This area of our new webpage is devoted to the memoirs of those dedicated, and slightly crazy, individuals who live in Wolf Camp. A rustic setting devoid of electricity, plumbing, and phone service, camp is located just outside the pack's enclosure and residents live in tents year round. WERC's resident biologist and typically 2-4 interns inhabit the remote camp to ensure the welfare and security of the pack every day and night, regardless of the weather or danger. Such a life provides a deep insight into the pack's life and essentially causes the Wolf Camp residents to live in harmony with the other forest inhabitants. Life in Wolf Camp is nothing less than an adventure. These are our words.
SILENT NIGHT
Night fell hours ago on the home of the Sawtooth Pack: Wolves of the Nez Perce, and camp is quiet other than the wind through the Ponderosa and the crackle of my wood stove starting to heat my walled tent. I have made my home here for the past month and can't even believe that I will be leaving it at the beginning of March to head back to the east coast. The remainder of the pack, siblings Piyip and Motoki, have already surpassed my expectations for hands on learning, and the staff of WERC has been more than accommodating to my goals of my internship with the organization.
My name is Leah Kramer Heyman, a recent graduate of the Audubon Expedition Institute of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My fascination of wolves started in my hometown of Sharon, MA at the age of twelve when my class was required to read the book "Julie of the Wolves" by Jean Craige George. The book is about a young independent Inuit woman who runs away onto the tundra of Alaska and is saved by a pack of wolves. While the story is fiction, the description of the pack hierarchy and bond would shape my life and peak my interest for years to come.
Now ten years later I still find myself fascinated with the pack, within the 20 acres of the enclosure and beyond. This week I am joined by Jessica Collins, a former intern here for a visit, and Hilary Zaranek, a practicum student. My education through Jeremy and other WERC members grows each day even when I am the lone intern. Between learning how to maintain camp and participate in public educational activities, I am learning how this organization works and about the west's growing wolf population.
Political conversations with staff and locals has shed a whole new light on what was only a written reality in my world, reintroduction of the wolves in this part of the county. Sitting in the well-insulated cook shed, talks of wolf behavior and the workings of the hierarchy and pack management spurs questions and stories that are enlightening. But it is the direct contact with the pack that has had the most impact on me.
A month after my arrival I am taking my first steps, with Jeremy and the other girls, into the enclosure. We are very cautious and as Piyip and Motoki approach; I see them for the first time without the fence between us. While they do not greet, their presence is overpowering. Piyip walks several feet behind me as we break the trail though the meadow. Hilary and I examine first hand the size of one of twelve dens in the enclosure. Even in the cold of the Idaho winter, the sandy home is away from the wind, warm with its sunny southern exposure. Hidden trails and meadows open up as we continue to explore and ask questions, and before we know it, we are walking through the fence back to camp.
I still have two more months to explore new ideas and ask more questions, but I wonder if that will ever be enough. From the first night to the last morning I am looking forward to hearing the pack howl me awake and asleep. While the snow continues to fall I hope that each person who I encounter over the next few months here at Wolf Camp will be as touched as I am by these amazing creatures and will go away with a better understanding of their biology and history, past, present and possible future. I leave this update of wolf camp with a writing call "Wolf Credo" by Del Geoetz 1988:
Respect your elders
Teach the young
Cooperate with the pack
Play when you can
Hunt when you must
Rest in between
Share your affections
Voice your feelings
Leave your mark
Smile.
Leah Kramer, Winter 2008 Intern
ENTRY 1:
Spring is a time of birth and ample life around the territory of the Sawtooth Pack: Wolves of the Nez Perce and the adjacent Wolf Camp. Our first wildflower bloomers of the year, the Buttercups, bloomed last month and now the Glacier Lilies and Shooting Stars add color to the landscape that only recently lost its winter barren white appearance. The huge pine trees are dropping vast amounts of yellow pollen, while the deciduous shrubs take their first breath of the year. Wobbly-footed and spotted new-born fawns stagger across the meadow following their mothers, and the summer songbirds create a loud chorus every twilight.
The pack is beginning their seasonal processes as well. Their thick winter coats are now about to shed from their bodies and each is slowly losing their winter weight gain. Wolves also tend to become very sleepy this time of the year, probably recovering from the long, exhausting winter and breeding seasons. With the pack growing older, they take full advantage of the "spring slumber", often sleeping for half-a-day at a time. If only those of us who care for the pack were so lucky! Actually, spring is a very busy season for Wolf Camp personnel. All the structures need to be evaluated for damage from the harsh winter weather, and then repaired accordingly; the outhouses need to be emptied; all the limbs and trees that toppled over during winter must be removed from the trails, etc. Plus, much work is necessary to prepare the Visitor Center and interpretive displays for the upcoming visitor season. In fact, spring is one of the busiest seasons for WERC.
Alas, soon our doors will be open for the summer and then the pack will once again be the centerpiece of the visitor season. Hopefully the pack is well rested by then and ready to do what they do best----teach the world about the realities of their wild cousins.
J Heft
Entry 3:
Recently in camp, most of the drama in the animal world has centered on raising young. As most parents know, this can be a time of great play, worry, constant harassment, and sometimes loss.
This morning I watched five tiny Red Squirrels running around in a stand of trees. Usually Red Squirrels don't tolerate another squirrel within 200 yards and boisterously chase intruders completely out of their territory. These juvenile squirrels completely tolerated their littermates, often climbing within ten feet of each other and chasing each other only a short distance in play, then stopping. On one occasion, a squirrel sat on top of a limb, while his sibling tried to unseat him from the bottom. The one on top realized his brother's tail was within reach and pulled up on it, lifting his brother completely off the tree and holding him upside down for a second before the upside down squirrel grabbed the tree, pulled away, and chased his brother half way up the next tree.
The deer in camp have had fawns for nearly three months now, and at least two separate families reside in camp. One morning at 6:30 I was awakened by a line of five deer, starting with mother-fawn-mother-fawn-fawn. The two fawns in the rear suddenly bolted after each other in a playful chase, while their mother looked worriedly in my direction. Possibly one mother had twins and the other a single fawn. The doe in front was noticeably larger than the other doe, perhaps indicating she was a yearling from last year that had rejoined her mother with her own fawn.
Outside the cookshed is a Ponderosa Pine snag with several one inch diameter holes. Throughout the last month, I've watched two adult nuthatches making routine trips, in and out of one of these holes, sometimes as often as one per minute. That could mean 60 trips in a single hour.something that makes our troubles of feeding our own children seem miniscule.
About a week ago, an adult landed five feet from our porch and gathered some Snowberry stem fibers before flying back inside the hole to add to her nest. I believe their young are almost ready to leave the nest, as signaled by their tiny begging cries which have steadily increased in volume as their bodies have grown over the past three weeks. Everywhere else throughout the woods, small nuthatch "flocks" have recently appeared, as other pairs have fledged their young and now forage as family units.
As for other young, the list goes on and on. The Pacific Slope Flycatchers who nested our deck recently fledged their young, after making sneaky swoops under our deck for the past three weeks to feed young. The Mountain Chickadees that I watched peck out rotten wood from the underside of a branch (again outside our cookshed), have disappeared after a week of entering and exiting their hole. Perhaps a predator discovered their nest. The long-eared Owls also have at least one owlet, which back in late May was flying around behind his hunting parents calling with a distinctly different, slightly whinny, single "whoo..whoo.whoo."
The nest predators have also been under attack lately. Several weeks ago, I watched a group of Gray Jays move through the trees, alternately getting dive-bombed and driven out of the territories of first nuthatches, then Western Tanagers, then chickadees as they continued moving through the trees. Predators that eat baby birds are not well liked at this time of year, and either get mobbed, or in the case of our Cooper's Hawk, create bird alarms that can stretch for over 100 feet into the forest. The death of a baby bird may seem sad to us, but to the Cooper's Hawk, the lives of its own babies depend on the death of others.just as we humans depend on the death of other animals to support our own children.
Chris Smith, Summer 2007 Intern
Entry 4:
"Wolves are not vegetarians, and neither are most of you." That got a laugh out of the kids I was teaching about wolves and set a good mood for the rest of my time as an instructor for the Wilderness Awareness School through the Wolf Education & Research Center.
That week we were going to be tracking animals in the Frank Church Wilderness, and while we all were excited to be out in the wilderness, looking at animals and searching for the signs they left behind as they traveled, we were especially anticipating finding signs of wolves.
After my talk to them about wolves, none of them seemed to have any real fear of wolves, but they had probably never actually had a real fear of wolves and were all very open minded.
Wolves are less dangerous than mountain lions, bears, and even deer, yet people are still afraid of them. Dogs may get the prize for attacking the most humans as far as non-human animals go: every year in the U.S., 5 million people, or about 1 out of 50, are bitten by a dog, and 10-15 people are killed by dogs.
I'm from Minnesota, where wolves never went extinct, and they are essentially a non-factor in most people's minds. They don't attack people and the damage they cause to the deer and moose populations, as well as the livestock, is minimal to insignificant. But the kids I was with were all well informed and weren't afraid of wolves.
The kids and I really hoped to see wolves or at least hear them even, but that never happened. For us, it was exciting enough that we eventually did find wolf tracks and took a few casts of large wolf prints. None of us really expected to see wolves but we would have all liked to.
We saw two black bears during the trip, and that was great, but it really makes you think about how wolves live at higher densities than black bears and yet are seen by people less frequently. They really are elusive animals. Thus it was that amid a week of hiking, singing songs, and kids throwing rocks as heavy as they could lift into a roaring river that awe was found in thinking about the lives of the creatures we tracked and how lucky we were to be able to walk in their footsteps.
Chiji Ochiagha, Summer 2007 Intern
