Once bear baiting starts in mid-August, bear bait piles can become rendezvous sites for wolf packs—areas where the pups hang out and the adults come to and from on a regular basis. Bait piles are likely used as rendezvous sites because the pups and adults can remain near a large

We set this trail camera on a remote wildlife trail near a beaver pond, and here are the highlights from the past year or so! . Notably, we captured many more videos of wolves, bears, deer, snowshoes hares, and more but condensed it here to the best footage captured. Of course,

What do you want to know?.

Bear baiting season in Minnesota begins today, and that means within the next few days, wolves will find many bait piles and spend considerable time at them. For instance, thus far on our project, we have intensively studied the predation/foraging behavior of 53 collared wolves

A good example of how different the howling of pups and adults can be at this time of year. These videos were taken by the same camera at a Half-Moon Pack rendezvous site a few years ago. The first portion of the video shows all the pups at the site howling and there are no

Here is a map that hopefully helps folks visualize things. The white outline in the map is the boundary of Voyageurs National Park. The different color polygons are pack territories. The yellow pins are observations of the Blackstone pack and we connected observations that

On New Year’s Day, we captured this footage of the Blackstone Pack, a large, predominantly Canadian Pack, trespassing deep into the Listening Point Pack territory on the Kabetogama Peninsula. The Blackstone Pack was a large pack at the start of early winter as we had several

Anyway, as anticipated, this young wolf remained in the GVE for about a week after we collared it and then hit the road again, traveling east through the Northwoods of Minnesota near the Echo Trail. We will be very interested to see where his wandering takes him!

All this to say, black wolves are quite rare in our area. Obviously, there are parts of North America where black wolves are quite common, and even parts of Minnesota where black wolves seem to be a bit more prevalent than our area.

Although we did document a single black lone wolf wandering through the area for a few days this past winter. This could be the same wolf we just collared or a different black wolf…hard to tell.

When we collared this wolf, we were 99% sure it was a lone wolf not affiliated with a pack in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem (our study area). This past winter, there were no black wolves in the 19 packs in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem. In fact, there has not been a black

We recently collared this black wolf—the first black wolf we have collared in our 11 years of research. For perspective, we have collared 119 wolves during this period, meaning 0.8% of all wolves we have collared have been black.

Another collection of neat, rarely seen moments from the Northwoods of Minnesota! I.e., this is “Part II” of the highlights from our ~350 cameras deployed in the field last summer. Check out our last post for Part 1!. Will be curious to hear what folks think is the best clip…the

A collection of neat, rarely seen moments from the Northwoods of Minnesota! That is, these are some highlights from our ~350 cameras deployed in the field last summer. Will be curious to hear what folks think is the ‘best’ clip…always hard for us to decide. Big thanks to the

And if none of those tips are helpful, commenter Matt Deitner shared some top-notch, expert advice yesterday:. Review "the previous 30 seconds of footage to see if it's chasing a beaver or a roadrunner”.

That is not something we really look at when trying to tell them apart because there is relatively little difference there (and tail shape/color can vary between wolf pups and coyote pup). The best things for proper ID are the physical characteristics of the face/head, body

This isn’t very scientific but wolf pups just look more like dopey adolescents to us, stuck between a cute young pup and a lanky adult, than coyote pups in July which look more like dainty pups with huge ears and slender faces and bodies. Very scientific, we know!. Some folks in

Wolf pups have much blockier faces than coyote pups, with muzzles that are much wider/more robust than a coyote pups. Coyote pups have much narrower, pointed muzzles. Additionally, wolf pups have much larger feet at 3 months than coyote pups do, as these pictures illustrate. And

The differences in appearance between coyote pups and wolf pups in mid-July when each are roughly 3ish months old. The mysterious pup from yesterday's post was a coyote pup. The easiest way to distinguish a coyote pup from a wolf pup, in our opinion, is the face/skull.

Wolf or coyote pup? Image taken on July 13 in middle of the Biondich Pack. We know the answer so not asking for assistance but rather figured it would be a fun little test for folks who like to test their canid ID skills.