Up North, the Cry of 'Wolf' Echoes With Anticipation
Predator May Be Getting a Toehold in an Old Neighborhood
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
ERROL, N.H. -- Somewhere out there, a Canis lupus roams.
Snow swirls in sub-zero cold, and across ice-locked Bear Pond a mountain spine rises. The north woods harbor moose and coyote, bobcat and lynx, and thousands of deer. And, quite likely, a handful of nature's great predator, the gray wolf.
"I saw him right there, standing broadside with that massive cranium," said Bob Lord, a red-bearded bear of a man, who jogged down this logging road last fall and came face to face with a wolf. "Oh, my God, what a beauty."
Lord, 58, a bow hunter, stuffs his bare hands into the pockets of his wool pants and surveys the frozen woods.
"This was their land," he said. "Welcome back."
Extirpated by man more than a century ago in every corner of New England, the gray wolf (aka Canis lupus ) seems on the verge of reestablishing a toehold in the 20 million-acre Great North Woods, a forest that extends from northern Maine to New Hampshire and Vermont and New York. Lone wolves appear to be wandering down from Quebec, Canada, reconnoitering these lands and disappearing again. No one knows when these wolves will find a mate.
But wildlife biologists say there is no reason that a wolf pack could not form here, perhaps very soon.
"When I look at the northern woods of Maine and New Hampshire, and see the abundant moose and white-tail deer, it's like a buffet for the wolves," said Douglas W. Smith, a National Park Service biologist and chief of Yellowstone's Gray Wolf Restoration Project. "It's the next best place for the wolf to return."
The return of the wolf to New England would cap a natural repopulation of the northern woods striking in its breadth and depth. A century ago, these forests stood nearly denuded of large mammals -- the moose population had dwindled to double digits because of overhunting, and the mountain lion, wolverine, marten and lynx had disappeared.
Now, thousands of moose roam these woods and marshes, and the lynx has crept back in.
John Harrigan, a ruddy-faced sheep farmer and the genially cantankerous publisher emeritus of the News and Sentinel in Colebrook, N.H., (Motto: "Independent but Not Neutral") bounces across frozen gullies in his pickup truck.
Somewhere, around the next corner maybe, he knows that a wolf lurks.
"Isn't it great to be living on Earth when this reoccupation is occurring?" asks Harrigan, slapping his dashboard. "The woods are filling up again."
No one has charted the wolf's precise path south into New England. Thousands of wolves reside in northern Quebec, in the Laurentian Mountains and the arboreal forests that stretch north until yielding to tundra.
Wolves run 75 to 90 pounds and live in packs of about six, New England wildlife biologists say. Each pack is run by an alpha male and female, who are the fraternity and sorority presidents of the Canis lupus world. They brook no challenge. Young wolves -- known as dispersers -- wander off. A few cross the St. Lawrence River, probably on winter ice.
From there, the wolves wander south into to the hills of southern Quebec, just north of New England. At least one pack seems to have formed there.
It is not known how many wolves take the next step and walk into Maine and New Hampshire, although they can roam 500 miles. The only sure clues are a bit sad: In 2001, a hunter mistakenly killed a wolf in the Adirondacks, and a trapper caught one near Bangor, Maine, in 1996.
But reliable sightings -- that is, those made by trained woodsmen and biologists during the day and under no influence of a fine whiskey -- have grown exponentially. Many wildlife biologists in New England agree wolves stray in at least occasionally.
"Everyone assumed they couldn't get across the St. Lawrence -- well, they did," said Peggy Struhsacker, wolf team leader for the National Wildlife Federation.
Struhsacker is the Sherlock Holmes of the Canis lupus crowd, tracing every sighting of the four-legged ghosts, double-checking facts. She is carefully skeptical. "Some appear to walk through," she said as she stood in that forest outside Errol, N.H. "What we don't know is if a female has met a male and set up shop."
The search is complicated by the rugged land, a place of few roads and many bogs and moose wallows (literally, a pool of water and moose urine). Struhsacker points at the firs and dark-green tamaracks and the Magalloway Mountain ridges running toward Maine.
"So this is the kind of place I'll walk in and, howl," Struhsacker says.
Howl?
"I howl. In hopes that the wolves will respond."
Even if the wolf returns, its hold on this land could remain precarious. The wolf's greatest challenge remains how to survive nature's true superpredator: man.
The province of Quebec allows the hunting and trapping of wolves, establishing a gantlet through which wolves must pass to reach New England. As developers push into northern New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, busier roads make life more precarious for a large predator.
It has always been so. Four centuries ago, Puritans no sooner had arrived than farmers began employing poisons and bounties to hasten the wolf's demise. In his book "The Condor's Shadow," ecologist David Wilcove describes a hunt in Pennsylvania in 1760: Two hundred settlers formed a circle in the forest and advanced, killing animals that stepped into their paths. The toll was stunning: 41 panthers, 109 wolves, 114 foxes, 198 deer, 111 buffalo and 12 wolverines.
A few years ago, Idaho's legislature declared wolf extermination a state goal. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are more welcoming, but even in those states, wildlife biologists worry that tolerance might dim as wolf populations swell.
"In Michigan, the wolf population has reached 400," said Jim Hammill, who retired from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources. "It could make sense to let the public take part in controlling the population through limited trapping and hunting.
"The biggest danger," he added, "is that the wolf population grows so fast that people lose respect for the animal."
New England remains at no danger of wolf overpopulation. Advocates recently succeeded in blocking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from downgrading the gray wolf from an endangered to threatened species.
"Without endangered status, the wolves could be treated as varmints and shot on sight," said Patrick A. Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor who argued the case in federal court.
If anything, as one travels from one village to another in these northern lands, residents sound reconciled to the wolf's return. Lord, the bow hunter from Errol and a retired schoolteacher, walks the woods every day, even in the black-fly madness of late spring. He fishes, hunts, guts and skins. He's got a National Rifle Association sticker and another for "George W." -- he is no one's version of a lefty tree-hugger.
But he found himself moved by his close encounter.
"It looked at me and probably figured I was some big, sloppy moose -- then it just loped off," he said. "If these wolves are returning on their own four feet, who are we to stop them?"
Struhsacker listens to Lord talk and nods; the survival of wolves will depend on precisely such tolerance. She recalls, not so many years ago, when she stood at night in the woods of Yellowstone Park and first heard the wolf howl.
"I sat down and cried," she said. "I want to hear that sound again here."
Washington Post
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
ERROL, N.H. -- Somewhere out there, a Canis lupus roams.
Snow swirls in sub-zero cold, and across ice-locked Bear Pond a mountain spine rises. The north woods harbor moose and coyote, bobcat and lynx, and thousands of deer. And, quite likely, a handful of nature's great predator, the gray wolf.
"I saw him right there, standing broadside with that massive cranium," said Bob Lord, a red-bearded bear of a man, who jogged down this logging road last fall and came face to face with a wolf. "Oh, my God, what a beauty."
Lord, 58, a bow hunter, stuffs his bare hands into the pockets of his wool pants and surveys the frozen woods.
"This was their land," he said. "Welcome back."
Extirpated by man more than a century ago in every corner of New England, the gray wolf (aka Canis lupus ) seems on the verge of reestablishing a toehold in the 20 million-acre Great North Woods, a forest that extends from northern Maine to New Hampshire and Vermont and New York. Lone wolves appear to be wandering down from Quebec, Canada, reconnoitering these lands and disappearing again. No one knows when these wolves will find a mate.
But wildlife biologists say there is no reason that a wolf pack could not form here, perhaps very soon.
"When I look at the northern woods of Maine and New Hampshire, and see the abundant moose and white-tail deer, it's like a buffet for the wolves," said Douglas W. Smith, a National Park Service biologist and chief of Yellowstone's Gray Wolf Restoration Project. "It's the next best place for the wolf to return."
The return of the wolf to New England would cap a natural repopulation of the northern woods striking in its breadth and depth. A century ago, these forests stood nearly denuded of large mammals -- the moose population had dwindled to double digits because of overhunting, and the mountain lion, wolverine, marten and lynx had disappeared.
Now, thousands of moose roam these woods and marshes, and the lynx has crept back in.
John Harrigan, a ruddy-faced sheep farmer and the genially cantankerous publisher emeritus of the News and Sentinel in Colebrook, N.H., (Motto: "Independent but Not Neutral") bounces across frozen gullies in his pickup truck.
Somewhere, around the next corner maybe, he knows that a wolf lurks.
"Isn't it great to be living on Earth when this reoccupation is occurring?" asks Harrigan, slapping his dashboard. "The woods are filling up again."
No one has charted the wolf's precise path south into New England. Thousands of wolves reside in northern Quebec, in the Laurentian Mountains and the arboreal forests that stretch north until yielding to tundra.
Wolves run 75 to 90 pounds and live in packs of about six, New England wildlife biologists say. Each pack is run by an alpha male and female, who are the fraternity and sorority presidents of the Canis lupus world. They brook no challenge. Young wolves -- known as dispersers -- wander off. A few cross the St. Lawrence River, probably on winter ice.
From there, the wolves wander south into to the hills of southern Quebec, just north of New England. At least one pack seems to have formed there.
It is not known how many wolves take the next step and walk into Maine and New Hampshire, although they can roam 500 miles. The only sure clues are a bit sad: In 2001, a hunter mistakenly killed a wolf in the Adirondacks, and a trapper caught one near Bangor, Maine, in 1996.
But reliable sightings -- that is, those made by trained woodsmen and biologists during the day and under no influence of a fine whiskey -- have grown exponentially. Many wildlife biologists in New England agree wolves stray in at least occasionally.
"Everyone assumed they couldn't get across the St. Lawrence -- well, they did," said Peggy Struhsacker, wolf team leader for the National Wildlife Federation.
Struhsacker is the Sherlock Holmes of the Canis lupus crowd, tracing every sighting of the four-legged ghosts, double-checking facts. She is carefully skeptical. "Some appear to walk through," she said as she stood in that forest outside Errol, N.H. "What we don't know is if a female has met a male and set up shop."
The search is complicated by the rugged land, a place of few roads and many bogs and moose wallows (literally, a pool of water and moose urine). Struhsacker points at the firs and dark-green tamaracks and the Magalloway Mountain ridges running toward Maine.
"So this is the kind of place I'll walk in and, howl," Struhsacker says.
Howl?
"I howl. In hopes that the wolves will respond."
Even if the wolf returns, its hold on this land could remain precarious. The wolf's greatest challenge remains how to survive nature's true superpredator: man.
The province of Quebec allows the hunting and trapping of wolves, establishing a gantlet through which wolves must pass to reach New England. As developers push into northern New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, busier roads make life more precarious for a large predator.
It has always been so. Four centuries ago, Puritans no sooner had arrived than farmers began employing poisons and bounties to hasten the wolf's demise. In his book "The Condor's Shadow," ecologist David Wilcove describes a hunt in Pennsylvania in 1760: Two hundred settlers formed a circle in the forest and advanced, killing animals that stepped into their paths. The toll was stunning: 41 panthers, 109 wolves, 114 foxes, 198 deer, 111 buffalo and 12 wolverines.
A few years ago, Idaho's legislature declared wolf extermination a state goal. Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are more welcoming, but even in those states, wildlife biologists worry that tolerance might dim as wolf populations swell.
"In Michigan, the wolf population has reached 400," said Jim Hammill, who retired from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources. "It could make sense to let the public take part in controlling the population through limited trapping and hunting.
"The biggest danger," he added, "is that the wolf population grows so fast that people lose respect for the animal."
New England remains at no danger of wolf overpopulation. Advocates recently succeeded in blocking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from downgrading the gray wolf from an endangered to threatened species.
"Without endangered status, the wolves could be treated as varmints and shot on sight," said Patrick A. Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor who argued the case in federal court.
If anything, as one travels from one village to another in these northern lands, residents sound reconciled to the wolf's return. Lord, the bow hunter from Errol and a retired schoolteacher, walks the woods every day, even in the black-fly madness of late spring. He fishes, hunts, guts and skins. He's got a National Rifle Association sticker and another for "George W." -- he is no one's version of a lefty tree-hugger.
But he found himself moved by his close encounter.
"It looked at me and probably figured I was some big, sloppy moose -- then it just loped off," he said. "If these wolves are returning on their own four feet, who are we to stop them?"
Struhsacker listens to Lord talk and nods; the survival of wolves will depend on precisely such tolerance. She recalls, not so many years ago, when she stood at night in the woods of Yellowstone Park and first heard the wolf howl.
"I sat down and cried," she said. "I want to hear that sound again here."
posted by wolf saga at 9:08 AM
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