![]() ![]() Wolves are among our planet’s best-studied animals, yet in the boreal forest, the wooded belt that girdles North America and Europe, their habits have remained relatively mysterious-particularly in summer, when dense vegetation makes it difficult to radio-track wolves or observe them from the air. “That gives us a new understanding of how they’ve proliferated across the Northern Hemisphere.” “We’ve seen that wolves are far more flexible than most people had realized,” Gable says. ![]() What’s more, rather than exclusively chasing their prey, wolves lean on a diverse repertoire of hunting strategies, some of which hint strongly at advanced cognition and even, perhaps, culture. Gable and colleagues have detected wolves chowing down on swans, otters, fish-even blueberries. Over the last seven years, however, a research initiative called the Voyageurs Wolf Project has revealed that the region’s wolves have surprisingly eclectic tastes. Picture Canis lupus on the hunt, and you likely imagine a pack racing across a Yellowstone valley on the heels of an elk, not an individual wolf skulking through a swamp to ambush a rodent. ( Meet the rare swimming wolves that eat seafood.) As a beaver trundled past during its nightly dam maintenance, the wolf sprung, subdued his prey after a brief battle, and consumed the body in a spruce copse-bones, fur, and all. The wolf, it appears, had hunkered down in the wetland and waited. He’d captured the wolf last fall and outfitted him with a satellite collar, which alerts Gable every time the predator dawdles in one location for more than 20 minutes-likely an indication that the wolf has made a kill.Ĭomparing the beaver’s scattered remains with the GPS points transmitted by V074’s collar, Gable reconstructs the attack. student at the University of Minnesota, has been on V074’s trail for months. “He’s already killed at least four this spring.” “This wolf’s been on a beaver-killing rampage,” Gable says as he inspects a low branch snapped in the struggle. The perpetrator: a 76-pound male gray wolf, perhaps five years old, known to Gable as V074. A mulchy odor rises from a clump of half-digested plant matter-the victim’s last meal. The clues are subtle but grisly: blood-stained leaves, tufts of hair, fragments of bone. The biologist crouches atop peat moss, pondering the evidence left by last night’s struggle. In a serene, spongy wetland in Voyageurs National Park, a remote quilt of forests and lakes that blankets northern Minnesota, Tom Gable is investigating a violent slaying.
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