Netherlands: Unique footage shows family of eight wolves trotting past a wildlife camera

From DutchNews.nl:

A wildlife camera has caught all eight members of a wolf pack which has made the Veluwe national park its home in an unprecedented joint appearance. Wildlife monitoring organisation Zoogdierenvereniging, which installed the camera, said the footage shows that of the nine cubs born in 2019 and 2020 seven are still alive. That means that food is plentiful, the organisation said. Analysis of the animals’ droppings shows that their diet consists of red deer, fallow deer and young wild boar.

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What Will It Take to Fully Recover Wolf Populations?

From Sierraclub.org:

In 1987, a farmer near the town of Pouce Coupe, British Columbia, saw four gray wolves on his property and shot one of them. The wolf happened to be radio-collared, and the farmer reported the collar to authorities. The data revealed that the five-year-old female wolf had traveled all the way from Montana’s Glacier National Park—a distance of some 540 miles. This wolf, which was among the first litter of radio-collared wild-born wolves in the western United States, had loped through protected national parks and private ranches, crossed interstate highways, dodged traffic, and, along the way, avoided the rifle crosshairs of ranchers—until it met the last one.

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Switzerland decided in a referendum not to allow wolf hunting

From PrudentPressAgency.com:

Geneva, September 27 (EFE). – The Swiss decided today in a referendum to preserve the national protection of the wolf, which is a semi-extinct animal in the country for 25 years but has been restored, in the face of legal proposals that called for more freedom to hunt it, due to the increase in this predator’s attacks on livestock.

With 51.92% of the vote, voters today decided to repeal the new National Hunting Law that has already been approved by the Federal Parliament and the government, but it can still be challenged in a popular consultation.

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Give a Dog a Bone: Did Sharing Meat Lead to Canine Domestication?

From Haaretz.com:

It’s a charming notion. Sharing meat scraps with wolves in the dead of winter possibly as long as tens of thousands of years ago may have wound up creating man’s best friend, a new paper in Scientific Reports suggests.

Only in winter? No sharing in summer or spring? That’s a twist in the new hypothesis by Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki and colleagues, which ties together several facts to reach that startling conclusion: Two species in competition over resources – each capable of killing and eating the other – wound up in love.

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Baby Tasmanian tiger skulls more similar to wolf pups than to other Australian marsupials

From ABC.net.au:

Tasmanian tigers and dogs last shared a common ancestor 160 million years ago, but new research has revealed the thylacine resembled its distant relative from birth.

Scientists from the University of Melbourne and Flinders University used micro-CT scanning and digital reconstructions to compare the skulls of Tasmanian tiger pups and wolf pups.

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Wolves lost endangered species protection this year. Idaho may offer a glimpse of what’s ahead for them nationwide.

From the Idaho Mountain Express:

It was the day after Christmas when Stanley resident Mikesell Clegg had what she considers a once-in-a-lifetime experience along state Highway 75, headed south to Ketchum. A stone’s throw from her car, a pack of nine wolves bounded along the road before veering left and ducking under a fence to an open, snow-laden meadow.

“I could tell it was wildlife, so I started slowing down and that’s when I realized it was a pack of wolves,” Clegg, 26, told the Express in an interview. “I pretty quickly after that grabbed my phone to film.”

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Germany: New challenges for wolf conservation

From Eurekalert.org:

People view the wolf as either a threatening predator or a sign of a healthy natural habitat. Many proponents of nature and animal conservation welcome the spread of wolf populations in Germany. By contrast, farmers who graze herds directly impacted by the wolves’ return are more critical. The team of Nicolas Schoof, Prof. Dr. Albert Reif of the Chair of Site Classification and Vegetation Science at the University of Freiburg, and Prof. Dr. Eckhard Jedicke of the Competence Center Cultural Landscape and the Department of Landscape Planning and Nature Conservation of Hochschule Geisenheim University has assessed the existing legal situation.

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Wisconsin: Wild Things: Wolf Debate Heating Up as State Eyes Management

From the Door County Pulse in Wisconsin:

Gray wolves lost protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) Monday, offering lethal control options to states suffering losses of livestock, pets and wildlife. But a Wisconsin hunting and trapping season will happen in 2021 only if expected legal challenges from animal-activist organizations are unsuccessful.

“We’re prepared. We’ve managed wolves before,” said Keith Warnke, administrator of the Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Division of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “We have a robust population, and we’ll be applying the best biological and social science in an extremely transparent process.”

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Do predators shape ecosystems? Trophic cascades curtailed by prey use of dangerous places during safe times

From the University of Minnesota:

By simulating wolf activity in the grasslands of central Minnesota, University of Minnesota researchers demonstrated that deer altered their behavior in response to the fear of predation in specific ways that halt the cascade of predator effects on plant and soil communities.

“Traditionally, it was believed that predators shape ecosystems by changing the activity of the prey and that the prey’s changes in behavior would then have cascading consequences on organisms in lower trophic levels, such as soil and plants,” said lead author Meredith Palmer, a former graduate student and postdoctoral researcher with the U of M College of Biological Sciences and current postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. “However, our research shows that isn’t the case and sheds light on understanding why we do not always see trophic cascades in terrestrial ecosystems.”

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ODFW now managing wolves statewide after wolf delisting

From the Tillamook Headlight Herald:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally removed most gray wolves in the lower 48 from the Endangered Species List Monday, Jan. 4, which turns management over to state fish and wildlife agencies including Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). In Oregon, wolves west of Highways 395-78-95 had remained on the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) when the area east of this boundary was delisted in 2011.

While U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was the lead agency in the western two thirds of the state, ODFW has always played a significant role in wolf conservation and management statewide since wolves began to re-establish themselves in Oregon in the 2000s.

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