Wolves Trapped and Collared in Central Idaho

Last fall, Idaho Department of Fish and Game wolf biologist Michael Lucid picked up a mortality signal on the only radio-collared member of the Timberline wolf pack in the mountains north of Boise. When he tracked it down, instead of the expected dead wolf, "we found that the other animals in the pack had actually chewed the collar off," he said. In late May, Lucid set out traps along several roads north of Idaho City where he found fresh wolf tracks and scat to catch and radio-collar other members of the pack to replace the collar. "We try and keep two collars on every pack in the state," Lucid said. "And this pack has been off the air for about six or seven months now." On Wednesday, May 24, he trapped two healthy males about one to two years old, grey and weighing about 80 pounds each. Both were caught in roadside traps baited with dog food and wolf scat. Sunrise came late to the road above the creek. Here the land rises to one side of the road and drops sharply down to the creek on the other. The area gets a lot of human use, and several wolves in the pack have been killed illegally, Lucid said. Lucid and biologist Steve Nadeau, Fish and Game's large carnivore coordinator, stopped when they came upon a wolf trap that had been sprung-one of eight traps set three days earlier along the road where Lucid had seen wolf tracks and scat. The trap, which had been buried just under the dirt at the side of the road, was attached to an 8-foot drag chain with a double pronged hook at the end. The trail left by the hook showed clearly in the soft morning light, and led the biologists to a trapped wolf a couple of hundred yards up the dirt road. On their way back to the truck to get their gear, the two were nearly run down by a pair of male elk at a full gallop. They wondered what had spooked the elk. "On our way back, just right around the corner, two bull elk came running down the road toward us and they were actually close enough that we could have reached out and touched them," Nadeau said. "We thought maybe they had just caught wind of the wolf in the trap." Returning to the trapped wolf, Lucid distracted it with a metal catch-pole while Nadeau tranquilized it with a syringe attached to the end of a 6-foot fiberglass pole. Once the tranquilizer took effect they freed him from the trap, carried him down to the road and tied on a blindfold. "We've got an eye cover on him here to keep him calm," Lucid said, "and to keep his eyes from being hurt from the sunlight." They examined, ear-tagged and fitted the sedated wolf with a new radio collar. After administering an antidote, Lucid and Nadeau watched as the animal woke up to make sure it was not hurt. The wolf staggered drunkenly before getting his legs under him and disappearing in the timber on the hillside above the road. Farther up Beaver Creek, where snow drifts still covered parts of the road and the sun played hide and seek with puffy cumulus clouds, they found a second wolf in a trap. It got the same treatment. First Lucid removed a short piece of stick caught in the roof of the wolf's mouth. Trapped wolves often try to bite at the trap and snap at sticks. If a piece of wood gets caught in their mouths, they could starve to death after their release. Nadeau attached an ear tag in the hole from a DNA sample plug. Lucid fitted a new radio collar. When they finished, he administered the antidote, and they watched while the wolf recovered. On their way back out, Nadeau and Lucid, their work done, learned what had spooked the elk they had encountered earlier. The story was written clearly in the surface of the dirt road. When they stopped to pull up an unsprung wolf trap they found two sets of elk tracks, deep imprints of splayed hooves, paralleled by a set of clear paw prints, claws digging in, of a wolf in apparent pursuit. Nadeau and Lucid had been in the middle of the wolf pack earlier that morning. "We had a wolf in this trap, a wolf in the trap up the road, and there were at least one or two other wolves in between the two trapped wolves," Nadeau said. "And this one right here was evidently chasing the two elk we had seen in the road." Nadeau pointed to the tracks in the road. "If you look right here you can see the track of the wolf," he said. "One, two, three, four claws and the heel pad, and then the track of the bull elk running." The wolf tracks veered off about 50 to 100 feet short of the two biologists; the elk ran right past them. They apparently had interrupted the wolf's hunt. The newly radio-collared wolves will help Fish and Game biologists track wolf packs and to monitor their activities. And the collars may lead Lucid to the pack's den or a rendezvous site. "I do a telemetry flight every month, so I'll get a location from the air," Lucid said. "And hopefully these radio collars will lead me to their pups and let me count how many pups that they have and determine if this pack has reproduced this year." As of June 9, the two captured wolves were alive and well, and had returned to their pack, Lucid said. He had located the pack's den site and counted three new pups. Idaho has 59 documented wolf packs and between 500 and 600 wolves. They have thrived in Idaho's rugged backcountry since their reintroduction in 1995 and 1996. Earlier this year, Idaho took over the day-to-day management of wolves, still protected under the Endangered Species Act.