Wolf Island by L. David Mech; & Greg Breining & Rolf O. Peterson

Author:L. David Mech; & Greg Breining & Rolf O. Peterson [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO030000 Biography & Autobiography / Environmentalists & Naturalists, NAT044000 Nature / Animals / Wolves, BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, NAT049000 Nature / Regional
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2020-10-12T20:00:00+00:00

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The winter was shaping up as a great winter to fly. The weather was mostly favorable. Early on, we surpassed the number of chases and successful hunts we had witnessed all the previous winter.

Yet there were still days we couldn’t fly—it was too windy, or visibility was too limited by snow. Then we turned our attention to camp.

During the off-season, after the Park Service had closed up the premises and before we arrived, the deer mice had apparently interpreted human absence as an opportunity to plant their flag in the ranger station. They were everywhere—in the house, in the shop. On days flying was impossible, I indulged my interest in wildlife and trapping by laying out deer mouse traplines. I would rise each morning and check my lines, catching sometimes a single mouse, sometimes several. I would prepare study skins of my catches as a way to record for posterity examples of what was probably the most common mammal on the island. How or when the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) arrived at Isle Royale was anyone’s guess. It was certainly small enough to stow away aboard a fishing boat or even an Indian canoe. Yet it might have washed ashore on some flotsam from the mainland. Conceivably the species might be one of the oldest residents of the island. I imagined that in addition to getting rid of household pests, I was also providing museum-grade specimens that might shed light on such mysterious questions.

Probably the second-most common mammal on the island was the snowshoe hare, and there was certainly evidence they were more plentiful than last year. Between the dock and our camp there were two or three well-used runs, where the previous year there had been none. Tracks peppered the lakeshore and formed trails all over the island. Wherever the snowshoe hare occurs, its populations run in boom-and-bust patterns—not just random fluctuations but cycles that last roughly a decade. In the days not too long ago when lynx were common on Isle Royale, snowshoe hares would have been their favorite food. In fact, because lynx eat almost nothing else, the population of hares and lynx would be closely synchronous. When hares hit a downward turn, the lynx soon followed. With lynx now gone, or nearly so, the island’s red foxes were probably the hare’s chief predator. Various raptors undoubtedly took some. Although some hare hair showed up in wolf scats, it was becoming clear from my scat analysis that wolves spent little effort chasing after animals as small as a hare.

Among the activities that had absolutely no relevance to our wolf study was the Park Service’s ongoing battle against the aging and decaying structures on the island. Weather and our schedule permitting, Don Murray would fly chief ranger Ben Zerbey (who had replaced Dave Stimson after a couple of weeks) to some far-flung outpost of former habitation on the island, where Ben would take advantage of the low fire danger in winter to burn down old fishermen’s shacks and unneeded Civilian Conservation Corps buildings constructed a quarter century earlier.

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