Working as a wolf field technician in Wyoming

 

In the winter of 1999-2000, I worked as a field technician for the Wyoming Wolf Project in the area north of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Wyoming Wolf Project was part of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's wolf reintroduction program; my boss was Dr. Mike Jimenez. Wolves had been reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park a few years earlier, and some had made their way south to Grand Teton National Park, and the Gros Ventre river valley northeast of Jackson Hole. My job description was to monitor wolf movements, and also to collect data for a study on prey selection by wolves in the area.

The aim of the study was to examine which elk the wolves were taking. In other words, were wolves taking the very young, the very old, and the sick or injured? Or, were they indiscriminately taking elk, with no regard to condition? I would visit suspected wolf kills, and (1) determine if wolves were responsible, (2) collect the jawbone and femur, and (3) make any observations of the condition of the killed animal, such as presence of arthritis in the joints, condition of the teeth, or presence of an injury like a broken bone, etc..

It took some training and experience to recognize wolf kills. Mountain lions have a distinctive way of killing and consuming their prey. For example, the neck is always broken by a bite, and the hair below the rib cage looks like it has been shaved, which mountain lions do ,with their incisors, before they enter the body cavity to eat the liver. In contrast, wolves kill by inflicting trauma to the underside of the neck, and eventually severe the large arteries and veins in the neck. There was always a spray pattern of blood in the snow were the severed vein or artery had spurted blood. There would always be footprints of either wolves or a mountain lion in the snow surrounding the carcass. Further, wolves would run down their prey over a large distance, whereas a mountain lion attacked from an ambush position without running the animal down. Coyotes clamp their jaws around the nose of a very young animal and suffocate it. Finally, bears, which were hibernating in the winter, will peel all of the skin back like a banana. I never saw any bear kills.

The results of the study were that wolves were very careful about which animals they selected to pursue and kill. They exclusively killed late-in-the-year elk calves, the very aged, and very sick, obese, or injured cow elk. We didn't find any healthy, adult elk that had been killed by wolves.

The most important thing that happened that winter was that I had an idea. I was looking at some wolf tracks one day, and thought to myself - I wonder what information a scent dog is able to get from a footprint? This got me to thinking about technology, and I wondered if technology had advanced to a point where it could be used to get the same information. The problem with scent dogs is the dog-human interface; it may be (and very likely is true) that dogs know much more than they are able to communicate to humans. The information in a footprint comes from exfoliated skin cells that humans and animals are constantly shedding. Much later in my career, I would be able to predict not only individual identity, but also the individual's age, and gender from a scent in captive wolves using technology.