If the wolf is to survive, the wolf haters must be outnumbered. They must be outshouted, outfinanced, outvoted. Their narrow and biased attitude must be outweighed by an attitude based on an understanding of natural processes. Finally, their hate must be outdone by a love for the whole of nature, for the unspoiled wilderness, and for the wolf as a beautiful, interesting and integral part of both.
-L. David Mech, ”The Wolf” (Doubleday, 1970)
For the last 23 years, the call of the wild for L. David Mech has been an unrelenting chorus of steady beep-beep-beeps that pound in his brain like tiny claw hammers as he soars aloft in his cramped airborne laboratory. Mech has spent tens of thousands of hours in chartered single-engine planes over the lake-dappled woods of northeastern Minnesota, braving buffeting winds, sudden squalls, winter white-outs, not to mention the dizzying aerobatics that his complex research requires.
Mech-the derivation is Polish, and the family pronounces it Meech-is as territorial as the wolf and nearly as tradition-bound. A succession of aged Plymouths have logged a half-million miles between Mech`s home in St. Paul and his research base 250 miles north in Ely, where he has been studying a thousand square miles of Minnesota woodland for nearly half his 52 years. As the leading wolf biologist in the world, Mech often is called to distant hinterlands to consult with colleagues, but he doesn`t stay away long.
Slowly, painstakingly, he has amassed the longest-running full-scale ecology study in history, fighting to fund it, struggling to continue it. His role is to study wolves in a wild setting, to learn their secrets over many generations so that a now-treasured American wildlife legacy can be preserved. Mech has never lost the intoxication that discovery brings-”I`m the luckiest man alive,” he says, smiling. ”All my days are Saturdays.”
To Mech, amazing psychodramas always are being played out a few hundred feet beneath his airplane in the heart of the 1.7 million-acre Superior National Forest, gateway to a great untrammeled wilderness near the Canadian border. Radio telemetry, of which he is both a pioneer and master, gives Mech the means to record precisely who is doing what down there, and to whom. Often he may watch the protagonists directly or must deduce afterward what happened; sometimes, when the blinding Minnesota sunlight bounces off the snow, all that`s able to be seen are racing shadows-dancing, darting, dodging- dashing through the trees, until, finally, they fuse together into the mighty last leap for survival that climaxes the ballet of predator and prey.
Wildlife scientists often seem to take on the mannerisms of the animals they study, and Mech is no exception. He is aptly described by one of his former graduate students, psychologist Roger Peters, in the latter`s loosely fictionalized memoir, ”Dance of the Wolves”:
”I`m not sure what I expected a wolf man to look like; but certainly not apple-cheeked, moon-faced, balding, with an innocent openness in his smile,” Peters wrote. ”On the whole I thought that (Mech) looked far more pastoral than predatory. It was only around his eyes that one could find a trace of a wolf. At the foot of his high, tanned forehead lurked two lean, dark eyebrows, incredulous predators ready to pounce. His eyes were almost hidden beneath them, gleaming in the darkness of their lairs.”
Visit Mech at work, and you`ll find that the action escalates within moments after the ski-equipped plane has taken off from the little municipal Ely airport. Seated behind the pilot, Mech twiddles the dial of his radio receiver, adjusting the signal loudness and refining it by switching between the twin antennas perched on the wings. Scientist and pilot must work as a unit, the latter instantly responding as Mech pinpoints the characteristic chirps, the wolf-beeps he hears, while homing in on the broadcasts from the forest.
”I think we`ve got him,” Mech`s voice crackles through the headset to pilot Steve Durst. ”Let`s do a 180 to make sure.” Durst banks, rolls and begins to fly a tight circle, intent on not overshooting the signal. Mech peers out the side window, scanning the chaotic, snow-splotched terrain of spires of black conifers, pearly-white lakes, low sandy bluffs and rocks-down where the wild things are.
”They`re all directly underneath us, asleep on the edge of that lake,”
Mech says. But the confused visitor sees nothing, absolutely nothing, except desolate wintry woods. To Mech, a research biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the forest is as familiar as his back yard. He has the practiced eye to spot telltale dots through the thick brush and trees; furry dots shaped like German shepherds that steadfastly ignore the spy plane circling above as they doze, play, meander, mate, relate, carouse, kill, feast, raise families, establish territories, disperse hundreds of miles and otherwise go about their daily lives.
Durst drops the plane and rolls it again so that the visitor`s window suddenly, sickeningly, starts to resemble a glass-bottomed boat. ”They`re right there,” Mech says patiently. ”See `em?”
And finally you do-six in number, all grays, just sprawled about the shore, lazing like a bunch of kennel dogs. Oddly, the thrill is shivery, something almost primeval, to be savored. There are wolf buffs who spend their yearly vacations traveling hundreds of miles just on the off-chance they might hear the songs of these almost unbelievably elusive animals. Yet there they are, just two minutes` flying time from the Ely airport, still within sight of town-a pack of wild timber wolves snoozing in the snow.
”In the group you saw, there`s one that`s radio-collared,” Mech explains. ”Another in the group has a radio, but it`s broken, and someday we`ll try to retrieve it. We`ve got about 25 wolves on the air currently, and also 35 white-tail deer, so we can keep track of both sides of the equation. Each radio wolf or deer broadcasts on a specific frequency, and we just tune them in by scanning the radio band like you`d do in your car.
”There are six wolf packs within a 10-mile radius of Ely. They represent between 20 and 40 animals, depending on pup production from year to year. They`re all living peaceably. Doing well. I`ve tracked them through town at night, but people rarely catch so much as a glimpse of them. They stay here because they have what they need. Their ancestors probably were occupying the same territories a century ago.”
If wolves could award the Nobel Prize-for either science or peace-they`d have to give it to Dave Mech. Voting would not be unanimous because of regular blood workups and other physiology experiments on captive animals that enable Mech to ”know the wolf from the inside,” as he puts it. He also would lose support from the more than 400 Minnesota wolves he slyly has outwitted and snared in steel-jawed foot traps over the years. ”I don`t like the things, but it`s the only way I know to catch the animals,” he says, shrugging.
The traps have been modified to injure the wolves as little as possible. But Mech still anesthetizes the crafty creatures with drugs, withdraws blood and urine for study, attaches ear tags and straps on acrylic radio collars, transforming the proud predators into mobile broadcasting stations, their whereabouts no longer secret no matter how far they roam.
Once collared, the free-ranging animals can be tracked from the air or followed by truck or on snowshoes. The movements of contiguous and widely separated packs can be charted. The histories of individual animals, their ancestries and destinies through the decades, can be followed.
”The hardest part is trapping them again, when their batteries wear out after a few years,” Mech notes with a grin. ”What we`ve created here over time is the most educated, trap-shy population of wolves in the world.”
One female, a legend known to the researchers by her ear-tag number,
”2407,” was on the air for a remarkable 11 years and 3 months-outliving two mates in the process-before disappearing. Mech, a trapper since boyhood, is a consummate woodsman, but this wolf nearly defeated him. ”We evaluate our efforts in terms of what we call `trap nights,` ” he says. ”Catching a wolf- any wolf, not a particular individual-might take anywhere from 50 trap nights to 500. That means you put out 1 trap for 50 nights, or 10 traps for five nights, and so forth.
”Now, trying to catch a wolf the second time will take a lot longer, and I had to catch 2407 nine different times and change her collar. About the eighth time, it took me 8,000 trap nights to catch her-that was 5,000 one summer and 3,000 the next.
”So, we had 50 traps out for her at a time, each of which had to be checked every day, because we don`t want to leave the animal trapped any longer than need be. But remember, this wolf was already collared, meaning that basically we knew where she was all the time, yet we still couldn`t catch her. Of course, the longer the deal went on, the higher her esteem rose in our eyes.”
Nature doesn`t care about happy endings or big finishes, so the denouement for 2407 came as a kind of letdown for her trappers. After eluding Mech`s best efforts for two summers-he baited trails with every smelly concoction he could think of; he even placed traps in puddles-the wolf finally walked into one that was nothing special. Just an old trap, which, for some reason, she decided to sniff that day. Mech replaced her batteries, but when those expired, the wolfmen heard their last from 2407.
”She came from obscurity and vanished back into obscurity,” Mech says.
”I tried so hard, maybe too hard, to learn what happened to her. The last time, I had a very special collar made-a double collar with two radios in it. Damned if both of them didn`t fail.”
Minnesota has 1,200 resident wolves, the largest population in the lower 48 states, and they survive as a threatened species under federal law. Once the U.S. had wolves ranging from Florida to Maine, Mexico to Washington, but by 1918, between bounties, mythic fears that European immigrants had of the wolf and the concerns of ranchers over their livestock, wolves were being shot and poisoned by the tens of thousands.
Mech traditionally has been dispassionate and matter-of-fact when speaking or writing about the misunderstood animal to which he has devoted his life. He comes across as a scientist who discusses only what he knows, only what his data show. Mech doesn`t guess. If he doesn`t have an answer, he doesn`t try to please.
He has long walked a political tightrope. He has been threatened, his traps destroyed, his study animals shot. All partisans-wolf-haters and wolf-lovers alike-have been angry at ”the wolf man with the Ph.D.,” as Mech has been derisively called, when his research failed to agree with them. The doctorate was earned from Purdue University in 1962 under the mentorship of Durward Allen, the dean of the nation`s wildlife biologists, for Mech`s pioneering studies of wolf-moose interactions on Upper Michigan`s Isle Royale, the remote and fiercely federally protected national park out in Lake Superior. Mech`s doctoral dissertation was deemed so important by the federal government that it was immediately published, putting him on the map as a wolf scientist at the age of 25.
Mech has never changed his identity. He views himself as a scientist whose job is to tell the government what it needs to know about this endangered species. And he has become a veritable research factory, producing four books, numerous articles, documentary films and nearly 250 research papers that shatter the centuries-old myths perpetuated by wolf-haters and also serve to moderate the well-meaning intentions of the new generation of wolf-lovers, who tend to view the majestic carnivore as basically just a big, cuddly dog.
Mech is not, it should be noted, the bumbling wolf biologist portrayed in the movie ”Never Cry Wolf,” based on the Farley Mowat memoir Mech calls
”delightful but not true.” Mowat`s book has bedeviled Mech and other wolf specialists since it was published in 1963, purporting to be the controversial and colorful Canadian author`s rollicking misadventures with a pack of charming wild wolves that he supposedly befriended during a stint as a wildlife biologist 15 years earlier. The book and film changed so many people`s minds about wolves, according to published reports, that even in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party has been forced to triple the bounty.
”It was a great book,” Mech says. ”And it certainly sold more copies than mine will and probably even did more for the wolf, even though it was done under false pretenses. It did a lot. But since my whole life has been dedicated to seeking the truth about wolves, there`s no way I can endorse a fable in order to make a point.”
Mech, however, can certainly prove that he is the first man to live with a wolf pack in the wild. Mowat`s book, suspiciously, was devoid of photos;
Mech`s latest book, ”The Arctic Wolf: Living with the Pack,” is indisputably the real thing, although Mech had to go all the way up to Canada`s Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic before he could find wolves trusting enough to let him join their family. Mech documented the experience, which he calls the
”high point of my life,” with 106 color photos, a National Geographic article and a TV documentary.
Many books have been written about why the wolf, hounded to near-extinction, has recently enjoyed a miraculous revival. Once revered, once reviled, the wolf has during Mech`s career risen to become the poster child of conservation.
Yet one of the most mysterious facts about the wolf is that unless rabid, and hence insane, it will not attack human beings. No wild animal has been so relentlessly hunted down-trapped, shot, knifed, gassed, bludgeoned, poisoned and strafed from airplanes; officials even once tried biological warfare by infecting the creatures with mange. Wolves have every reason in the world to get even, yet seem to bear no grudge.
The historical record has yet to document an authenticated case of wolves ever attacking people in North America. The wolf is the only carnivore known to behave this way, and Mech cannot explain. He never has been confronted in the wild-”I don`t know any wolf biologist who`s afraid of wolves,” he notes. Once, when he was examining a freshly killed moose to determine its age, he ran off 15 hungry wolves by merely approaching them. Other scientists, and even nonscientists, have gone into wolf dens-on one occasion with the female present-and photographed wolf pups. Wolves stand at the high end of the evolutionary ladder that includes the dog, and perhaps it was this trait that was responsible for canine domestication 13 millenniums ago.
Of late the wolf has been swept along with the growing understanding of the predator`s place in nature. It was Mech, as a graduate student on Isle Royale between 1958 and 1961, who documented the wolf`s role as a controller of population within herds of moose. Mech showed that wolves do this by preying mainly on the only animals they can catch-the sick and lame, the very young and very old, the unwary and dimwitted-the biologically unfit, according to nature`s harsh rules.
Over subsequent decades Mech also proved that the delicate balance of nature really isn`t so delicate after all. Natural cycles tend to swing wildly, and wolves will starve even when there are plenty of deer around, if those animals are young and vigorous. Ordinarily the wolves won`t waste any time trying to catch them. Mech proved that wolf packs have carefully defined territories, the borders of which are diligently freshened by urination, or scent-marking. He showed that a pack will trespass on another pack`s territory only out of desperation and hunger, and that the interlopers are in deadly peril if they are spotted by the resident wolves.
Quite amazingly, after 10 long years of observations, Mech showed in 1977 that there are one- or two-mile demilitarized buffer zones between contiguous wolf territories, and that deer that are fortunate enough to be born in these DMZ`s are safe from wolves patrolling either side. So long as the deer don`t cross that invisible line, and so long as the wolves aren`t starving, the wolves won`t touch them. The only similar parallel among predators that Mech has been able to find was the buffer zone that once existed between the warring Chippewa and Sioux Indian tribes in Minnesota. Because hunters from both tribes were afraid to enter the zone, the deer thrived. Once the tribes reached a truce, the deer were immediately wiped out. Famine ensued. Mech suggests that it makes good evolutionary sense for wolves to permit a neutral territory, a ”prey reservoir,” to exist, but he attributes no intelligence on the part of the deer. ”No, it`s just blind luck that they`re there,” he says.
To understand Mech`s fascination with the wolf, one must look back to his childhood in Syracuse, N.Y., and his father who taught him, among other things, to love the woods. That wasn`t very hard, the way Mech tells it. In fact, his early years are almost a blur as he hurried through high school and college in a rush to get outdoors.
”I was a trapper,” he says, ”mostly as a hobby, but I turned it into a paying proposition when I was a kid. I always had to work and used to set pins in a bowling alley. Usually, you`d set one alley, but if you jumped back and forth between two alleys, you could earn twice the money. It was dirty and dusty, and I figured if I was going to be there, I might as well make money.
”So when I was 14, I used to jump alleys until midnight. Then I`d walk home a mile or two and hit the sack and get up at 5 to check my traps. I was after foxes, mainly. The hardest animals to trap were the carnivores. They`re the smartest and the hardest to figure out. There`s a charisma about them that I can`t explain. It`s the difference between an eagle and a dove. I`d rather work with an eagle.
”After checking my traps, I`d get back home by 8 a.m. and hitch a ride to school. After school I`d go check my traps again, eat dinner and go to the bowling alley and jump. I graduated from high school when I was 17 and went to Cornell to learn to be a wildlife biologist. I skipped the master`s and went right for the doctorate. So I had my Ph.D. when I was 25 and was able to do a lot of things at a young age.
”I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but my vistas were very limited,” he recalls. ”When I went to Cornell, I became the first in my family to go to college. I figured I`d get a graduate project going, maybe to study the coyote in New York State. Then Durward Allen came along and offered me a chance to study wolves on a remote island in Lake Superior. That was 10 times better in my book. I jumped at the chance.”
