Wild Horses, Wild Wolves by Maureen Enns

Author:Maureen Enns [Enns, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / Wilderness
ISBN: 978-1-927330-24-1
Publisher: Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2013-06-02T21:00:00+00:00

The stud Kit. In Full Camo, charcoal drawing, 23 × 29 in., Enns, 2010.

I had read of ravens and wolves. Ian McAllister describes a symbiotic relationship between the two, each benefiting from the other. He describes how ravens alert wolves to carcasses and wolves in turn break open skin that is otherwise impervious for a raven’s beak, and so on. Ian speaks of his assistant Chris Darimont’s dietary study that analyzed more than 3,300 wolf scats collected from the outer BC coast up into the Coast Mountains. The wolves had ingested many types of birds ranging from ducks to herons, but Chris didn’t find a single trace of a raven in a wolf scat. According to Eleanor O’Hanlon, who has read his book Mind of the Raven, biologist Bernd Heinrich calls ravens “wolf birds,” the relationship is so close.

Spotting the large wolf track alongside Kit’s was daunting for me because I do not have a depth of experience with wolves from which to draw. An interspecies relationship within wild animal groups is rare, but it happens and I have been lucky enough to witness one.

I was aware that my many hikes and horseback rides into the area were habituating the animals to my presence – something I didn’t want to do. After seeing Kit and the wolf’s tracks, I installed my first heat- and motion-activated camera, which began to record images onto digital cards when I wasn’t around. With these cameras I have been able to record a coalition of sorts between the wild horses and the wolves. I have also been able to record some astonishing evidence of their ability to co-exist with other species in the area. Through these images, I have come to a much richer understanding of what I originally thought was a straightforward predator / prey relationship. I began to see the wild horses as members of a wild community, living within a dense and often misunderstood network of relationships.

I installed my first heat- and motion-activated camera near a mineral lick in late February 2012, backgrounded by the Devil’s Head, which is located across the frozen marshland. The first download from the digital chip blew my circuits. On February 24, 2012, at 7:09 p.m., two wolves mated in front of the camera and tied, as dogs do, for a short period of time. It is night and dark at that time of year in Alberta, but the infrared function exposed the mating. I was a voyeur par excellence, not that I intended to be. In every pack, only one pair mates, and I had it digitally recorded in the wild – now that was a shutter click of luck. Usually the alpha male mates the alpha female. At the time I was pretty sure that two packs had survived the fur trapper of the region, who I had heard trapped six wolves during the winter of 2012. Rick and I had met some wolf hunters earlier that February. They remarked to us that every dead wolf was a live deer or elk (for them to shoot).

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