Wolf tracking in Minnesota's wilderness
On snowshoes and in aircraft, they pick up the trail of the celebrated predator as part of a wildlife retreat.
from the April 14, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
The center focuses on education about wolves and their relationship to the world around them. To help, they keep a captive pack of four wolves in a natural enclosure that allows visitors to watch their habits up close. They are varying colorations and ages of Canis lupus, the gray or timber wolf that is the most common in North America. Four pups will join them in June.
Ten of us show up for the program, from Vermont, New York, Florida, Tennessee, California, and Maryland. We settle in our cabins on a small lake not far from the center and put ourselves in the dexterous hands of Jess (Jessica) Edberg, information services director of the center.
She's a small-town Minnesota product who studied animal science and then chose to focus on the wolf. Over the next four days, she moves seamlessly through a two-hour PowerPoint lecture on gray wolf ecology; identifies all tracks, markings, deposits, plants, and trees found on a trail; teaches us the electronics of tracking wolves from the air, answers the remotest question about the animals and local ecology; and helps you relate to snowshoes. All done with a modest smile and the self-reliance of a young woman who lives alone with her dog and her truck and plays on a women's hockey team called "Chicks With Sticks."
My first Jess-help comes the next morning on our hike across the lake and back to try out snowshoes. My fingers are cold and wet, and I am falling behind. She recognizes a duffer when she sees one. Soon I am shoed properly and off. The snowshoes are old-fashioned with wood frames and plastic webbing. I fall once, stumble a couple of times, but I have company.
We spend the afternoon at the wolf center, studying the elaborate exhibits and hoping for the animals to howl. They don't.
That night at the lodge Jess spins the tale of the "wolf bird," a raven that is always around to help the wolf finish off a kill. In northern Minnesota, this is usually a deer. Wolves feed mainly on hoofed animals, which brings trouble when they get too close to farms and cattle. But they'll supplement their diet, Mech says, "with anything they can catch: beavers, snowshoe hares, squirrels, mice, domestic sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses, turkeys, and even dogs."
Outside, before bed, we look for the northern lights that can illumine the skies over Ely like phosphorus this time of year. But none.
Elderhostel literature calls Ely the "quaint but bustling gateway" to the boundary waters area. Bustling, certainly. Quaint, no. It has about 4,000 residents in the winter and several times more in the summer, and its proximity to Minnesota's Iron Range gives it an ethnic influence and blue-collar ethos that makes it a bit harder-edged than Garrison Keillor's quirky, Scandinavian-centered Lake Wobegon.
You can get a walleye pike sandwich for a song and buy wild rice (soup grade) for less than $4 a pound. But the grocery stores also sell European sausages and the polka music is more Slovenian (some nice waltzes) than the German style farther south. Another Ely flair: Spring and the melting of the lake ice, which is ushered in each year with a musical at the local college. This year it's "South Pacific."
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Snow fell overnight and the next morning the historic boundary waters trail that we are to walk is a thing of quiet winter beauty. Snowshoes, easier to get on this time, make more sense for balance on the rolling trail. Over two miles, we spot a long list of sights – wolf and other animal tracks, their markings and scat, an eagle's nest.
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