From the Star Tribune in Minnesota:
Six environmental groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday, aiming to keep endangered species protections for wolves, which have largely recovered in northern Minnesota but are still gone from most of their native range in the United States.
The Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the wolf throughout the Lower 48 in October, saying the population was high enough that federal protections were no longer warranted.
From The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado:
The first steps toward reintroducing wolves into Colorado began with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission approving a preliminary process for developing a wolf management plan.
The plan, which is required after the passage of Proposition 114 in November, was considered during more than six hours of informational presentations and discussion on wolf reintroduction that covered biology, federal delisting of wolves and the importance of stakeholder engagement.
From Scientific America:
Dire wolves are iconic beasts. Thousands of these extinct Pleistocene carnivores have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. And the massive canids have even received some time in the spotlight thanks to the television series Game of Thrones. But a new study of dire wolf genetics has startled paleontologists: it found that these animals were not wolves at all, but rather the last of a dog lineage that evolved in North America.
From CBC.ca:
The board responsible for managing the caribou herds of the eastern N.W.T. is recommending the territorial government end one of its most controversial programs aimed at preventing their decline.
The Wekʼèezhìi Renewable Resources Board (WRRB) issued their final recommendations Friday on a one-year wolf cull pilot program that saw the government hire marksmen to shoot wolves from helicopters, in an effort to decrease their impact on the population of two key caribou herds.
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.
Read more at DutchNews.nl:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The International Wolf Center uses science-based education to teach and inspire the world about wolves, their ecology, and the wolf-human relationship.