A collared male wolf from the Bow Valley went on an impressive two-week walkabout inside and outside the protected boundaries of Banff National Park – then came right back home again.
Data from a GPS collar on a wolf from the Fairholme pack shows he travelled almost 500 kilometres in 13 days in March, travelling from the park into the Ghost River area and as far north as the Brazeau River in the foothills before eventually turning around.
Travelling an average of 37 kilometres a day during his two-week sojourn, this young wolf, known as 1505, spent much of his time outside of the protected boundaries of Banff National Park, running the risk of being trapped and killed on provincial lands.
“I thought he was just going to keep on going, but he flipped and turned around and came right back,” said Jesse Whittington, a Parks Canada wildlife biologist with Banff National Park.
“I don’t know why he came back, but I am wondering if he was hungry and he didn’t find much to eat and just decided to come back to the Fairholme where there is a lot of prey.”
The dispersal of individual wolves allows for diversity in packs and the formation of new packs. Lone wolves travel travel great distances looking for a new pack to join, or perhaps a lone wolf to mate with and establish a new pack.
When there’s a shortage of prey in a pack’s territory, a wolf may decide to leave the pack and travel to other territories in search of food. A subordinate wolf may also choose to leave in search of another pack in which it would have better breeding status.
Perhaps the most famous local wolf to travel such long distances was Pluie, a five-year-old female wolf fitted with a radio collar and satellite transmitter in Kananaskis Country’s Peter Lougheed Provincial Park in 1991.
For two years, Pluie’s signal was tracked as she traveled across a 100,000 square kilometre area. She moved through Banff into British Columbia, across the U.S. border through Glacier National Park, on to Idaho and then into Washington state before heading north again to B.C.
Her collar stopped working in 1993, and then two years later a hunter near Invermere, B.C., shot Pluie and her mate, along with their three pups.
Another famous wolf from the Bow Valley known as Skoki travelled to Kananaskis Country where he found a mate, formed his own pack, and fathered at least one litter of pups. But then his GPS collar fell off and researchers lost track of him a few years ago.
Whittington said wolves frequently disperse more than 300 kilometres from their home range, but in his experience he has not known a wolf in this area to do what 1505 did and return home to the pack after travelling so far.
“I know wolves are travellers, but it’s always amazing to see how far and how fast they travel,” he said.
“I was somewhat surprised this wolf returned. I haven’t seen that that much before.”
GPS collars have been fitted on six wolves in Banff National Park – two from each of the Bow Valley pack, Fairholme pack and Cascade-Panther pack. They were captured and collared earlier this winter and information is being used for several research projects.
Based on GPS data, Whittington said he believes all three wolf packs are currently denning, noting wolves in Banff typically den in the middle of April and pups would be about three weeks old.
“We’re fairly certain wolves are denning on Bow Valley Parkway, the Fairholme bench and in the Panther Valley,” he said.
“We see from the GPS data that wolves are travelling to and from the den, going out to predation sites and carrying food back.”
Parks Canada does not conduct den surveys so as not to disturb the wolves during this sensitive time, but there are usually anywhere from three to six pups observed when first spotted by members of the public or photographed on remote cameras.
“We’ll get get an estimate of how many pups the wolves had based on public observations along roads, as well as remote cameras,” said Whittington.
All the wolves in a pack help take care of the pups. When the pups are very small, other pack members bring food to the mother so she does not have to leave the den. When the pups are a little bigger, pack members bring them food, play with them and even babysit.
Whittington said when pups are a couple of months old, they leave the den and start using rendezvous sites, essentially meeting places where wolves gather to sleep, play and just hang out.
He said wolves move the pups to rendezvous sites and to higher elevations about July.
“After a while, the den gets to be quite stinky and can attract things like grizzly bears, so wolves often move to rendezvous sites, like a meadow with running water close by, where they like to hang out,” he said.
Whittington said young ones won’t start hunting with the pack until they’re about seven or eight months old.
“The pups aren’t very useful hunters until they’re older and, through summer and fall, they are just trying to learn to hunt from their parents,” said Whittington.
Before denning, the Bow Valley pack and Fairholme pack were both thought to have five members each, while the numbers in the Cascade-Panther wolf pack are a little more uncertain, but there were at least five earlier this winter.
Unlike the Bow Valley and Fairholme packs, which predominantly travelled in the valley bottoms this winter, GPS data shows the Cascade-Panther pack spent a lot of time travelling on wind swept ridges and slopes.
“That’s really not surprising,” said Whittington. “For anyone who has skied in the backcountry in the middle of winter, they know travelling the valley bottoms can be very difficult.”
Whittington said the Fairholme pack spends most of its time inside Banff National Park, though it made a number of excursions into the Ghost region, to Red Deer River, and close to Mountain Aire Lodge near Sundre.
“We’ve never had a GPS collar on the Fairholme pack before, but I’ve always suspected they’ve travelled out into the Ghost,” he said, noting they frequently travel through Carrot Creek to connect the Fairholme benchlands to the Minnewanka and Ghost areas.
“It’s been really neat to see how frequently they travel out there and how they’re getting there.”
As for the pack that lives in the heart of the Bow Valley, GPS data shows those wolves spent much of their time this winter between Banff and Lake Louise. This well-known pack is regularly seen, including during a dramatic hunt on the train overpass near Banff.
“I expect, come summer time, they will move up to higher elevations, either north of Lake Louise or in the Egypt Lake area,” said Whittington.
Tracking the movements of these wolves aims to provide information on a host of research projects, including how wolves in the Bow Valley are responding to a mandatory nighttime closure of Bow Valley Parkway each spring and how they use wildlife corridors.
Parks Canada is also trying to get a better handle on wolf use in historical caribou range in Banff’s backcountry. As part of a plan to reintroduce caribou, researchers want to put caribou where they won’t be heavily preyed on by wolves to ensure their best chance of survival.
They also want to get a better idea of the diet of the individual wolf pack packs, which seems to be primarily deer these days compared to when elk made up most of their diet 15 to 20 years ago.
“We’re ramping up our work to check all GPS clusters from winter and we’ll be able to see where wolves spent several days in once place and we can go check those sites and look for signs of predation,” said Whittington.
