Long-term Research on Wolves in the Superior National Forest

Abstract

The seeds for the blossoming of the wolf ( Canis lupus ) population throughout the upper Midwest were embodied in a long line of wolves that had persisted in the central part of the Superior National Forest (SNF) of northeastern Minnesota, probably since the retreat of the last glaciers. This line of wolves had withstood not only the various natural environmental factors that had shaped them through their evolution but also the logging, fires, market hunting of prey animals, and even the bounties, aerial hunting, and poisoning that had exterminated their ancestors and their dispersed offspring only a few wolf pack territories away in more accessible areas. The dense and extensive stretch of wild land that is now labeled the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness had proven too formidable a barrier even for the foes of the wolf who had strived to eliminate the animal and had succeeded everywhere else in the contiguous 48 states of the United States. The wolves of the SNF became the reservoir for the recolonization of wolves throughout Minnesota and into neighboring Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The only other part of the 48 contiguous United States where wolves still survived in the late 1960s was Isle Royale in Lake Superior, just 32 km off Minnesota’s coast (Vucetich and Peterson, this volume). Those wolves had crossed Lake Superior’s rare ice bridge to the 540-km 2 island from Ontario or possibly Minnesota in 1949. At that time, Isle Royale was a national park, and the wolves that reached the island were fully protected there from bounties, poisons, and aerial hunting. The wolves of the central SNF also were those that wildlife biologist, wilderness enthusiast, and writer Sigurd Olson (1938) had trailed in the snow in the late 1930s and that Milt Stenlund (1955) had studied later. Although neither worker realized it, molecular geneticists would eventually debate whether the wolves they studied were an interesting blend of animals descended from the most recent colonization of North America across the Bering land bridge ( Canis lupus ), such as those in northwestern Canada and Alaska, and wolves that evolved in North America ( Canis lycaon ), such as inhabit southeastern Ontario (Wilson et al. 2000) . Wolves with both types of genetic markers sometimes live in the same pack, and apparently