The Company of Wolves (18 page)

Even as a boy, Mech indulged his curiosity by trapping. “As a fourteen-year-old fur trapper, putting scent posts up to catch foxes, I was really curious about why is that fox interested in this urine? What does that mean to the life of the fox?” Today, when life gets too full of snarl and shrillness, Mech goes off to trap mink.

The habit, he believes, reflects the predatory nature of humankind. He talks of “my long predatory instincts,” and adds, “I don’t take any pleasure in hurting anything, but I also don’t think we as humans shouldn’t kill things. Because we, like wolves, are predators.”

We have long compared ourselves to wolves. Much of the comparison has focused on the wolf’s social nature. Jack London’s fictional sled dogs harked back to their wolf ancestry, and when one’s true nature asserted itself, the “dominant primordial beast” emerged. Buck, the lead dog in London’s
Call of the Wild
, killed his way to dominance and then used his leadership to instill efficiency in the dog team. In the same vein, Adolf Hitler, whose first name comes from a Teutonic word for “fortunate wolf,” referred to himself as “a wolf … destined to burst in upon the herd of seducers of the people,” and often used the pseudonym “Wolf.” As Führer, he was called by his admirers “Uncle Wolf,” and the implication of the name was
that his dominance provided an efficient and companionable order. It is a long way from such mythical views of wolves to the scientific understanding Mech hopes to achieve.

At the heart of our understanding of wolf society is the idea of the alpha wolf. In the 1930s, Norwegian biologist Thorlief Schjelderub-Ebbe developed the concept of a pecking order while studying domestic fowl. He observed that each bird in a flock tended to peck down on a bird of lesser status. By the 1940s, the concept of a dominance hierarchy, an ordering of status from most dominant to most submissive, was being applied to other species. In the 1930s and 1940s, Rudolph Schenkel studied captive wolves at the Basel Zoo. He called the highest-ranking male and female “alphas.” In theory, wolves have such dominance orders because, though they must hunt in groups, there is such a risk of overrunning the food supply that only one pair in the pack may breed. In general, among wolves, only the alphas breed, whereas, among other species, dominance hierarchies don’t reflect breeding patterns. A female chimpanzee, for example, will mate with a succession of males, one right after another, without regard for rank. Humans, too, breed regardless of status, and in some societies producing a lot of children is the chief means of gaining standing. Even among wolves, it is not always the alphas who reproduce. Mech observed that the breeding female in an Ellesmere Island pack was a subordinate female. And in one of Murie’s Mount McKinley packs, the dominant male was not the breeding male. Such matings pose the possibility that dominance is not just an expression of the sharpest bite or the strongest will.

Dominant wolves have prerogatives. Any wolf in possession of food is likely to have a zone of one to two feet around it that no other wolf will enter. But dominant wolves have wider zones of personal space. Mech observed that, after the Ellesmere pack fed on a musk ox, the alpha pair took possession of the carcass. At the kill of a musk-ox calf, he saw a subordinate male propel itself toward the dominant male, with ears and lips back and body low in emphatic submission. The subordinate male crouched below the alpha and pawed at his face, like a puppy. The dominant male snapped at the subordinate and it fell to the ground. Mech wondered whether the gesture expressed a kind of homage.

Dominant wolves may have powers we do not clearly perceive.
Eric Zimen studied a captive pack in Germany in which two females bore pups several years in succession, but the pups of the subordinate female always died. Though he could not say conclusively why the pups died, he had the impression that the subordinate mother and her young were heavily stressed, perhaps by psychological pressure from the alpha female. Zimen suggested that the alpha female kept subordinate females from coming into breeding condition by some similar psychological means. He found that all of his subordinate females had vaginal bleeding at estrus. They ovulated and had the same hormone levels as the alpha female, and some even produced milk, but they did not become pregnant. Klinghammer found that, with the alpha female present, subordinate wolves were in estrus only twenty to thirty days; if he removed the alpha, the subordinates’ estrus periods lasted forty-seven to sixty-five days. Similarly, Mech found that, whereas wolves normally don’t breed until their second year, pups reared apart from adult wolves would come into season and even breed at nine to ten months of age.

Rank is often reflected in personality. Dominant wolves are confident, sober, outgoing, and assured. Low-ranking wolves are nervous, shy, and sometimes withdrawn. If a dominant wolf loses its rank, its personality may change. Zimen’s captive subdominants were friendly with strange wolves and even sought them out, something they could only do when away from the dominant members of the pack. One of Zimen’s captives would get out and go to the village, where it played with dogs and children. But when it became alpha male, it ceased to do that, and attacked people and strange dogs through the fence. It even attacked Zimen. Once it lost its dominant status, it reverted to its old congenial personality.

In practice, the idea of the alpha has been stretched to mean “leader.” The alpha in a school of fish is whichever fish happens to be swimming in front. When the school turns, a different fish may be the alpha. With wolves, it is often presumed that the alpha directs hunting and the movement of the pack. Some observers believe that the alpha keeps the pack together as a society; but whether the alpha does so by being aggressively intolerant of disorder or by fostering a sense of companionability is not known.

People inevitably say of Mech that he is the “alpha” of wolf researchers. Indeed, he is the researcher with the broadest and longest
experience watching wolves in the field and arguing for them in committees, in state legislatures, and in the halls of the U.S. Congress. When reporters want to know about wolves, they call Mech—and they call often, for wolves are an enduring source of controversy. Mech’s efforts to bring what he has learned about wolves into the discussion of what we should do about them has kept him at the center of that controversy for decades. Minnesota had a bounty on wolves until 1965. Mech testified in the legislature against continuing the bounty, arguing that only wolves known to have attacked livestock ought to be killed. When the legislature did not reauthorize the bounty, farmers and hunters alike were outraged. Though the wolf was declared an endangered species by the federal government in 1967, legal protections didn’t start until 1974. Even then the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources continued to trap and kill wolves, and did so until the federal government warned that it was violating the Endangered Species Act. Minnesota has never liked having the federal government preempt its control over a species, and today still wishes to see the wolf delisted and a sport-hunting season opened on it. In 1978, the federal government downgraded Minnesota’s wolves from endangered to threatened, to try to reduce conflict. But in 1983 and 1984, when the state tried to allow the sport hunting of wolves, conservationists sued and barred the hunt. There is still a lot of anger over wolves in Minnesota, and Mech, who has repeatedly come to their defense, has borne a lot of the anger.

He takes it from both sides. Defenders of wolves also criticize him for his willingness to permit wolves that prey on livestock to be killed. “In a pluralistic world,” he says, “I believe we have to manage most of our wildlife. We can’t have bison running through wheat-fields. We have to manage bison when they’re in areas where they cause damage. And we have to manage wolves.”

He sees that the constituency for wildlife has changed. “Since Rachel Carson and Earth Day,” says Mech, “there’s a whole new breed of people who’ve become interested in wildlife, maybe more from reading or television. Many of these folks didn’t grow up hunting and fishing and trapping. A lot of these folks turn more to animal welfare and animal rights and wildlife rehabilitation, which from a biological attitude makes very little sense. They think that every wild animal out there is like a pet. It’s a very emotional approach to
life, and it leads to such absurdities as two people independently asking me why the government doesn’t go out and round up all the wild wolves in Minnesota and give them physical exams and euthanize the ones that aren’t fit and feed the wolves so they won’t have to go through the gruesome thing of killing. The people who get interested in that phenomenon are very important to conservation, but, alas, it’s for the wrong reason. We have people worrying about every individual muskrat while people are out there draining the marsh. If we can save the marsh, we can have muskrats forever.”

It is in part because Mech has stood between these conflicting forces that he is recognized by nonscientists as the leading authority on wolves. But if he is a leader, he does not—at first glance—seem very wolflike about it. He is not aggressive, and it is hardly in his nature to speak ill of someone else. Careful with his words, he is apt, when speculating about why wolves do something, to use two or three qualifiers in a sentence, to say “maybe” or “almost,” or to apologize for suggesting a mere analogy. Perhaps this is all a reflection of his watchfulness: he does not speak for what he does not know. And when he is in a room full of biologists, he is likely to seek consensus. He chairs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Wolf Specialist Group, which advises the IUCN and comes up with action plans for wolf conservation all over the world. “Most governments will listen to us,” he says. But the meetings of the group are strewn with controversy. Should the group oppose the use of poison? Should it condone aerial gunning of wolves as a method of research? If Italy’s last three hundred wolves prove to have interbred with dogs, should the group support their protection on ecological grounds? Such questions may be argued heatedly. Mech is apt to end the discussion before it gets too contentious, trying to save tempers and working relationships until the issue develops a semblance of civility. Says Mech, “We try to work by consensus. I think it’s a better way to go if you can do it. Why embroil yourself in controversy if you don’t have to?”

As he says this, it is hard not to think about what some people say about alpha wolves being not the meanest and most aggressive, but the ones that are best able to bring harmony to the pack.

• • •

Mech is currently conducting research in Alaska’s Denali National Park, on remote Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, and in the Superior National Forest of northern Minnesota. He delegates much of the Alaska and Minnesota work to graduate assistants who stay in the field, but prefers to do the Ellesmere Island work himself, because Ellesmere is open terrain, and in midsummer the sun does not set, and he can watch the wolves twenty-four hours a day. Since 1966, however, he has devoted the bulk of his time to research in the Superior National Forest.

The Minnesota study is wide-ranging. The big question has always been what effects the wolves have on the white-tailed deer population. Wolf trapping goes on from June to October, deer trapping from January to April, with radio-tracking all year round. An extremely diverse collection of scientific publications have come out of the twenty-six years of study, from papers on scent-marking and papers on howling to papers on home-range size. Mech is constantly coming up with ideas for scientific articles he feels he should write. “I know far more about wolves than I’ve ever published,” he says. “The major work from this project has yet to be written.” He writes much of his research by dictating into a miniature tape recorder during the five-hour drive between the lab and his office in St. Paul. He is working on a book on predation that will explain what he has learned about wolf-prey systems.

One of the things Mech is interested in is what makes some wolves disperse. “What I’m trying to get at is, why do some subordinate wolves stay with the pack for years and years, and others take off? What is the triggering mechanism that makes them go? Are they kicked out, or do they go on their own?” And that is why we are about to go out to find and capture Wolf 171.

We put on three pairs of socks and thickly insulated snow boots. Mech pulls a Gore-Tex shell over his fleece pants and I zip up a goose-down parka. We get into his Fish and Wildlife Service Chevy Corsica, and he follows Norton and Seabloom, who are driving a pickup truck and hauling a trailer carrying two snowmobiles. The sky is low. It is ten degrees out, and snowing. Mech drives forty miles an hour over the snow-paved roads of the forest, steady as a rock at the wheel.

As he drives, Mech mentions that, in thirty-five years of study, except
for Ellesmere Island, he has had only fifteen encounters with wolves without the aid of radio collars or airplanes. “All were fairly brief,” he says, most of them windshield sightings as he drove along a forest road. One wolf crossed a highway in front of him in Alaska, and he almost hit it. He points out a spot on this road where he saw a pack cross in front of him. He recounts another in Ontario, and others in Minnesota. He remembers every one. So rare were the encounters, he says, that “each one was memorable. Each one was an event. If one ran out in the road in front of us right now, it would be extremely exciting.”

The point is, says Mech, “it’s difficult to find these animals from the ground.” So you use either airplanes or radio collars, and preferably you use both. The National Park Service forbade the use of radio collars on Isle Royale because visitors would object to scientists’ meddling with the lives of wild wolves in a national park. But in Minnesota, the United States Forest Service had no such objection. Today, radio collars allow Mech to follow the movements of individual packs and to find and retrieve their kills. He can also collar deer to get a better idea of how many of them fall prey to wolves. “Primarily, everything we’ve done since 1968 is based on radio-tracking,” he says. “We’ve radioed five hundred wolves in this area. One wolf we followed for eleven years and three months.”