UW-based husband and wife team fighting to save Algonquin Park wolves

by Patricia Bow, adapted from an article in the UW Magazine

John Theberge has been a professor in the faculty of environmental studies at UW since 1970. He has been researching wolves for 40 years -- for more than 30 of those with his wife, Mary Theberge. They and their students have caught 172 wolves in padded foothold traps designed for scientific research, placed radio transmitters on collars around their necks, and released them. Over months, seasons, and, when the wolves survive, years, they have tracked the individual signals, noting where the wolves range to hunt and den, when pups appear, when packs dwindle to just a few scattered wanderers.

They have spent their summers and part of most winters since 1987 tracking wolves in Algonquin Provincial Park. Using telemetry, observation, and lab analysis, they are working towards the answers to a host of questions about how wolves fit into the ecology of Algonquin Park. These questions invariably prompt larger ones. Questions like: Is the Algonquin wolf just a subspecies of the grey wolf, as is commonly thought, or is it a different species altogether? Is a 7,725-square-kilometre wilderness park big enough to protect a population of wolves? And why should we protect wolves, anyway?

For their study area the Theberges chose Algonquin Provincial Park in central Ontario, a place that symbolizes the accessible wilderness for many Canadians.

"Our reasons were partly historical, partly biological," Theberge says. "I had studied wolves there in my undergraduate years as an assistant to the internationally recognized biologist Douglas Pimlott. Mary -- my research partner and wife -- and I had continued together there in the mid-1960s and again in the early 1970s. Although discontinuous, this string of wolf data is the longest in Canada. That makes Algonquin Park valuable. It takes time to puzzle out the causes of changing large mammal numbers in dynamic, ever-shifting ecosystems.

"We picked Algonquin, too, because it is a world-famous wolf sanctuary, a special place for wolves. Over the past thirty-five years, possibly more people have learned about wolves and heard them howl in Algonquin Park than anywhere else in the world."

Doing field work with John and Mary Theberge is no walk in the park. They pitch their tents where they can monitor the wolves without disturbing them, which can mean in a gravel pit swarming with sandflies. ItUs dirty work: crawling into empty dens, picking up decaying wolf carcasses to be transferred to the University of Guelph for dissection, collecting bags of wolf scat for analysis at Waterloo. They have endured blackflies and damp sleeping bags, airsickness on telemetry flights, long treks on snowshoes at face-freezing temperatures.

But the only real hardship for the Theberges is finding their research subjects killed. Algonquin wolves sometimes die of rabies, more often of starvation. But more wolves are killed by humans than by all other causes combined. Although hunting and trapping of wolves are not allowed inside the park, many are shot or snared when they stray across the boundaries following the deer that retreat from the deep snow of the park in winter.

In Ontario, wolves are protected from hunting and trapping only within Algonquin and Lake Superior provincial parks and the Nipissing and Chapleau Crown game preserves. There are closed seasons on bear, moose, even raccoons, but not on wolves, except in three townships near Algonquin Park, for three months of the year -- concession won by the Theberges. The researchers have often found wolves with heads partly severed by inward-ratcheting wire snares, a trapping method that is illegal in most of the United States, but not in Ontario. One wolf died of strychnine poisoning, which is illegal in Ontario. There have also been reports of snowmobilers herding wolves out to roads where hunters are waiting to shoot them.

Officially, wolves in Ontario are in no risk of extinction. But in and around the park, Theberge says their situation is precarious. The factor that could tip them off the edge is conflict with humans. That conflict came to a head in the early U90s, and there was no doubt who was winning. In the 11 years of the study, the wolf population on the east side of Algonquin Park declined drastically. Entire packs disappeared from the landscape.

Killing by humans not only reduces the numbers, it disrupts the structure of the packs. This matters because wolves are highly social animals, their survival tied to their ability to act co-operatively. When experienced elders are lost, packs are less efficient at hunting or finding the best travel routes. When young wolves donUt live long enough to become experienced parents, their pups may have a higher mortality rate.

The Theberges became convinced that the wolves would not survive long as a viable population unless there was some way to protect them from human depredation when packs strayed across park boundaries. The obvious solution was to persuade the Ontario government to set up a no-kill zone around the park. In December 1993, after five years of lobbying, they achieved that goal -- in part. Ministry of natural resources officials agreed to ban wolf hunting and trapping in Hagarty, Richards, and Burns townships, the three townships bordering the southeast corner of the park, during the time the wolves normally use that area, December 15 to March 31.

This concession might seem small -- it only protects the wolves in the eastern part of the park -- but the implications are huge, Theberge says. "Nowhere else that I know of, certainly not in North America, has any government extended special protection for a park population of carnivores beyond park borders."

The disrupted packs have been slow to recover, however. And as the wolves struggled to re-establish themselves, the Theberges identified another threat. In 1994 they began following up their suspicions that coyote genes had been infiltrating the Algonquin Park wolf population. They established a partnership with geneticist Bradley White of McMaster University. After testing the wolvesU DNA, White concluded that all of the Algonquin Park wolves carried some proportion of coyote genes. The wolves are still much more like wolves than coyotes -- they look, howl, breed, and hunt like wolves. But a comparison with skulls collected thirty years ago shows that Algonquin wolvesU skulls are smaller now than they used to be. Could gene swamping by coyotes be the cause? Coyotes generally do not mate with wolves -- they lack the size that confers social dominance Q but that could change when the social structure of the wolf pack breaks down.

Putting the evidence together, Algonquin Park is a fortress held by wolves, under siege by coyotes," says Theberge. One solution, the Theberges say, is to strengthen the fortress.

But there is more to the genetics story than the coyote threat. New evidence has emerged that the Algonquin wolf may have been misclassified as a subspecies of the grey wolf. Genetically, Theberge says, it looks like a closer relative of the nearly extinct red wolf of the American southeast. Bradley White proposes that the red wolf and the Algonquin wolf both be reclassified as Canis lycaon, the lycaon wolf or eastern timber wolf. Reclassification will add to the case for better protection of Algonquin wolves, especially since there is a good chance that Algonquin Park may, Theberge says, be "the last refuge of the purest remaining lycaon wolf."

Events are still on the move. In 1998 John Snobelen, the minister of natural resources, established an advisory committee of representatives from environmental, hunting, and trapping groups, as well as scientists (Theberge is one) and local citizens, to help develop a conservation strategy for wolves in and around Algonquin Park. During the week of February 14, the World Conservation Union and the MNR co-hosted a workshop on the wolves of Algonquin Park at the ministryUs educational facility in Dorset. This forum brought together representatives of all the stakeholders to review evidence supplied by wolf biologists and to come up with a set of recommendations for action. A report on the workshop is expected in a few weeks.

All quotations are from Wolf Country: Eleven Years Tracking the Algonquin Wolves (McClelland and Stewart, 1998) by John B. Theberge with Mary T. Theberge.