Wolves first arrived in what is now Minnesota thousands of years ago.

They likely migrated to the region from other areas as part of their natural dispersal patterns.

Wolves are highly adaptable and have historically been found in various habitats across North America.

The ancestors of the modern wolves, known as canis lupus, were present in North America before the arrival of humans.

These early wolves likely crossed land bridges or followed migratory routes, gradually spreading across the continent.

They moved into different regions as they pursued prey, took advantage of available resources, and adapted to changing environmental conditions.

As the wolf population expanded, they eventually reached what is now Minnesota.

The abundant prey such as deer and smaller mammals attracted wolves to the area.

Wolves played a significant ecological role in Minnesota acting as predators at the top of the food chain and helping maintain the balance of the ecosystems.

They were an integral part of the natural landscape in Minnesota and coexist with various other wildlife species.

However, as human settlements expanded and development occurred, wolves faced significant challenges.

The arrival of the European settlers in the 18th and 19th century marked a period of eradication that greatly caused the decline of the wolf population.

That persecution still exists to some degree but through legislation the wolves are much better protected than they have ever been.

This video program offers unique insights into wolf behavior in the wild and in captivity.

The wild behavior of the wolves is captured through the University of Minnesota's Voyageur Wolf Project and the Voyageur State Park and the study of wolves in captivity is done at the Wildlife Science Center in Stacy, Minnesota.

Tom Gable is a project manager of the Voyageur Wolf Project.

The area we study wolves in we refer to as the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, which includes Voyageurs National Park and then a big chunk of land actually south of the park.

In total that area is about almost 2,000 square km.

We have 15 or 16 wolf packs in this area at any given time typically, and it's a really high density wolf population as well as a really high density beaver population which makes it a really interesting place.

Prior to my research up there for my masters, Voyageurs National Park had started to do some sort of basic wolf monitoring starting in 2012, which is when wolves were removed from the endangered species list, one of the times they were removed I should say.

So the park started doing some basic wolf monitoring.

They want to know how many packs are in the area, what were the wolves dying from, how big were the packs, some really sort of basic information about the wolf population.

So when I came in 2015 doing my graduate work, I was able to sort of build off those initial efforts and then sort of expand the project and that involved looking at their predation behavior and a lot of their summer ecology, which is a time, summer in particular is a time, when wolves have not been as well studied because they're really challenging for people to study.

So that was sort of the impetus.

Actually, the funny story is when I started to do my graduate work it was actually supposed to be on beavers, not supposed to be on wolves.

So I was told when I took my graduate position that I could study anything I wanted so long as it dealt with beavers in Voyageurs National Park and so I thought I was going to be studying beavers and I did study beavers but as I was thinking about ideas in terms of beaver research questions, I started to realize that wolves prey a lot on beavers, especially in northern Minnesota where we have a lot of beavers.

And so that's when I proposed to my Master's advisers can we study wolf-beaver interactions and they thought that was a great idea and so that really started kind of this sort of synthesis between the wolf research that was going on and the beaver work that was already going on in Voyageurs and sort of starting what now has become the Voyageurs Wolf Project which is now studying sort of wolf predation during the entire summer, and not just on beavers, but also their predation behavior on deer and other things like that.

The thing that's most telling is, you know, we spend we have a team of six to eight people that are in the field almost every day during the summertime and by summer I mean spring to fall we think of it in the biological summer for wolves.

And we are following wolves almost every day and yet we never see them, right, you know, which is quite amazing because you would think that if you're in the field going to the spots where the wolves spend time, you know, if anyone should encounter them it should be us and yet the only times we see them is a sort of a brief glimpse when they run across the road or something like that.

So we're not seeing them in the field and we've had many instances where we've gone to a spot and we can tell from the GPS collar data once we get back from the field that the wolf was actually bedded down somewhere nearby or was close by and yet we never saw it.

You know we were 50m away, 100m away and so I think that's the sort of stuff where it's like they definitely know we're there and they probably know we're there well before, you know, we get even close to them and so I think that it's quite fascinating how little we see them and yet how close we are to them a lot.

So we're using cameras, which are really fantastic, and we're using just sort of commercially available trail cameras that anyone could buy and then we're using GPS collars and that's probably the real key is having those GPS collars that allow us to track where wolves are moving throughout the area because if we didn't have that technology studying wolves, particularly during the summer when you can't see them, you can't you can't find them has been really challenging, but that GPS tracking technology allows us to know where the wolves are going, where they're spending time, and that allows us to figure out where they're making kills, where they're raising their pups, all sorts of great information that for a long time people just didn't have access to because the technology didn't exist.

It really comes down to the the collars.

I mean those really help us know where the different pack territories are and now we've been able to do work, you know we're going on our ninth year of research in this area, as part of our project and so we have a really good understanding of where these packs have been sort of historically and that lets us know where most packs will be as we go forward.

Because with the habitat up there we have a lot of large lakes and different features that actually have kind of impacted where wolves can set up territories and so we typically have territories in the same places year after year or very similar places and so that does help us a bit with our work.

You know there are little shake ups and wolves will change in their territories little bits at a time, but the the collars help us really detect those changes.

To put them on in the first place we use rubber padded foothold traps that have been sort of modified for the capture and release of wolves.

So these are similar to the traps that maybe trappers would use except there's modifications to them that allow us to capture wolves and release them without damage to the wolf because that would be really counterproductive to our efforts.

If we're trying to understand what wolves do during the summer but then they're not acting like they normally would that's problematic.

So we have these foot hold traps, wolf gets caught in one of them, we come sedate the wolf.

The wolf, you know, falls asleep, we come and do our workup and in about 35 to 45 minutes that wolf is starting to wake up from the sedatives and then is back on its feet and shortly back to being a wolf and we're quickly back to studying that wolf and trying to understand how it makes a living.

Quite a bit about packs are pretty well known, but there's always stuff that is surprising, you know, like I think, you know, there's been in places like Minnesota where you can't observe wolves, you know, there's this sort of assumption when you think about wolf packs it's very easy to sort of generalize them.

Oh it's a pack with their parents and their offspring, which is generally true, right, but weird stuff happens, right, and I think that's what we see through time is we get to see some of the unique circumstances where it's not necessarily just, you know, two wolves and their pups, you know, it's a sibling and a mate plus their other sibling in the pack, you know, and these sort of unique combinations of individuals and that doesn't surprise biologists per se but I think with the public sometimes they're surprised to see these things and we're able to now document that in a way that we might not have been able to in the past because we have trail cameras which allow us to understand pack composition in ways that we used to not be able to understand that.

You know, when we first started doing our work, between 2015 and 2018, we didn't have the video camera technology so we had just the sort of still photo trail cameras and we would be able to learn like oh there's five wolves in this pack.

But generally beyond that we didn't have a clue what animals were traveling together because we couldn't differentiate them on the photos, they're just wolves.

But once we got the video footage that's this high definition video footage, we now can determine, we can identify which individuals we're looking at most of the time.

We can make out who are these wolves traveling together.

We can observe sort of packs forming, how do they form, where do they form, in ways that we didn't, we never would have been able to.

So we've watched several instances now where we've had wolves that were, you know, subordinate wolves in one pack and then that subordinate wolf leaves and starts to form their own pack sort of neighboring their original pack and we can see through the trail cameras them finding a mate, interacting with their mate, and then also having pups and building their pack.

So we start to see the dynamics of those a little better and again that's not going to be any news to biologists per se, but it's cool to be able to actually see it and document it.

You know in places like Yellowstone National Park they're able to watch these sort of I guess you could call them daily dramas all playing out cuz you can see the wolves.

But in Minnesota, you don't get to see that, and we still don't get to see a lot of it but we're getting more and more insight into them.

I think though probably the biggest thing with pack dynamics that we're seeing or at least learning about that surprises people I think is understanding the role of sort of pup survival in these packs and sort of how variable pup survival is between different wolf packs and between different years.

And in particular that most wolf pups just don't survive to being adults, and I think for most people that's really surprising to learn because there's sort of this assumption that wolves are, you know, exceptional predators that can just easily proliferate whenever they want and that certainly is true in the right circumstances they can be effective predators.

But in places like northern Minnesota, where you have this sort of saturated population, there just aren't enough resources for there to be the adult population that currently exists plus new batches of young added to that population every year, and so in some sense pup survival is low because you've got this population that's probably at sort of a natural carrying capacity.

There's just not enough food for all of these wolves and so pups start dying and that's sort of one of the ways that wolves sort of intrinsically sort of regulate their own population size is that pups just don't make it.

And so we've been able to document that and that surprised people.

You know two years ago we had 7% of wolf pups that actually survived to being adults, which is pretty incredible, right.

So it was a really low pup survival rate but then the interesting thing is then the year after it, so last year, that went way up to 52%, right and so you see and this year will be much lower again.

We've seen a lot of pups didn't make it this year.

And so you see this dynamic, right, that's going on in the population.

And one of the things we're trying to understand is why do we see these big variations in pup survival and we really don't know.

So we're trying to understand that.

But those things impact pack dynamics big time because those pups are what keep packs at certain sizes.

So if you're not adding a lot of pups into a pack, that pack is going to remain really small for awhile.

So that's been one of the big things we're trying to understand is pup survival because that ties in a lot to sort of how wolf populations as a whole function, and it's been something again that's really challenging to study in forested areas because to understand pup survival you have to know how many are born in the spring and that requires having GPS collars so you can find the den and count the pups.

And then you also need to know how many are alive come winter time.

Well that's really hard to if you can't observe them readily and that's where the trail cameras have come in handy as we can get a lot of observations and say oh we know this many actually survived to make it.

And prior to, you know, prior to this technology that was almost impossible to do, so that's what we're trying, it's one question we're really trying to answer.

So that's been one of the big questions that we've been focused on and that was a lot of my graduate work as well was trying to understand how do wolves hunt and kill beavers.

Because beavers are such a different prey species relative to the other prey they kill.

And so what we found by going to all these spots that wolves spend time and kind of seeing what they were doing is that wolves primarily kill beavers by ambushing them.

And to some people that's not that surprising.

They think, well, how else would a wolf kill a beaver because there's only a few options.

But what's surprising is that wolves, prior to our work, were not thought of as ambush predators.

They primarily were thought of as cursorial predators which means they primarily kill their prey by outrunning and outlasting it.

They don't use a lot of secrecy or tactics it's just sort of brute force, you know, they're going to exhaust prey and then kill it.

But what we see is when they're hunting beavers is they actually are able to use a lot of secrecy and sort of tactics to figure out good spots where beavers will come on land and they can launch an attack and actually ambush the beavers.

And so that was really insightful in terms of understanding how they do this.

And then we really wanted to understand how were they figuring out where they're going to actually wait for beavers.

Because a wolf who's wandering around its territory has a few different options when they're trying to figure out where to ambush beavers.

They have to figure out what ponds do they want to or what pond do they want to wait at if they're going to ambush a beaver.

And in our area a typical wolf is going to have maybe a hundred beaver ponds in its territory so there's a lot of options.

So how does it determine which pond to wait by, and then once it knows what pond it wants to wait by how does it pick where it's going to wait around that pond.

Sometimes beaver ponds can be pretty big.

So what we wanted to do is understand when wolves go to a pond how do they actually choose where to wait because presumably it's not random.

They've got something they're keying in on.

So what we were able to learn is by finding these ambushing sites, using the GPS collars, and knowing where wolves actually wait for beavers, we measured a bunch of information about where they're waiting.

And what we were able to learn is that wolves are almost always picking ambushing locations that are actually downwind of where beavers will be on land and that's because a beaver's primary way of detecting predators on land is their sense of smell.

And so wolves seem to have an understanding of this and they pick ambushing locations in response to that.

But what was really interesting is that while wolves would wait downwind, we kept seeing this pattern where wolves would wait really close to where the beavers would be on land, and oftentimes wolves are waiting in the wide open, you know, so if a beaver could have good eyesight they could see a wolf and presumably would never come on land.

But that's the important thing is that beavers have really bad eyesight because they spend probably six months of the year in darkness and so they've got these small little beady eyes and they really can't see motionless predators.

And so what wolves seem to have figured out is that beavers can smell them but they can't see them and so they have this ambushing strategy where they wait in spots where the beavers can't smell them and then the wolves just presumably wait still and so the beaver can't tell that the wolf is there.

And since they're downwind the beaver has no idea what's going on and then the beaver waddles up and the wolf attacks it.

So it was really quite fascinating because we were able to show that wolves seem to have an understanding of beaver behavior to an extent and they're able to actually pick how to hunt them or sort of choose these locations in response to that and we just thought that was pretty amazing.

And depends on the time of year and how mobile the pups are but they will take beavers back to the the pups.

We found several beaver skulls and things like this at dens, and we've gotten trail camera footage of, you know, wolves carrying half-eaten beavers back to their pups.

Sometimes too they'll just consume it all and then they'll just go back and regurgitate it for the pups.

But yeah we collect when we go to these dens we found several beaver skulls and pick those up as samples and they're stored in our freezer and things like that.

We see wolves eating fish, blueberries, all these sort of unique food sources and it's not surprising in the sense that wolves are these generalist carnivores that are very good at taking advantage of a variety of different food sources and particularly in the summer, which is the lean time of year for wolves, it is not surprising that wolves are taking advantage of any food source that they can and any food source that adds calories so to speak.

Wolves are also really smart predators.

So once they sort of make that association that let's say a fish in a stream is food, they're going to keep going back to that until that food source is no longer there.

But it was surprising in the sense that no one had ever documented wolves catching freshwater fish before.

You know people had documented that in coastal Alaska and British Columbia where wolves were hunting and killing spawning salmon and these really big salmon runs, but that's kind of categorically different than wolves catching spawning suckers in the spring in a little Minnesota creek, right.

So it was one of these sort of neat discoveries I would say that I don't think any biologists would be like no way I can't believe they do that, but it was neat to be able to say we were the first people to document this behavior and also catch it on video, which was cool, because that was the first time it's ever been documented.

So what we found is they wait in areas where there's sort of restricted water flow on a stream so the suckers have to come into these narrow sort of shallow little areas.

And often times the suckers will be splashing or something like that and the wolves just sit on the bank and they just catch them as they come through.

And some of these creeks that were, you know, that they're going up, you know, are only this deep, right, so like I mean the suckers are pretty vulnerable and the wolves find strategic spots to wait.

You know they're not waiting at the deep holes for the fish, they're waiting at the really shallow pinch points.

One of the other areas that we've seen wolves really target suckers at is they wait below beaver dams because these beaver dams hold back all the water.

So the suckers come up to spawn and then those dams kind of act as a barrier and then all the fish pile up underneath that dam and it's shallow and the wolves will sit there and they'll grab the fish there.

And so we've seen that.

So when we first documented wolves catching fish we thought that was, really we thought it was, really neat, but we thought this is probably pretty rare because no one else has seen this before, and you know, what are the odds that this is common.

But as time has gone on and since we studied more and more wolves, we've actually realized that this behavior is actually relatively common in our area.

We've had multiple wolves from different packs presumably wolves that are unrelated and don't know each other all catching fish in the spring and sort of figuring out how to do this it seems independently.

And so what we suspect is happening is that this is probably a widespread behavior across northern Minnesota and other places where there's fish.

But it's just really challenging to document because suckers are only running for a short period of time and so you need to have the, you need to be able to like know where wolves are doing this at the right time to actually document it, and you have to be in the field to know where to look.

And so we suspect that if other people let's say did our work in other places, they probably would reveal this happening in other spots because there's no reason to believe that, you know, our area is somehow unique, that we have this, you know, this unique population of wolves because our area is not a closed population.

Our wolves are traveling all over the place and other wolves are probably coming into our area as well.

So that was really just neat to show their adaptability and how wolves can actually figure out how to find these unique food sources to sort of make a living.

So that's one that's been really neat.

And then the blueberries is the other one that usually surprises people that wolves eat.

And that has been something that's been consistent since we started in 2015.

Virtually every wolf pack that we study eats blueberries in the summertime and that's because oftentimes blueberries are pretty abundant in our area.

And the blueberries become available in late summer and late summer is a really lean time for wolves.

And so what we suspect are berries are probably like a starvation food for wolves where it makes the wolves feel full cuz they can eat these berries and wolves can taste sweetness as well, so they probably taste good.

So the wolves probably eat these berries, they can fill their bellies so they feel full, and that probably slows starvation for them because their other prey during late summer is really challenging for them to catch and kill.

So it seems that they're probably going after the berries as sort of a substitute.

So instead of running around chasing after a deer, fawn, or something that, you know, you can't catch, you're better to just sit in a berry patch, don't move very much, don't burn a lot of calories, eat some free food, and just kind of wait it out until the prey becomes vulnerable again.

One of the challenges for us is that we don't get many observations of wolves actually chasing after deer.

You know we've gotten a couple trail camera videos where like a deer goes by and then a wolf is, you know, following after it or something like that, but we really don't know much beyond that, you know, so and that's something where we don't, you know, we have to do a lot of our, particularly in the summer, we make a lot of our inferences based on the GPS collar data and what we're seeing.

So there's a lot of sort of indirect inference.

There's not a lot of direct observations of their predation behavior.

So when it comes to say wolves hunting deer we really don't know, you know, presumably we can guess they're chasing after the deer, you know.

And there has been work in northern Minnesota by Dave Mech and other people where they've observed wolves during the winter time chasing deer and things like that.

We just don't have very many observations like that.

We do do work trying to understand wolf predation on deer fawns, and that's something we have been interested in trying to figure out how do they actually hunt and kill deer fawns, because fawns presumably are bedding down and not moving.

So wolves aren't chasing fawns necessarily until they're older, so how do wolves actually find these deer fawns, and so that's something we have done.

We've got a research paper we're working on right now that looks at how wolves are going about that and it's not going to tell us necessarily how are they like hunting them, but it will tell us how are they spending, where are wolves spending time, and how does that match up with where they're actually killing the fawns.

And what that work seems to suggest is wolves are using roads and trails and different things like this to get around their territories and that allows them to detect the fawns presumably because they're using scent for the most part.

Because if these fawns are sitting there immobile, you know, wolves aren't going to be able to see them.

But by running the roads and things like that they probably get scents that are sort of drifting over the trail and that allows them to locate, at least generally speaking, where a fawn is and then they can kind of key in on it.

But that's about the extent we get and so that's one of the challenges about the summers is you don't get the direct observation.

So you have to try to put all these little pieces together and try to make sense of the whole even when you can't observe it and that is what makes it frustrating and also really exciting because when you actually make sense, when something actually works out, you're like wow, I can't believe we actually figured that out, you know.

So it's sort of, but there's times where it's frustrating because you want to know, you know, how does this happen and you don't know and you'll never be able to watch it.

At the Wildlife Science Center we have about 110 wolves and we also have four coyotes and we have three black bears, four mountain lions, two bobcats, a lynx, multiple gray fox and red fox.

So we have all the Minnesota cats and all the Minnesota dogs, wild dogs, so it's pretty fun.

We also have a handful of animals that are not native to Minnesota.

We have Mexican grey wolves which are a part of a captive breeding and reintroduction project.

We also have red wolves, which are also an endangered species from the US.

And interestingly that's the real true North American wolf.

That is the wolf that evolved on the continent.

The grey wolf evolved in Eastern Europe and crossed the Bering land bridge to get to North America.

So, we have the true Minnesota, or true North American wolf here so.

We're located in Stacy, Minnesota.

It's only about 40 minutes north of the Twin Cities.

It's very easy to access.

It's freeway and we're six miles off the freeway, so it's very easy to access, and we're open several times a week just for general drop-in tours.

Or we have any number of private opportunities for people to come and set up anything they want: bonfires, campfires, school programs, any number of different things that you can do to enjoy it.

So the Wildlife Science Center, we actually created after this federal project called The Wolf Project stopped being funded.

I started when it was federal and I worked for five years for the federal government and then when the federal money dried up no one wanted to take it over and I did not want to euthanize the 40 wolves because I really liked the idea of these wolves contributing to things.

I mean they were animals that were taken from the wild for various reasons: killing livestock, killing dogs or whatever.

But they were contributing back to information that was helping endangered species and other wolves.

Actually some of the stuff we've been doing looking at minimizing the impact that wolves have on livestock we've done some non-lethal work looking at ways to mitigate that impact.

I felt like we wanted to continue that work and I also wanted to open the doors for education because I wanted people to get a chance to see them, to talk about them in a pragmatic way and see them up close.

Because that especially, to a child, it's hugely impactful when you see them and you hear them and you watch them.

You get a completely different feel for them.

They definitely have expanded their range.

But I think what happens when wolves expand their range into areas that are not appropriate for them it's a short-lived process.

So, for example, the wolves around Cedar Creek, they won't ever get to be a substantial population down this far because they can't stay out of trouble.

They're these little ma and pa hobby farm operations that are around and they impact them and so they eat a cow here a cow there, a dog here a dog there, and there's just not that much space for them.

So then they get removed because of that.

So I think we're seeing that in Clay County, in the western part of of Minnesota, where they move out of the woods and into farmland and they get into trouble right away and so then they're controlled that way because of the loss.

So I think, yes we're seeing wolves in some different areas, but that's often times in response to food pressure, that the deer population slips a little, wolves try, have to try that much harder to find enough food, and so you see some of this range expansion.

But it isn't, doesn't seem to be really, a big deal for wolves.

I mean we had this pocket of wolves at Camp Ripley and they're doing well, but almost nothing in between around Camp Ripley.

So I think there are places where wolves can live and should live and there are places where wolves just can't.

When you think about managing wolves we really don't manage wolves.

I mean this is a species that does just fine.

They follow deer populations, they don't control the deer populations, they follow the deer populations.

They're pretty self-limiting.

They kill each other, the hard winters are hard on deer and then they're hard on wolves, and it's just it's I really think this is an animal we really just don't need to worry much about.

It's far more of a social caring capacity than a biological caring capacity that we get hit with and the closer you get to the Cities the more amorous people feel about wolves, and that really flies in the face of the folks that live in and amongst wolves and have them impacting their lives.

And I think that's where the problem lies is that this is not about management, it's about people's opinions and feelings about this animal.

I mean nobody feels that way about black bears that much and nobody feels that way about any other species.

It's really unique to the wolf that people love it so much and hate it so much and that's been a mystery to me for many years.

I think it's a combination of modeling and counting and I think a number of different things that they work together on.

I'm very impressed with the way they manage to, and it's not a, it's a survey not an actual census, so it's not, you don't count every single nose.

But they have a very good idea of how many wolves are out there give or take and so I think they have a good idea.

And it's not just, they certainly don't just take the public's input.

They also, agencies that work directly with them, wildlife services, is they're on the ground and they see wolves face to face so they have a very good idea of when populations flux.

So I do actually think that the DNR has a very good idea of how many wolves are on the ground and I know that nobody believes that but I really do think they do.

We have continued research and we have partnered with the Mexican Wolf SSP and a lot of our research looking at ways to increase breeding success for this very endangered species, ways to temporarily stop breeding just so that you don't have wolves mating that are littermates and you don't want that.

So, for example, when you have, space is a premium for any of these endangered species.

We volunteer to have Mexican wolves here.

We have two enclosures of them.

There's no money for that and we don't get money for it.

We just get that's part of our mission, our conservation mission.

So the space is limited for these animals.

So often times, even though the reintroduction might call for any number of litters, there isn't space for that to happen.

So sometimes wolves are housed as littermates and they already are so highly inbred you do not want littermates breeding.

So we want to be able to prevent that temporarily until the animals are paired with appropriate pairs and that's decided by a committee.

And they look at coefficiency of relatedness and representation in the the population to make those decisions.

And then, of course, space, is there space for these animals.

So we have two groups of Mexican wolves and neither of those groups are breeding groups so that's something that we agreed to.

I mean some cooperators really insist on having puppies.

We'll do whatever the SSP needs us to do.

So the re-evaluation is going to take a lawsuit.

It's going to, that's what has to happen.

Yeah it's going to take a lawsuit to make that happen and it's a frustrating process.

If you look at the letters of The Endangered Species Act, wolves were put on that list while their numbers were at risk and they're not anymore.

So based on whether if a state has an appropriate management plan and the population is sustainable or above above target and we're way above target.

The target for reintroduction or taking off the list was 12 to 1500 wolves in Minnesota and then 100 wolves in states next door to us.

So we've well far exceeded that in Wisconsin, far exceeded that in Michigan.

And so we, and we have around 3,000 wolves in Minnesota, so we definitely the population is in a place where we can take them off the endangered species list without concern assuming the states have an appropriate management plan in place.

And Minnesota has a very appropriate management plan in place and it's a very inclusive plan.

It took into consideration tribal interests and folks that aren't interested in harvest, so it was a very comprehensive effort to make a plan that would have the best interests of everyone possible and to ensure the continued survival of the wolf in Minnesota.

And there are emergency plans in place should the population slip below 1500 animals.

So it was a very, very thoughtful plan and I supported taking them off the endangered species list.

One of the frustrating things is that these animal , the lawsuits take place in venues that have nothing to do with Minnesota, so, and that's where it's happened pretty regularly.

They go to some Eastern judge that doesn't really know the science behind what's going on and just has a snippet of information about the politics and that is where these decisions are made instead of in the science room which is where they really belong so.

And it's there isn't any way to reach people across this divide.

People either love wolves or they don't, and the wolf lovers are just as stubborn as the wolf haters so there's a chasm in between that's very difficult to bridge.

One of the questions, of course, is the hunting and trapping.

It's not that we have to hunt wolves, but we can, the population can tolerate public harvest.

And as for trapping, trapping is what wildlife biologists use to catch them to put radio collars on.

So if you're walking up with a tranquilizer is it that different than waking up with a firearm and dispatching the wolf.

Not to the wolf, I imagine, being caught in a trap is caught in a trap, they don't like it either way.

But it isn't something that should be a deal killer.

It's if people are taking them that manner.

So I'm not a predator hunter, I don't pursue predators but certainly there's no issue with pursuing predators if their population can sustain it and wolves certainly can.

In Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan there's very good folks that work in the US Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services and those are people that are trained to respond to wolf loss.

It's not a revenge killing.

For example, in the town of Ely there was a gentleman that had a couple of pet sheep in the backyard and the wolves got them and there's no more potential for loss so no wolves were taken.

So it's just you got your pet sheep and they got taken.

So in dog loss in Minnesota, wolves are generally not pursued because it's the responsibility of the dog owner to manage the dogs.

So wildlife services will respond, there are rules in place, and they will assess whether or not it was actually wolves that made the impact.

And unfortunately there's no payment for disappeared calves, and you can certainly imagine that a wolf can carry off an entire calf without problems.

It's a pretty tight-knit group, as you imply and that's actually nationwide.

I mean I know a lot of folks across the country, back in the federal days, in order to work with wolves you came through our organization because we drug wolves once a week.

And you came.

We had people from every imaginable project come through and learn how to drug them, learn how to take blood samples from us when we were there, including Isle Royale folks, Yellowstone, all these people came through and did that.

So I know a lot of these people across the country, we're aging a little bit here, so some of the younger generations I don't necessarily know, but it's a fairly small tight-knit group of people so.

And the folks that do this professionally, definitely.

There, when it you get the outer circle of people that just love wolves that's an enormous kind of group of folks and their backgrounds vary and their motives vary.

Sometimes it's crazy who will show up to a wolf meeting.

So, for example, like a deer meeting you don't get deer lovers or people that love deer more than or wear deer earrings or deer t-shirts or I mean it's just not and so that passion is a little tough to take sometimes.

I mean it's a fairly easy subject, wolves are fairly easy and they've been studied so exhaustively.

I just think we just need to have some pragmatic thinking going into this whole thing and and let's be honest.

We don't have to hunt wolves, we don't have to hunt ducks, we don't have to hunt deer.

We don't want to be overrun.

Well, the places we have to hunt deer, we can't, in the urban areas.

So, exactly, yeah.

So when it came to the wolf hunt this year one of the things that I felt like we could do differently with the plan is provide opportunities for hunting where livestock loss is heaviest.

And that really didn't happen in the last hunt, they were, most of the places where wolves were taken, was public land, and so there wasn't any real emphasis to pairing livestock loss.

And I think a lot of producers would be open to that, to have folks hunt their property or around their property and take wolves and it would save federal dollars and it would certainly sit better with some of the folks that don't want a wolf hunt.

So it felt like a win-win.

And those conversations were happening because the wolf hunt wasn't going to happen this year anyway.

But I thought that was a very positive direction to go.

And now people are mad again.

The research being done by the University of Minnesota through the Voyageur Wolf Project and work being done at the Wildlife Science Center is providing much more information and detail about how wolves live and the many challenges they face.

The wolf population in Minnesota has shown signs of recovery, although the species still face conservation challenges including habitat fragmentation, human wildlife conflicts and ongoing management consideration.

Today wolves are an iconic symbol of Minnesota's wilderness and play a vital role in the state's ecosystem, contributing to the overall health and biodiversity of the region.

While they are loved by many and despised by others they continue to make parts of Minnesota their home.