Anderson: Minnesota researcher roamed the Arctic with curious wolves unafraid

Imagine that you could travel back in time, to before Minnesota was settled.

In this scenario, you’re an eagle, carving huge circles against a cobalt sky, riding a midday’s thermals, while below, grazing, are bison and elk, also prairie chickens, wild turkeys and coyotes, with ducks preening on glassy ponds.

Bracketing these are fields of purple coneflower, butterfly weed, prairie flox and other native wildflowers, flourishing in a kaleidoscope of colors, while farther north, lying near their dens, sunning, are wolves.

Soon, some of the wolves trot into the near distance, then farther still, hunting as they do each day, for themselves, yes, but also for the mother wolf and pups that stay behind.

Today, such scenes must be imagined because few places in the world exist where wild critters roam unencumbered by people and their stuff — their towns, homes, yards, roads, pets and livestock.

Few places except Ellesmere Island in Canada’s High Arctic.

It’s on Ellesmere, a frozen hunk of rock roughly the size of Minnesota, that wolves — white wolves — alternately scamper playfully near their dens, howl to advertise their territorial boundaries and gather robustly with tails wagging before dispersing on a mission as old as time:

To kill for survival.

“Ellesmere is the only place in the world we know of where wolves and their prey co-exist as they have for eons,” said Dave Mech, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and University of Minnesota professor.

Mech, 88, has spent a lifetime studying wolves, much of it while peering down on the wild canines from two-seater airplanes, picking through wolf scat looking for beaver hair, hiking through impenetrable forests following Canis lupus tracks, or highlighting spots on maps where wolves killed a deer or dragged down a Hereford calf.

Ellesmere was relief from all of that.

Here was a place, Mech would learn, where wolves are unaffected by modern civilization; where they have virtually no interaction with people, and where they were more curious about Mech’s presence than fearful.

“I could watch a den from as close as 50 feet,” Mech said. “I could even get that close to them when they hunted and killed muskoxen.”

Mech’s decades-long study of Ellesmere’s wolves are recounted in a new book he co-authored with colleagues Morgan Anderson and H. Dean Cluff.

Titled, “The Ellesmere Wolves. Behavior and Ecology in the High Arctic,” the book (University of Chicago Press. 288 pages. $32) bears the multitudinous citations typical of academic tomes. But it’s also a page turner, and full of surprises, including one detailing how Mech first arrived on Ellesmere.

“It was 1986,” he said. “The photographer Jim Brandenburg, who just recently died, had an assignment from National Geographic at the time to photograph Will Steger and his crew as they traveled to the North Pole. Ellesmere is relatively close to that area, and National Geographic wanted Jim to do a photo story about the island while he was in the area doing the Steger story. But Jim was a photographer, not a writer. So he suggested to me, and to National Geographic, that I accompany him to write a story to go with his photographs, and I got the assignment.”

Ellesmere is so far from civilization that summer trips to it via infrequent flights to its weather station must be booked the previous fall. Once on the island, Brandenburg and Mech had ATVs for their travels and a helicopter so they could view the island from the air, all courtesy of National Geographic.

“The value of human tolerant wolves to the photographer as well as the ability to get close to my subject meshed precisely with my needs to study the interactions between individual wolves and between the adult and pups,” Mech writes in ”The Ellesmere Wolves." “Thus, in terms of how far from the den we should camp and how best to interact with the wolves, we found ourselves in total agreement on responding to what potentially would be a lifetime opportunity for both.”

Surprised by the wolves’ acceptance of him and those who accompanied him — Mech always traveled with a companion or fellow researcher in case of an accident or health incident— he learned that Ellesmere’s wolves also were tolerant of him riding an ATV, so long as he stayed on it.

Only if Mech dismounted the machine did the animals grow wary. Conversely, if he dropped a piece of clothing or another object while on the machine a wolf or wolves might approach to abscond and later play with whatever had fallen.

Especially exciting for Mech was the wolves’ tolerance of him when he tagged long on their hunts to find muskoxen or hares to kill. More rarely, they pursued caribou or seals.

“The wolves would leave a den walking at approximately 4 or 5 miles an hour, and might travel 30 miles before they found something to kill,” Mech said. “With muskoxen, a pack often focused on calves. But sometimes they’d take down an adult. A single wolf can kill an adult muskoxen, but it might take a day or multiple days.”

Devouring as much as 22 pounds of meat at a kill site, a wolf is capable of regurgitating that amount, or nearly so, to provide for a nursing mother and her pups.

En route back to a den, Ellesmere wolves pick up the pace, trotting at 9 or 10 mph.

“[We] observed at the den for 168 continuous hours from July 12 to 18, 1988, when the pups were an estimated seven weeks old and still nursing,” Mech writes. “We saw a total of 34 adult wolf return, or about one wolf return per five hours on average. The wolves delivered food during 80% of their arrivals.”

Spending about a month every summer, for two decades, camped in a tent in the far north might be a heavy lift for some people.

But for Mech and his colleagues, the adventures were a rare opportunity to research wolves up close and personal.

Gained in the process was a respite from the many conflicts wolves inspire in places such as Minnesota, whose present-day inhabitants include not only wolves, but people and their stuff — their towns, homes, yards, roads, pets and livestock.

“The Ellesmere wolves — way off there near the end of the Earth — should long be able to continue their lives as natural as can be," Mech writes, “wild and free of human wrath.”