods and it wouldn’t survive, he said.
Whether an animal is genetically wolf, coyote, or dog, however, any canid
predators that manage to form packs and live wild in the Maine woods will
change the state’s ecosystems.
“If it looks like a wolf and it acts like a wolf, it is a wolf,”
McCollough said.
Hear no Evil; See no Evil
Dana Smith is among a chorus of critics who say that Maine DIF&W has its
blinders on when it comes to wolves and uses the genetic confusion as a
red herring. The “wolf man” has reported dozens of tracks and sightings.
He’s sent in samples of hair and scat for genetic analysis, but says he
hasn’t gotten much response.
“It’s all a big can of worms,” he said. “Personally, I think the upper
management of the state doesn’t want to hear it.”
Lisa Osborn, too, wonders what the state will do when enough wolves
trickle over the border to form packs.
“The last thing they want to deal with is another endangered species,” she
said, with the oft-repeated criticism that DIF&W has the interests of
hunters, and not wildlife, at heart. DIF&W relies primarily on hunters and
trappers for its wolf reports, often the same people who support snaring
coyotes to preserve local winter deer populations.
The northern Maine ecosystem changed with the loss of its chief predator,
and game animals like deer and moose have thrived, eventually spawning a
multi-million dollar hunt each fall. Wolves are often perceived as a
threat to this tradition.
The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, the state’s largest hunting lobby,
vehemently opposes wolf reintroduction, but would be more accepting of
wolves that make it here on their own, said Executive Director George
Smith. In a 2003 opinion survey of its membership, however, only 29
percent said that they would like to see wolves return.
“I think the general sentiment for the American public is that they don’t
want wolves around,” Osborn said. “Any wolf that has been found south of
the Canadian border [in Maine] has been a dead wolf.”
The state has an official wolf policy, which states that reintroduction is
opposed, and that a natural recolonization will be neither impeded nor
helped along. Locally, wolves are protected only by state poaching laws.
State biologists lack the time and funding to go chasing wolves,
particularly after thousands of dollars in research funds were cut to fill
the state budget deficit. Going out to find a wolf in the vast commercial
forests of northwestern Maine would be “a lesson in frustration,” Elowe
said.
“They’ve been on the radar screen for a decade or more, but we haven’t
found enough evidence that we could effectively spend money on it,” he
said.
The department gets 20 or more wolf sighting reports every year, many of
which come from trappers working in Maine’s North Woods. But a single
eyewitness report isn’t worth much where the Endangered Species Act is
concerned. To change the official status of wolves in Maine, Elowe needs
irrefutable proof – like a live capture and evidence that the animal had
been living in the wild or a breeding pair with pups.
“It’s a Catch-22,” McCollough said. “A wolf would be very vulnerable.”
Wolves are likely on their way, but won’t survive the risks of snares,
shotguns and interbreeding with coyotes without protection. Politics will
have to catch up with ecology for the Maine wolf to become reestablished,
said biologists.
“Both sides need to wake up,” Smith said. “There’s people that have the
means if they just would put their politics aside and get some work done.”