Searching For Wolf Tracks Pilots Keeping Tabs On Canadian Wolves In Idaho, Montana, As The World Watches, Waits, Wonders
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The steady tick from a radio-collared wolf pounded into the cockpit of the tiny backcountry plane as pilots Fred Reid and Sam Bennett closed in on their first find of the day.
Adrenaline-fueled hearts beat to the rhythmic tick as the plane banked and circled at 90 miles per hour over the tree-covered ridge 300 feet below. With one eye on the steep ridges that enclose the narrow canyon, the two pilots, necks craned, peered through the tree tops at the snowblanketed ground.
“There he is!” one shouted.
It was 8:05 a.m. when they spotted “Tree,” a 98-pound black male wolf named by Boise High School students and released in January into the central Idaho wilderness, as he trotted through the conifers.
Reed, owner of Western Air Research in Driggs, specializes in tracking game with high-tech antennas and computerized equipment. He is the man the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hired to keep tabs on the 15 wolves released this year in Idaho.
Picking up a faint tick from the radio collar of a distant wolf, he aims his plane at the sound. The closer he gets to the wolf, the louder the tick grows. It’s somewhere in the draw ahead.
Swooping up the canyon and around each ridge, Reed follows the ticking sound, checking for false signals that might bounce off the terrain. The tick gets louder. He’s getting warmer. It fades away. He’s getting colder. Once over the wolf, the ticking blasts methodically into the circling plane.
Assigned the task of watching over the wolves, Reed and his equipment have become the eyes for a nation watching Idaho’s wolf recovery. Reed likes the job.
“It’s one of the most challenging jobs I’ve ever done,” he said. “The combination of the weaker transmitters with the severity of the terrain and the movement of the wolves has really taxed us to keep up.”
Since he’s cut back his flights from every other day to once a week, Reed said it’s hard to tell just where he’ll find them.
For example, Libre, a female wolf who has zigzagged her way across 350 miles - farther than any of her counterparts - was spotted Feb. 27, curled up 100 yards from the top of the Lost Trail Powder Mountain chairlift. Reed said the ski hill on the Idaho-Montana border wasn’t open that day.
Another wolf, B14, couldn’t be found at all on a Feb. 20 flight. On Feb. 27, though, Reed found the 101-pound gray male near Lolo, Mont., more than 100 miles from where it had been located 18 days earlier near Chamberlain Basin in the heart of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
Reed said he found B14 almost by accident when he was flying northeast from Grangeville at dusk.
“Just as I leveled off at 15,300 feet, I picked up a faint two beeps. As faint as it was I knew it was a long way away,” he said. “From the first beep to when the wolf was located, it was 98 miles.”
On the morning of March 8, Reed found B14 on Lost Trail Pass, about 120 miles south of his Feb. 27 location on Lolo Pass.
Actually sighting a wolf is lucky, said Reed, gaining altitude after sighting “Tree.”
He didn’t have to wait long. Picking up a distant “tick, tick,” the computer told him it was “B2,” dubbed Chat-Chaaht by Lapwai High School students. By 8:41 he had pinpointed Chat-Chaaht about 100 yards from a herd of 20 elk, and a couple of miles from Tree, but couldn’t see him.
“I think Mr. Wolf is right in this area over here,” he said, circling over a south-facing bowl dotted with conifers and bare ground.
Half a dozen circles around the trees couldn’t scare up the gray male wolf camouflaged by the bare ground and trees, and probably basking in the morning sun. Unable to see him, Bennett took a photo of the location, recorded it, then moved on.
By 5 p.m. March 7, the pilots had located all but four of the wolves. B8 and B6, a male and female that have been traveling together since Feb. 5, were just a few miles from their release site at Indian Creek and 37 miles from their location a week earlier.
Ted Koch, in charge of Idaho’s wolf recovery, is hopeful the pair has mated. Breeding typically occurs in January or February. Pups are usually born in April or May.
B7 had been left behind by the dating couple, said Reed. A pack-mate of B6 before they were captured in Canada, B7 had traveled with the pair until a Feb. 27 flight when he was spotted a half mile from them. Koch speculates that he was driven off by B8.
MoonStar Shadow, the 90-pound black male that staked his territory as soon as he was released from his cage at Corn Creek, was spotted curled nose-to-tail in the snow atop a 7,000-foot ridge about 10 miles from Corn Creek.
Another wolf, B3, had moved only a few miles from her location west of Philipsburg, Mont.
Reed said finding the wolves in the mountainous terrain of the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states requires a bit of wolf logic combined with a whole lot of guess work. The wolves have ranged as far south as Stanley and Cascade, and as far north as Lolo and east to Philipsburg. Sometimes signals can be blocked by the high mountains.
“It’s the luck of the draw,” he said. “They’re dispersing into so many areas that they may be back in the core area again.”
Most of the wolves did just what biologists expected them to do after their release. They headed north toward their Canadian homeland. Reed said, although when a prolonged spell of bad weather kept him grounded for 11 days he found the northbound wolves had generally started heading back to their release site at Indian Creek.
After months of scanning the rugged mountains of Idaho and Montana and second-guessing wolves, Reed said he can’t help but speculate on their movement and what it might mean.
“After the storm we went back out and started locating critters and it really blew me away, because all these wolves hundreds of miles from each other suddenly decided to turn around and head back to the release site,” Reed said. “What is it that triggered them to turn around all at the same time?”
Until the wolves settle down, Reed has plenty of time and reason to wonder about how the wolves are doing, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. He’s not alone. The world is watching.