The Wanderer: An Alaska Wolf’s Final Journey

From Chapter 1: Wolf 258

In early November 2010, two wolves coursed the open slopes above Copper Creek, a tributary of the upper Charley River. Snow from a recent squall persisted in the lee of granite tors, and ice rimmed the shadowed rivulets. Scattered caribou grazed on a nearby ridge, while a nervous band of Dall sheep climbed sheer cliffs. The wolves, alert, were hunting.

The day was sunny and unseasonably warm, at 45°F, and the wind light, ideal conditions for flying. When the wolves heard the helicopter approaching fast and low, they broke into a run. As it grew louder and closer, the wolves parted ways. One, a black female known to biologists as Wolf 227, wore a radio collar. The helicopter was locked onto her signal, betraying her and her companion.

Biologist John Burch signaled to the pilot that he wanted to dart Wolf 227’s companion. As the helicopter closed in, the companion wolf veered wildly to shake the pursuit. But the pilot was an expert at chasing wolves. On this tundra hillside, escape was improbable. Sitting in the open door, and blasted by rotor wash, Burch fired his tranquilizer gun and struck the wolf’s flank with 500 milligrams of Telazol, a safe, fast-acting veterinary anesthetic that has an analgesic effect. The small helicopter flared and banked away. Within a few minutes, the wolf went down.

Burch, tall and soft-spoken, had been tracking Yukon-Charley wolves since 1996, when he took over the fieldwork from biologist Nick Demma. A Minnesotan, Burch earned a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in wildlife biology from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. While still an undergraduate, he began working with L. David Mech in Minnesota on a variety of wolf research projects. Before coming to Alaska in 1985 to conduct wolf research in Denali National Park and Preserve for Mech, Burch worked tracking and trapping wolves for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, primarily in Minne- sota and Wisconsin. Burch had more than two decades’ experience working with wolves when he joined the Yukon-Charley project. When it came to catching and handling wolves, he had few peers. Over his career, he darted and collared between four hundred and five hundred wolves.

Colleagues regarded Burch highly. “John is one of the most competent field biologists I have ever worked with,” said Adams. “At Yukon-Charley, John became recognized as the guy you wanted along if you were working in remote locations. He’s one of those adept field folks who can adapt to whatever he is facing, fix anything, work for long stretches under trying environmental conditions, and keep a good attitude throughout it all.”

After the helicopter landed, Burch hurried to the sedated wolf. A quick appraisal showed this young wolf was tolerating the drug. Burch had about an hour before it would begin to revive.

The sedated wolf weighed 103 pounds and was about two years old. He was well furred and appeared to be in excellent health, with perfect teeth. Based on their location and previous sightings, he guessed that the young male, now designated Wolf 258, was a disperser from the Seventymile River Pack.

Wolf researchers typically apply sequential numbers to their collared subjects, such as Wolf 227 and Wolf 258. Naming conventions for other wolf projects vary slightly. In Voyageurs National Park, for example, each collared animal is identified with VO, such as Wolf VO77, for Voyageurs. In Denali National Park, wolves get a four-digit code with letters for their color and sex—Wolf 1804GM (GM for gray male) or Wolf 1841GF (GF for gray female). The first two digits represent the year the wolf was collared, and the last two indicate where it falls in the order of wolves collared that year. Common names, such as Blackie or George, are anathema to biolo- gists, who avoid anything anthropomorphic.

After fitting the male wolf with a GPS collar, Burch, assisted by the pilot, collected vital signs: temperature, pulse, respiration rate, and blood oxygen level. They then took cheek swabs and hair samples and drew some blood, both to check for disease and to perform genetic analysis. (Analysis later confirmed that the two wolves were unrelated.) They weighed the wolf and examined his teeth for clues as to its age and condition. Burch finished just as the wolf began to revive. The wolf would be left to recover quietly on his own, although these days, biologists stay with a sedated wolf until it has recovered fully.

The young gray-and-white male was traveling with a collared female Burch knew well. He had first captured Wolf 227, then the breeding female of the Edwards Creek Pack, three years earlier. For the past two years she’d been traveling alone as the last surviving member of her pack, seldom ven- turing out of her core range on Washington Creek. This capture site on the upper Charley River was out of her normal territory; she had ventured into the range of the Seventymile River Pack, whose territory extended east from the upper Charley River into the Seventymile River drainage. Early in the summer, Burch had spotted her traveling with another wolf and thought she’d paired up. The young male wolf he’d just collared confirmed his sus- picions, and he was keen to find out if the sedated male was just a running partner or a mate to Wolf 227. Although two wolves are often called a pack, the key determinant is whether they produce pups.

Dominant wolves breed, fight, and are able to pull down a caribou alone. Researchers typically capture and radio-collar one to three individuals, pri- marily the breeders, in each wolf pack in a study area. Other pack members hunt and defend territory, but they don’t breed or make decisions for the group. Because the breeding pair is least likely to leave a pack, researchers routinely capture and collar them.

Burch caught Wolf 227 later that afternoon and replaced her old, failing collar. Despite running solo for two years, the six-year-old female had killed enough prey to stay in superb condition. She’d also managed to hold on to her core territory—or at least avoid lethal contact with trespassing packs. The collars would reveal mating and denning behavior. How the new pairing would affect territorial dynamics was but one of many questions Burch hoped the tracking collars would answer.

At the time, biologists used two types of radio collars to track wolves. A conventional radio collar, in use for decades, transmits a pulsing signal that can be tracked from an aircraft equipped with a receiver and antennae. A GPS collar, on the other hand, transmits coordinates through a satellite to a computer, allowing biologists to more accurately monitor a wolf’s travels, life, and death. Like a radio collar, a satellite collar can be tracked from aircraft, but the big difference is that location data is collected automatically. A GPS collar reveals a wolf’s day-to-day movements across territory in search of food; thus a wolf remaining close to a particular site for a day or two may indicate it has killed a prey animal and is feeding. Biologists began putting GPS collars on wolves in the Yukon-Charley National Preserve in 2003. Burch was confident that the two new collars would transmit valuable information about the fate of the Edwards Creek Pack, one of a dozen he monitored then. Before flying off, Burch paused for a few moments of silent contemplation. He never seemed to lose his appreciation for wolves and the surrounding wilderness.