Seasonal and inter‐annual variation in diet for gray wolves Canis lupus in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan

Abstract

Plains bison Bison bison bison were extirpated from most of their historical range in the late nineteenth century, and few studies have examined the interactions of bison with gray wolves Canis lupus. The Sturgeon River plains bison (SRPB) population in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan is one of only a few populations of plains bison in their historical range in Canada and have declined around 50% since 2005. This study examined the inter‐ and intra‐annual variation in wolf diet using stable isotope analysis (SIA), to assess the importance of bison and other ungulates to wolf diet relative to the decline of the SRPB. We used wolf hair (n = 35) and blood (n = 29) collected from 30 individuals from 2011 to 2017 to estimate the diet of two packs for summer and winter, and visited potential wolf kill sites (n = 270) during the winter from 2013 to 2017 to collect prey samples. We used wolf scats (n = 465) collected in the winter and summer of 2012–2013 as priors for our Bayesian stable isotope mixing models. We found the percentage of bison (median range: 26–39%), deer/elk (21–24%) and moose (16–33%) consumed in the summer was consistently high, compared to winter when white‐tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus comprised the highest percentage of wolf diet (40–49%). We observed small inter‐annual variation in wolf diet. We examined differences between packs and found that wolves that had greater overlap with the SRPB had more bison in their diet, particularly in winter (26–40%). Results from SIA were consistent with percentages of prey found at wolf kill sites. Overall, bison constitute a lower proportion of wolf diet compared to other wild ungulates, and our findings support the assumption that wolf predation is not the main contributing factor to SRPB population decline.