GPS tracking and a keen imagination tell the story of a lone wolf

“The Wanderer: The Last Voyage of an Alaskan Wolf”

By Tom Walker; Mountaineering Books, 2023; 171 pages; $18.95.

There is so much to know about every living thing in our world and even more about how living things interact with their environment and each other. Put the human animal at the top of this mix, with all of our history, science, politics and behavior, and the story becomes even more fascinating.

Writer and photographer Tom Walker has spent his life closely observing nature and animal life, and has written a remarkable new book that follows a lone wolf that wandered 3,000 miles across northern Alaska, driven by its need for food. Escape the danger and find a partner. The fact that Walker didn’t literally climb mountains and cross rivers doesn’t make the story any less interesting.

In November 2010, biologists captured two wolves in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve as part of a long-term study. They replaced the female with a radio collar and attached a satellite (GPS) collar to the young male, a two-year-old who they believed had separated from another pack, in order to bond with the female and possibly start a new pack . GPS technology tracked Wolf 258’s movements, allowing biologists (and Walker, who gained access to the recordings) to figure out where the wolf went and what it was likely to do over the next year. After a relatively stationary winter during which the female died, wolf 258 traveled to the northwest corner of the Yukon Territory, across the Arctic coast, and back south, paralleling the Dalton Highway, to the Yukon River.

As part of Wolf 258’s travels, Walker provides a wealth of information about the biology and behavior of wolves, the life histories of other animals, Alaska’s various parks and preserves, the history of human settlement and resource development in the North, and Alaska’s predator control programs.

The Yukon-Charley Wolf Study (aimed at “exploring fundamental questions about predator-prey dynamics”) began in 1998 and by 2014 had captured 165 different wolves to learn more about their lives and deaths. For example, of 17 wolves captured from a single pack over many years, biologists learned that four were captured, four starved, two were killed by other wolves, one was killed by a moose, one died after an encounter with a porcupine, and five scattered to other areas. Biologists now know that pack size is primarily dependent on available food, other wolves are the leading killer of wolves in the wild, lone wolves can account for 20% of wolf populations (despite typical family structures), and wolves travel widely, in and around outside large territorial distribution areas.

While the Yukon-Charley Reservation is a state that allows hunting and trapping, government measures have impacted wolves as well. Walker’s chapter on Alaska’s wolf control programs is well informed and impartial. Beginning with the history of Alaska’s predator control programs, which began with a federal bounty system in 1927, Walker moves on to the more lenient state post-statehood efforts and then the controversies of the 1990s.

He pays close attention to the state’s Intensive Management Act of 1994, which advocates reducing predator numbers to increase caribou and elk numbers for human consumption, causing a conflict between state and federal wildlife goals. For example, in 2009, state biologists and independent pilots shot 220 wolves in the Upper Yukon Territory around the federal reserve. Wolves from the sanctuary that trespassed on state lands were killed, resulting in a 64% population decline within the sanctuary. Many of the animals killed had been collared for the study.

The relationship between wolves and caribou is a classic predator-prey relationship, and Walker gives plenty of ink to the various herds of caribou that Wolf 258 encountered on his travels. He presents research that suggests wolves can take up 3-5% of the porcupine herd each year, a proportion believed to be “not the primary factor limiting their size.” Over time, the herds experienced large population fluctuations and changes in migration patterns. Today, climate change poses even greater challenges. For example, the warming climate has resulted in earlier hatching of mosquitoes, which coincides with the caribou’s calving season, disrupting feeding and rest, and weakening the animals through blood loss.

[Book review: ‘Watch the Bear’ is packed with facts and anecdotes from half a century of observation]

[The life of Riley, former leader of once-mighty Denali wolf pack, reaches its end]

GPS technology has made it possible not only to track an animal’s movement, but also to understand its behavior. When Wolf 258 stayed in one place for a long time, he had probably made a prey (or found carrion). When he climbed a mountain, he was probably hunting sheep. Walker used the best of what he could learn from the GPS records, the weather reports and his own extensive knowledge of wildlife, seasonal activities and the environment traversed. This allowed him to “fill in” in an imaginative but essentially truthful way about what Wolf 258 may have experienced.

Here, for example, Wolf 258 on the Kandik River, a tributary of the Yukon, in late April: “Chivyende squirrels marked his movements as he explored every scent and detail that might lead to food.” thereby stunted strands of hair that marked the path of grizzly bears. He sniffed old piles of squirrels, ran up to a grouse courting a hen, gnawed old elk bones, and quenched his thirst with ice-cold, tannin-tinged river water.”

The life of a wolf – especially a lone wolf – in Alaska is harsh, and the “final voyage” in the book’s title is a clue to the fate of Wolf 258.

Book signing with Tom Walker

Eagle River Nature Center, 32750 Eagle River Road in Eagle River

June 16, 6:30 p.m

ernc.org

Title Wave Books, 1360 W. Northern Lights Blvd. in Anchorage

June 17, 11am-1pm

wavebooks.com

Fireside Books, 720 S. Alaska St. in Palmer

June 17, 3-5 p.m

goodbooksbadcoffee.com

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