Wolves of the Yukon
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This non-fiction book is about a great mountain wilderness where wolves and their prey continue to live in a delicate, natural balance. Using a combination of narrative non-fiction and easy-to-follow essays, this book explores the natural history of the Yukon during the last 20,000 years. Part 1 – History – chronicles wolf evolution since the end of the ice age, including the great collapse of Beringia large mammals and the domination by caribou through the Holocene. Other chapters include the relation between ancient native people and wolves, and the importance of Jack London's Yukon stories to our collective image of wolves as a symbol of wilderness. Other history chapters explore the relentless, but largely ineffective attempts to reduce wolves through bounties, poison and hunting through the 20th century. Part 2 – Understanding – describes the author's original research into wolf relations to moose, caribou, Dall's sheep, ravens, and grizzly bears. In the last chapter Hayes, who studied three Yukon wolf control projects, explains why broad-scale killing of wolves has only produced brief benefits for moose and caribou, and why the practice should end. Finally, the book raises questions about how we should use and conserve one of the largest remaining tracts of complete wilderness on the continent.
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Wolves of the Yukon
Bob Hayes
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One lingering, pebble-in-my-shoe thought that has arisen as a result of reading this book has to do with wild places, in general, and how we experience them (or don’t, for many of the current generation). Many wolf biologists of Bob’s and my generation also took advantage of what was, at the beginning of our careers, a high-tech innovation called radio-telemetry. The benefit it provided was that we could jump in an airplane or helicopter and find marked wolves almost anytime we wanted to, watch them for a minute or two, and then move on to the next pack. It afforded the opportunity to collect significantly more data of certain kinds, and to generate tables and graphs that helped answer many questions more confidently. We caught wolves, handled them, followed tracks, investigated kill sites and den sites, and picked up scats. But I think previous generations of wolf biologists likely scoffed a bit, and even shook their heads in sorrow, at what we, the new guys, were losing by not spending even more time on the ground, like they did, collecting information the old-fashioned way, and experiencing the world of the wolf in a much more intimate way, albeit more slowly and deliberately. The “pebble” is that students I help today now often mark large mammals with satellite-connected collars and monitor nearly real-time hourly movements at their desk, then make inferences about locations of kill sites and test new ideas about travel paths and habitat use. But I think they are losing even more of the connection with the real environment than I did, and so I scoff and shake my head in sorrow. “Go to the Yukon,” I should tell them, “and experience what the natural world is really like… and if not, then read this book and you’ll yearn to go.”
Todd Fuller, Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
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