Howl

Will Wisconsin ever make peace with wolves? Or will vengeance prevail?

by

“For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

–  Henry Beston, The Outermost House

There is a difference between a forest where wolves walk and one where they don’t.

It is a difference rooted in ecology but also in something less scientific. Knowing that I am in a place where wolves live touches me deeply, stirring ancient, buried memory and giving me pause when I stand at the edge of a darkened wood in the wild, northern country where the packs roam and hunt and raise their young.

Here in Wisconsin, another wolf hunt could be held in the next few months, though a Dane County judge has effectively blocked the hunt scheduled for Nov. 6. Meanwhile, the fate of the wolf in Wisconsin seems as uncertain as ever, tangled in politics and court cases and a cultural divide that has brought the vitriol and divisions of current public discourse to the management of wildlife. I recently traveled with Wisconsin wolf biologist Adrian Wydeven far into the Chequamegon National Forest on a calm, starlit night to howl for wolves. I stayed quietly by the car and listened in the pitch-black as Wydeven walked away, his boots crunching on the gravel of the forest road. After a moment of silence, Wydeven issued a series of low and ghostly, moan-like howls. The forest remained quiet. Wydeven howled again, only much louder this time, his howls echoing through the dense woods.

Once again, nothing. Wydeven hoped that somewhere out there was a wolf pack he had not heard howl since the February wolf hunt. The silence, he noted when seated in the car again and perusing his maps in the glow of the ceiling lights, was not a good sign, and depressing. This area was home to two wolf packs and he feared one had not fared well during the poorly regulated and ill-timed hunt in February — the wolf’s mating season — when hunters killed nearly 218 of the state’s estimated 1,100 wolves in 72 hours. Hunters, mostly using packs of radio-collared dogs and ATVs, killed 99 more wolves than the quota of 119 set by the agency, an excess of 83 percent.

In previous wolf hunting seasons, the largest statewide quota exceedance had been six wolves.

On this same trip north, Peter David, a biologist who oversees wolf management for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, met with me at a picnic table in the sun outside his offices on the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation near Ashland. Asked to describe the hunt, he simply shook his head.

“It was three days of slaughter,” David says.

Wydeven, retired after managing the DNR’s wolf recovery program for many years, co-authored an analysis of the hunt. It was a hunt the agency had been forced to allow because of legal action by an ultra-conservative hunting advocacy group called Hunter Nation, which is led by Luke Hilgemann, the former head of Americans For Prosperity.

In the assessment, which he wrote for Green Fire, an environmental organization of retired DNR professionals, Wydeven reported the killing of so many breeding-age wolves means that as many as 50 wolf packs may not produce young this year. Worse, the loss of 116 males, including 47 adult males, could lead to the loss of a number of packs dependent upon those animals for hunting and food. Hunters also killed 53 yearling females, half or more of whom may have been pregnant, according to the Green Fire analysis.

These numbers no doubt weighed heavily on Wydeven that night in the Chequamegon as he stood on the forest roads waiting for a response to his howls. In the car, filling out his data sheets, Wydeven spoke of the difference between a night when wolves speak back and a night when the forest is silent.

“When you get a response, it changes everything,” says Wydeven.

Wydeven folded his map and tucked his compass and GPS device into pockets of his vest.

We drove on into the night.

The deterioration of the public discussion concerning management of the wolf comes at a time when we should be celebrating the return of the animal to Wisconsin. It is, after all, a great success. When I started covering the DNR and environmental issues in 1978 for the Wisconsin State Journal, wolves were just beginning to return to the state after decades of bounty hunting — $20 for adult wolves and $10 for pups.

By the late 1950s, reports of wolves were treated like sightings of Bigfoot. Few wolves remained south of Lake Superior and those were mostly lone wolves on the move, shadows in the forest.

But the wolves, responding to endangered species protections and the proliferation of wild and preserved landscapes, started returning on their own, traveling from Minnesota’s northern wilderness where populations remained healthy.

This was no small feat. The wolves were returning to a Wisconsin that was still in the thrall of the myths and misconceptions that drove the bounty system — two of the most persistent being that wolves would decimate the deer herd and that they were a threat to humans.

Despite the reputation of the wolf as an apex predator that dominates the forest, the struggles endured by the wolf in its return were many, especially when it came to escaping the wrath of humans.

On a previous tracking trip, Wydeven told me the story of a wolf he had grown fond of, following her collar signal for years through the depths of the Chequamegon. She had no name, just a number, 475.

When Wydeven first fastened a radio collar around the wolf’s neck in June 2004, 475 was in bad shape. She was 3 or 4 years old and weighed only about 60 pounds, 10 pounds less than the average adult female. Both of her lower canines and outer lower incisors had been broken off. Wydeven expected to hear a mortality signal from her collar within weeks.

But 475, part of the Shanagolden pack in the Chequamegon, lived for another six years. She would bear seven litters of pups, according to placental scars. And she would suffer mightily at the hands of humans.

A necropsy of 475, whose body Wydeven found in a bog near the Chippewa River, showed her body riddled with shotgun pellets. A recent shot to the side of her skull might have contributed to her death.

Despite such struggles, Wisconsin is now home to as many as 1,100 wolves, according to the DNR. And as that number has grown, the public has slowly and haltingly grown more accepting of wolves in Wisconsin’s forests, according to those like David who work on recovery. It’s certainly not universal and acceptance is greater in southern Wisconsin than in the north where the wolf is at the edge of town.

Initially, as the wolf returned, Wisconsin carved out an impressive record of managing these new populations. In 1957, Wisconsin became the first state to legally protect wolves and the first in 1975 to declare wolves endangered.

But acceptance of wolves has been blunted in recent years by the conservative politics that has largely controlled wolf management and misleads the public with inaccurate data and repetitions of the old untruths that drove the bounties and now shapes the hunts.

“Wisconsin has now become a prime example of what happens when wolf management is driven by politics instead of science,” write the authors of the Green Fire report.

It is a nationwide phenomenon, driven by the political agendas of hunting advocacy groups such as the Kansas-based Hunter Nation, which aggressively backs conservative causes and politicians (including Donald Trump), vociferously defends Second Amendment rights, and pushes states to establish trophy hunts and drastic predator control. The group is now pushing for a sandhill crane hunt in Wisconsin.

Dan Vermillion, former chairman of Montana’s fish and wildlife commission, recently told the Associated Press that wolves are being used to stoke political outrage in the same way Second Amendment gun rights were used in recent elections to raise fears that Democrats would restrict firearms.

In Wisconsin in 2012, a conservative Republican-controlled state Legislature, driven by the state’s powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies, stepped in to pass legislation designed to reduce wolf numbers.

In establishing the first wolf hunt, the Legislature completely bypassed the DNR and its professionals and ordered regular hunts that allowed the use of hunting dogs, hunting at night, baiting and trapping. Wisconsin would become the only state to allow the use of dogs. Agency biologists, though in agreement with a limited and tightly-managed hunt, objected futilely to the brutal, unfair nature of the Legislature’s hunt and the lack of scientific input.

The most lingering damage was done when proponents of killing more wolves wrongly embraced the number of 350 as a population goal.

Keith Warnke, administrator of the DNR’s fish, wildlife and parks division, says 350 was cited in the state’s earliest management plan not as a population ceiling but as a floor that would trigger further management actions. Biologists now understand that that original number dramatically underestimated the capacity of the Wisconsin landscape to support wolves.

Yet, to this day, critics of wolf recovery have used the number as a cap they claim should be used to drastically reduce the state’s wolf population. The claim has become, in effect, a lie embraced and pushed by conservative politicians and hunting groups such as Hunter Nation in the same way that lies, big and small, now distort national political debate.

For example, the endorsement of a 300-wolf quota for the next hunt by the Natural Resources Board, which sets policy for the department, is predicated on the continuing misinterpretation of that 350 threshold; the agency, having urged a precautionary approach in light of the deadly February hunt, later set the quota at 130 in defiance of its board.

The divisive actions of the board especially ignored the rights of Wisconsin’s Native American tribes, which revere the wolf as sacred. Under their treaties, the tribes are entitled to half of any wolf hunting quota, which they choose not to utilize because of their beliefs. But the board, set on killing more wolves, simply proposed an even higher quota to negate the tribe’s share, an action DNR Secretary Preston Cole blasted as “outrageous.”

The tribes have filed suit, charging the board’s actions violated their treaty rights. A federal judge delayed action on the lawsuit, noting that the November wolf hunt was already under an injunction.

That politics is at play here becomes even more clear when the rationale for killing more wolves is examined. Groups such as Hunter Nation claim wolves have become so numerous in Wisconsin that they pose a threat to humans, that they are decimating the deer herd and killing too many farm animals.

In reality, it is difficult to find few if any examples of humans being killed by wolves. On the other hand, dogs kill as many as 25,000 people worldwide every year. The deadliest threat to humans is the lowly mosquito, responsible for 1 million deaths a year.

As for livestock predation, cattle are more likely to die from adverse weather and disease. With more than 3 million cattle in Wisconsin, less than 0.05 percent die from wolf attacks.

And, while wolves do kill deer, they kill far fewer than humans. According to the DNR, a wolf kills between 15 and 20 deer per year, meaning that wolves in Wisconsin kill fewer than 20,000 deer in a year. Humans, however, kill as many as 450,000 deer during annual hunts and an estimated 40,000 per year with their vehicles.

All of this ignores the good that wolves do. They keep deer herds healthier by preying on sick and old animals. They keep forests healthy by keeping down a deer population that nibbles away important and even endangered understory plants. And a recent study by Wesleyan University and UW-Madison showed wolves save us $10.9 million each year because there are fewer car-deer collisions in counties with wolves.

Yet wolves, especially with the advent of hunting seasons, continue to evoke powerful emotion. It is not difficult to tap into the deep-seated hatred that some harbor toward wolves. It is all over hunting pages on the internet, stoked by images depicting wolves as enormous, snarling creatures with bared fangs. Such images accompany Luke Hilgemann’s blog on Hunter Nation’s website, though he does write that the organization supports wolf recovery.

Posts on the Wisconsin Bear Hunters United website show a desire to kill wolves that goes far beyond an interest in controlling a predator. “Make America great again, make wolves extinct again,” reads one. And on the Wisconsin Wolf Hunting Facebook page, it’s not unusual to find comments such as “The only good wolf is a dead wolf.”

While Wisconsin has a rich hunting tradition, killing wolves lies outside the set of values that many hunters follow. Wolves, for example, are not killed for food. Most end up as trophy mounts and pelts. Or, as some believe, they are killed for vengeance, as payback for the killing of deer or hunting dogs. Between 9 and 19 percent of Wisconsin’s wolves are killed illegally each year, according to the DNR.

“We don’t shoot everything and we don’t have to,” says David of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. “We’re shooting wolves because we hate them or to put a tacky rug on our wall.”

In his book Of Wolves and Men, the writer Barry Lopez contemplates this human compulsion to despise wolves to the point of wanting them eliminated from our world.

“I do not think men thoughtlessly kill wolves, they have reasons for doing so,” Lopez writes. “Prime among them is the belief that they are doing something deeply and profoundly right. Whatever arguments are put forth — predation on big game, wolves are cowards and deserve to die — all seem rooted in the belief that the wolf is ‘wrong’ in the scheme of things, like cancer, and has to be rooted out.”

I’m not naïve. It is tempting to romanticize the wolf, just as many of those who dislike wolves tend to wrongly vilify the animal.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. The wolf, as Henry Beston writes in The Outermost House, is its own nation. It is an essential cog in the ecology of northern forests. And there is no denying that it is a natural and efficient killer of its food, something which all who would accept wolves have to find a way to live with.

Several winters back, I flew with wolf biologists working for famed wolf researcher L. David Mech. They were tracking wolves in and around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I was crammed into the back of the small plane with a pile of electronic tracking instruments.

When we picked up a series of electronic clicks from a collared wolf, the pilot would drop the plane down to investigate. In addition to checking on packs from the air, we would keep an eye out for moose kills on the frozen lakes. They weren’t difficult to spot — large, bloody patches on the blinding white snow surrounded by hundreds of paw prints.

The pilot would land the plane, fitted with skis over the tires, on the ice some distance from the kill. We would then snowshoe over so that the biologists could piece together from the tracks how the kill had transpired. It always impressed me how little of the moose was left, tatters of hide and a few scattered and cracked bones.

Mostly from that trip, I remember seeing a pack of wolves gathered on a knoll deep in the forest. We could see them far below curled up in the snow, their tails wrapped around and covering their noses. The plane, however, roused them and they sat up, following our progress intently, their snouts raised to the plane and their ears erect.

Then, one wolf bolted and started running along a trail that led down off the knoll. The others, perhaps seven or eight in all, followed. They were beautiful. They seemed to stream down the side of the hill more than run and they were lean and fast, the sun glinting off their coats. I was reminded of essayist Edward Hoagland’s description of wolves on the run, “of their flowing joy, of such a delight in running that they melt into the woods like sunlight, like running water.”

Eventually, on our recent howling trip, Wydeven would raise the howls of what he believed were two packs in the corner of the Chequamegon we crossed that night.

The second pack that responded was the one Wydeven had feared had been disbanded by the February hunt. But howling near a creek in open country where the sky was wide above us and bright with starlight, the howls and wails of the little pack came back to us, soft at first, and then louder, rising and echoing and then trailing off into silence. Perhaps two adults and a pup or two, chiming in with their higher pitched yowls and yips until the adults quieted them.

It was good to hear the wolves howling again, especially this pack perched so precariously on the edge of existence. It took me back to wilderness campsites deep in canoe country where wolf and loon song would enliven the nights and remind you that you were in a different place, in Beston’s nation of wild things.

Can we live eventually with the wolf and all that the relationship entails? Can the state’s wolf population continue to thrive in the face of hunts that ignore sound biology?

The answers remain unclear in the current political morass, which it seems we will have to navigate to arrive at some common ground — perhaps including a science-based hunt — that allows wolves to persist and humans to live alongside them with little complaint.

The alternative would be a forest without the wolf’s haunting, other-worldly song and all that the predator contributes to a healthier deer herd and landscape.

That seems not only wrong, but heartbreaking, a careless and unnecessary discarding of a piece of our natural world at a time when we already grow weary of too much loss.