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Eastern wolf is in the house!

 
Christopher Weeks
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A week and a half or so back, two neighbors reported that there's a pack of timber wolves in the neighborhood. I'm trying to collect sightings of all the new (to us) fauna available since we moved to the woods five years ago. I've seen blackbear tracks and scat, but not the animal, though my wife espied one visiting our compost from her coffee house. I've seen a fisher playing/hunting(?) in piles of leaves in our front yard. We have a porcupine who visits every spring and fades back into the deeper woods after the buds mature. I've handled a flying squirrel and a newt. And we have ruffed grouse doing their early spring mating thing right now! But a wolf? How cool is that?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_wolf wrote:The eastern wolf (Canis lycaon or Canis lupus lycaon), also known as the timber wolf, Algonquin wolf and eastern timber wolf, is a canine of debated taxonomy native to the Great Lakes region and southeastern Canada. It is considered to be either a unique subspecies of gray wolf or red wolf or a separate species from both. Many studies have found the eastern wolf to be the product of ancient and recent genetic admixture between the gray wolf and the coyote, while other studies have found some or all populations of the eastern wolf, as well as coyotes, originally separated from a common ancestor with the wolf over 1 million years ago and that these populations of the eastern wolf may be the same species as or a closely related species to the red wolf (Canis lupus rufus or Canis rufus) of the Southeastern United States. Regardless of its status, it is regarded as unique and therefore worthy of conservation with Canada citing the population in eastern Canada (also known as the "Algonquin wolf") as being the eastern wolf population subject to protection.
Taken with a trail-camera four days ago in our back woods
from Wikimedia


Anyway, I went back out to place the camera in hopefully a better spot and we'll see if anyone shows back up. Apparently a pack of these guys travels through our patch of woods every few years so they seem pretty mobile.
 
Eino Kenttä
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Okay, that is seriously cool! Wish we had more wolves around here, but alas, a lot of people don't want that...
 
Christopher Weeks
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Eino Kenttä wrote:Okay, that is seriously cool! Wish we had more wolves around here, but alas, a lot of people don't want that...


Yeah, same here. My representative to congress would like very much to de-list the grey wolf as endangered so that farmers could shoot them legally (not that it doesn't happen all the time on the down-low). But I moved to the woods on purpose -- I'm going to kill as little as possible while I'm here.
 
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I am missing Minnesota.   It was reasonable common to encounter wolves and bears on our property south of Walker.  My best experience was driving down a gravel road, looking in the mirror, and seeing a small black bear chasing my truck.

Some people age like fine wine. I aged like milk … sour and chunky.

 
Christopher Weeks
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I've seen bears while driving -- both in MN and Ontario, and I once saw (I'm pretty sure) a wolf on a boulder to the side of I-35 half an hour south of Duluth. But not yet on my property.
 
Jay Angler
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Wolves are very important for a healthy ecosystem. They keep the ungulates moving, and target the sick among them.

Humans had ways in the past to protect their areas without eliminating the wolves, and I hope we relearn those ways, and only use force in extreme cases.

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I spent about 8 months on my friend's ranch near Hinckley about 10 years ago. I saw a few wolves & one thing that sure looked like a cross between a wolf & a coyote. Don't know if that's even possible but that's what it looked like. I frequently heard wolves howling at night & saw their paw prints near the main water source quite often but it was rare to actually see them.  Enjoy!!!

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Douglas Alpenstock
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Mike Barkley wrote:I spent about 8 months on my friend's ranch near Hinckley about 10 years ago. I saw a few wolves & one thing that sure looked like a cross between a wolf & a coyote. Don't know if that's even possible but that's what it looked like.


Yes, it certainly is. And it's a potential problem. Coywolves lose the natural wariness of true wolves, but retain the size and strength, and can become dangerously aggressive to humans. Including fatal attacks.
 
Mike Haasl
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I've seen one group of wolves.  Up until that point if I saw a wild canine I'd say to myself "Is that a coyote or a wolf?".  Now that I've actually seen a wolf my mantra is that if you don't immediately know it's clearly a wolf, it ain't.  They are just so much bigger and wild/strong looking...

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Christopher Weeks
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One problem I have with identifying is that these eastern/timber wolves are likely mixes of grey wolves and coyotes, so some of what I'm doing here is relying on my hopefully more knowledgeable neighbors. When I was picking a spot for camera placement, I was looking for a place where multiple canine tracks crossed in the snow. And I thought they seemed small to be a wolf -- like they could be the neighbor dog who most frequently visits our land. This dog in my picture seems pretty slight, but also seems to line up with the eastern wolf description.
 
John F Dean
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I used to go by the footprints to identify.  The feet of a wolf are much larger than a dog’s or coyote’s.

Some people age like fine wine. I aged like milk … sour and chunky.

 
Douglas Campbell
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Great image.
Coyotes in maritime Canada can be ~ 2X larger than western coyotes, and can be fairly intimidating, 25 kg or so.
They likely picked up some wolf genes spreading eastwards.
 
E Sager
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Wow!!! thanks for sharing.

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Revo Smith
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That looks like a coyote to me. I grew up in Colorado where the coyotes look Wiley and wirey like the cartoon, but now reside in Massachusetts where they look like this. The eastern coyote has been crossed with the red wolf in the 90s and is much larger than their western cousins. I've seen several in person and they do seem like wolves, but the picture you have looks like the eastern yotes I've spotted here. Either way, it's a great pic and a beautiful animal!

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Nina Surya
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Friends of mine lived in Romania (Europe) for some years, and witnessed a balanced, harmonious co-existance of wolves, bears and shepherds, thanks to the local Livestock Guardian Dogs, the Romanian Carpathian shepherd dogs.
The dogs keep the sheep and the shepherd safe, whilst the wolves keep the ecosystem healthy.

My friends are passionate about this balanced living with the wolves, and do their best to advocate LGDs and generally good livestock protection instead of hunting down the wolves.
If you want to read more on the subject, here's a link to Canine Efficiency.

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David Milano
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Feeling the need now to extoll the virtues of game cameras! Great for data collection and for just good fun. We regularly collect pics of fauna that are usually pretty shy and would require setting up somewhere and a lot of patience for eyeball sightings. The attached pics are representative.

As far as the coyote/wolf/cross identification dilemma, it surely can be difficult to make judgements based solely on game cam pictures. When detail is lacking, which it often is, one must rely heavily on scale, and that can be tricky. My guess is that Christopher Weeks’ picture shows a coyote or a hybrid, but that’s just an opinion. Generally the wolves I’ve seen are so large, and have such big feet, they’re unmistakable. Nevertheless I wouldn’t bet much on it. Could be a youngish wolf?
SeasonPond7.2024-2.jpg
[gamecam.jpg]
Fisher.7.2024.jpeg
[Fisher.jpeg]
IMAG0137.jpg
[gamecamera.jpg]
July.2024.k.jpg
[gamecam_bear.jpg]
 
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