I don’t know if there’s another animal that has been simultaneously reviled and admired like wolves. We have a primal fear of them—their howls can make the bravest among us pick up their pace. But wolves also occupy a unique place in many cultural myths representing family, loyalty, and intelligence. In this episode, I talk with conservation biologist Matt Fox about those contradictions and much more. Fox describes the two species that are native to the Mississippi Valley—red and gray wolves—and how they’re doing today, then we get into their life cycles, myths about their behavior, and how they deeply influence the ecosystems in which they live. We also talk about our conflicting and troubled relationships with wolves and what we may be able to do to turn that around.
In the Mississippi Minute, I mention two places where you can see and learn about wolves up close and personal, the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, and the Endangered Wolf Center near St. Louis, Missouri.
Show Notes
Look below for photos of red and gray wolves.
Video about how wolves changed Yellowstone National Park’s ecology
**NOTE: I should have known better. If a story seems too good to be true, it probably is. The video about wolves single-handedly remaking Yellowstone seems to be more fairy tale than reality. This article offers a good critique.
Support the Show
If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider showing your support by making a one-time contribution or by supporting as a regular contributor through Patreon. Every dollar you contribute makes it possible for me to continue sharing stories about America’s Greatest River.
Don’t want to deal with Patreon? No worries. You can show some love by buying me a coffee (which I drink a lot of!). Just click on the link below.
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
wolves, carnivores, coyotes, gray wolves, animals, system, elk, working, hunt, organisms, talk, pack, years, population, ecosystem, predator, love, river, podcast, killed
SPEAKERS
Matt Fox, Dean Klinkenberg
Matt Fox 00:00
Think about the tendrils of that wolf’s interaction stretching completely throughout the system in order to make that possible. It is incredible the amount of power that reintroducing a large carnivore has to fix an ecosystem which has been damaged or degraded by us.
Dean Klinkenberg 00:42
Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg. And I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.
Dean Klinkenberg 01:13
Welcome to Episode 29 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. Well, recently I did an episode on cafe connections. On how important coffee shops in particular have been to me personally. So it’s kind of fun, maybe slightly ironic, that in this episode the guest is somebody that I know from one of those third places. Matt Fox is somebody I’ve known for several years as our paths have crossed repeatedly in coffee shops and dive bars in our neighborhood. And what a treat it was to finally have a chance to sit down and talk with him at length. He has an extensive background in conservation biology and has done a lot of work on the ground. A lot of different projects around the world. It’s just a very impressive range of experiences that he has, and he has so much knowledge at the tip of his fingers. I suppose we could probably do several hours worth of episodes just giving me a chance to pick his brain about what he knows about different aspects of ecology and conservation. And we still wouldn’t get anywhere close to the depth of his knowledge. But this episode is about wolves. I asked him to come on and talk about one of the areas that I know he’s especially passionate about. He’s interested in top carnivores, wolves in particular. So in this episode, we talked about the different species of wolves that are native to places along the Mississippi Valley, red and gray wolves. We talk a little bit about the kinds of habitats they tend to prefer and their lifecycles. Some of the myths that we have about them, including pack behaviors and myths about hierarchies, how they have this remarkable effect to remake ecosystems, and some of the fears that we have about wolves and where that might come from. I think you’ll find this is some great content. I learned a lot about wolves and I think you will too. In our discussion, we mentioned a video about Yellowstone National Park and how the reintroduction of wolves there reshaped much of that ecosystem. It’s fascinating. So I will post a link to that in the show notes as well as a few other things. As always, thanks to those of you who show me some love through Patreon. Your ongoing support keeps this podcast alive. I am deeply appreciative. And thanks to those of you who have been showing me some love lately by buying me a coffee. Again, I appreciate that very much. And I drink a lot of coffee. So thank you for giving me the caffeine and the energy to keep this podcast alive too. So now let’s get on to the interview.
Dean Klinkenberg 03:58
Matt Fox is a conservation biologist with a specialty in carnivores. He’s worked at the Endangered Wolf Center in St. Louis and has held other conservation jobs around the world. He’s also worked as a river guide for trips on the Mississippi with Big Muddy Adventures in St. Louis. And as a safari guide for two years in South Africa. One of the things that I love about your background, Matt, is the hands on experience. So much of your your knowledge comes from being in the field rather than just from books. I’m excited to pick your brain and hear about all that and see what we can learn about wolves and top predators today. So welcome to the podcast.
Matt Fox 04:36
Thank you so much Dean. And I’m very excited to be here.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:39
Well, let’s kind of start with the basics. And tell me a little bit about how you got interested in conservation biology in the first place.
Matt Fox 04:46
I mean, I think the short answer is that I’ve always been interested in conservation biology. Like I’ve told you before, from a very early age I was out there crawling around catching wildlife. Catching snakes, catching reptiles, trying to catch crocodiles or alligators because I was down in southern Texas in the Houston area. Yeah, it’s been a plague on my parents mental health, the constant chasing me around hoping I don’t get killed by some feral beasts somewhere.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:18
So I want to hear about this chasing down alligator thing.
Matt Fox 05:21
Oh, yeah, yeah, we had a bayou right next to my house in Houston called Armand Bayou. And I would routinely, when they were not paying attention, climb over the fence to get close to the alligator pools.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:32
So yeah, I’m sure your parents were thrilled with that.
Matt Fox 05:35
Oh, they loved it. They supported me in my journey to being a wildlife biologist in every way, which is surprising, given so many scares that I gave them as a child.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:45
Right. Now we’ve talked about before, your parents weren’t exactly great outdoors people themselves. You didn’t pick up this interest in the outdoors and conservation from the work your parents were doing.
Matt Fox 05:56
No, this this was completely out of my own crazy brain. My Dad actually worked, when we were down in Houston, with NASA. He was working in mission control on scheduling and working on some of their robotics projects, like the Canadarm. And my Mom is and was a lawyer and a judge. So both very indoors people.
Dean Klinkenberg 06:19
Yeah, absolutely. So what was the first job that you had in the conservation world?
Matt Fox 06:24
Yeah. If you don’t count catching snakes and letting them go in my parents kitchen, my first job was working at a wildlife rescue center. And I came to the door brimming with energy for conservation. My first chance as I saw it, to make a real difference in the lives of some threatened wildlife. And I ended up taking over as the possum keeper for this rescue center, which was so much fun. Possums are fascinating organisms.
Dean Klinkenberg 06:53
Right. Another episode, some other time we’ll get into possums a little bit. What was your job with the possums? What was your responsibility?
Matt Fox 07:02
Yeah, so care of the possums kind of nebulously in an animal care standpoint. So, cleaning their enclosures, feeding them, assessing them for release capacity when they were getting to that point. Caring for their injuries even, because animals would often come in during the winter with frostbite. Possums are very poorly adapted to these colder conditions here in Missouri.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:26
Right? So you have a strong interest in carnivores. Tell me a little bit about why carnivores struck your interest so much?
Matt Fox 07:36
That is an awesome question. And like I’ve told you in the past, carnivores are the ecosystem. So as humans, we go into systems, and we’ve disturbed a lot of them. And we do our best to try to fix our errors and restore the resiliency in these systems. Well, carnivores do that like their life depends on it. Because it actually does. So if a system is out of balance, carnivores are the first ones to feel that issue. And the first ones to die because of it. The entire system is their responsibility because they draw nutrients out of the system at the highest level. For a carnivore to survive, its prey species have to be thriving. And so it is in the best interest of the carnivore always to do its work in balancing that system. Otherwise, they’ll go extinct. And Mother Nature does not make mistakes. If something’s here, it’s working well.
Dean Klinkenberg 08:36
So is it fair to call them habitat managers?
Matt Fox 08:39
Yeah, habitat manager would probably be their official job title.
Dean Klinkenberg 08:43
I invited you on really to talk specifically about wolves. So let’s kind of get into that a little bit. And as this is the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast, tell me what wolves were native to the places along the Mississippi River Basin.
Matt Fox 09:00
So gray wolves were native most of the way throughout the United States, moving down into the southeast, just barely moving across the Missouri River. So imagine that is kind of a nebulous boundary between the separation of wolves. They did move all the way down, in certain subspecies, into the desert Southwest and even into Mexico. But on the East Coast, there was competition. And that competition was the red wolf. So Missouri, where we are here right now is actually one of the only places not just in the United States, but the entire world, which had two species of wolves living in it. It had the grey wolves in the north, which are kind of like the grandma’s ghost story about the big bad wolf in the woods. Kind of imagine that shape and size, although they’re almost completely innocuous to human beings. But the red wolf is completely different. The red wolf is a beautiful organism. It’s so much more, to use a biology term, gracile – which is long and thin and rangier than the gray wolf. They have shorter fur, and beautiful colorations ranging everywhere from a deep red to kind of an auburn to a shining gold. So they’re beautiful to look at, very elusive, incredibly shy even compared to gray wolves, which are already extremely shy.
Dean Klinkenberg 10:26
So I think you’ve mentioned to me before red wolves are smaller than gray wolves. Where do they compare? Where are the red wolves compared with coyotes then?
Matt Fox 10:35
Yeah, so grays are much bigger than either of them. Depending on where you are on earth, like say you’re in Siberia, you can get some 100 pound plus gray wolves with regularity. But red wolves are much smaller. Red wolves are more cryptic, as in when you see red wolves in the Missouri forest, like you can at the Endangered Wolf Center, their coloration blends in so perfectly with the leaf litter that they are almost invisible. I’ve had to point out to guests when I worked over there, exactly where they were even though they were sitting right in the middle of the enclosure. Like, nothing obscuring them whatsoever. They were just that cryptic. And, again, cryptic is the biology term for camouflage.
Dean Klinkenberg 11:19
All right, so what for the red wolves, what kind of habitats do they prefer?
Matt Fox 11:25
Yeah. So again, they prefer these woodlands. And that’s where they’re, they’re physically designed to thrive. So imagine the oak hickory forests of Missouri, Southern Illinois, moving into northern Arkansas. But red wolves historically could have been found all throughout the southeastern United States. As a good metric, if you imagine that kind of like a map of the South during the Civil War, that is almost a one to one representation of where reds initially lived in nature.
Dean Klinkenberg 11:57
All right. And you mentioned that they are critically endangered. So where are there red wolves left in the wild today?
Matt Fox 12:04
That’s actually kind of a long and sad story. There have been a number of rerelease attempts for the red wolf. And I say rereleases, because for some long stretches of time, there were zero red wolves left in the wild. Yeah, they were so critically endangered that they were declared extinct in nature. And only a few were still alive in human care. I believe it was seven, were the founder population.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:32
Yeah, where were they? Where were they left? Where did they, where were they being taken care of?
Matt Fox 12:37
That’s a great question. I think it was in a zoo in Washington State, but I can’t remember the name of it. But they did a spectacular job. They actually had more than 100 red wolves that were originally captured during this big attempt to try and bring them into human care and save them. But almost all of those were declared admixtures as in an animal that has more than one species in in its creation. So many of them had bred with coyotes after their population completely was crashed out. So the way wolves in nature live is the alpha pair, a male and female will have generations of children. And sometimes those generations of children will hang around and help them raise the next generation or help them hunt, but eventually most wolves decide they want to go out on their own. They want to do their own thing. So around age three or so you often get wolves leaving their founder pack and meeting mates and forming new packs. Well, when the red wolf population had gotten to such criminally low numbers, I mean less than 100 in the wild, in most areas of their population at the time, they couldn’t find any other red wolves. And so they would end up just joining groups of roving coyotes. So yeah, by the time we actually tried to save them, it was almost impossible to save them. And there were only seven that were deemed to be full blooded red wolves.
Dean Klinkenberg 14:01
So from that group of seven, they started a reintroduction program. So where if I wanted to see a red wolf in the wild today, and my odds are probably not great, no matter anyway, but where would I have to go if I was gonna find them?
Matt Fox 14:16
The only place you can find them in the world at all in nature today is Alligator River Preserve. And that’s on the east coast of the United States in the Carolinas. It’s a beautiful forest, kind of a cypress swamp, which is great for red wolves. Red wolves, again, are these woodland organisms but more than any other wolf, they are, I wouldn’t describe them as semi aquatic, but they’re capable of using aqueous systems and doing very, very well. They routinely swim to islands which they’ll inhabit. And they are able to deal with that situation better than a gray wolf, which can swim to islands but they do it very, very rarely.
Dean Klinkenberg 14:58
Right? I can only imagine what that must have been like when their range extended all the way to the Mississippi with all the islands and their ability to swim, they must have moved around the wetlands and bottomland forests.
Matt Fox 15:10
And imagine the impact that they would have had on that system as well. Because again, like we know from Yellowstone National Park, when wolves enter a system, everything starts to change.
Dean Klinkenberg 15:22
We’re going to save that story. I definitely want to talk about that. But we’ll come back to that in a little bit. So do gray wolves have that ability to swim too?
Matt Fox 15:32
Yeah, yeah, wolves can swim in general. There’s a famous case of Isle Royale, up in the Great Lakes, where wolves naturally swim to the island. Yeah. And and there was this beautiful predator-prey dynamic system on a very small space, where we were able to do wonderful studies on like, what actually happens with the boom and bust cycle of prey population growing, then predator population growing in lockstep and then crashing the prey population? How does it all work?
Dean Klinkenberg 16:04
Right? This is one of the things that’s probably hardest for us as human beings to deal with. Like, we’d like predictability and things change. But in the natural world, there are all these variations across time. There are ups and downs. So populations grow and then fall back naturally over time. And there are usually checks and balances in those systems to that feed those loops.
Matt Fox 16:30
Yeah, I mean, not even dendrology is static, like the study of trees, forest type and dominant forest regime is changing and shifting all the time as climatic conditions warble back and forth. And the same is absolutely true of animal systems. I consider it more of like a rhythm that is consistent, rather than a point which needs to stay the same forever. Like it is very odd to look at a system of living beings chasing each other, interacting, eating, dying breeding, and think that the population sits should stay static. That is, that is ridiculous. Of course, there will be these long parabolas over time.
Dean Klinkenberg 17:14
Right? populations can crash for a little bit. But there there are mechanisms in the natural world to recover from that. So let’s talk a little bit about sort of the lifecycle for wolves. You mentioned packs, as you mentioned, wolf packs tend to be basically nuclear families, right?
Matt Fox 17:32
Yeah, yeah, they really do. There, there is all this talk of like, specific wolf hierarchy terminology, like alphas, betas, omegas. The original study that made these determinations was very weird. It was a number of unrelated wolves which were thrown into an enclosure together, and they just saw what happens. That’s essentially like prison. So some were very aggressive and rose to the top. Some didn’t want to have anything to do with conflict but couldn’t escape. And so they came into these incredibly dominated positions within the pack. And it had nothing to do with how wolves really act in nature. So those kinds of that kind of nomenclature has become somewhat of a plague on specifically wolf biologists. How everyone knows this, or they think they know this. And it’s difficult to teach something to someone when they think they already know the truth. But the way wolves really work in nature is exactly like you said, it’s like a nuclear family. So there are parents, and then they have a generation of children. And that generation of children, most of them will hang around to the next year in order to help raise the next year’s young. Some of them will stick around for multiple years, and some will decide they want to go off on their own and start new families. So it’s a lot like how we interact as humans. But in general, when you see wolves in the wild, you will see them in what’s called a multigenerational pack. So that’s parents and a few generations of their offspring. Because when you think about wolves, you, for most people, the number one thing that comes to mind is pack because it is such a beautiful and biologically ingenious way for these organisms that like I said, only weigh about 100 pounds, to be able to take down elk and bison which outweigh them maybe seven times.
Dean Klinkenberg 18:20
So help me with a bit of a lifecycle then. About what time of year would wolves normally be giving birth to a new one?
Matt Fox 19:48
Just like all organisms, wolves are designed to interface effortlessly with their ecosystems. So when wolves are going into their breeding season, it’s the middle of winter. So that when their puppies are born, it’s early spring, and the pack itself can thrive off of the nutrients of the newly born other animals, which are obviously quite easy prey. So the gestation period of a gray wolf and of a red wolf is about 62 days. So you’re imagining about two months. So March and April are generally when wolves are born. Early April is most common. And so that kind of puts February, January as as primetime wolf breeding season.
Dean Klinkenberg 20:36
And how old are they normally before they can hunt on their own?
Matt Fox 20:41
Yeah, so they, they generally remain around the denning site for at least eight weeks before they even start moving on and doing anything. But they will start participating in hunts by their first year, as in, they will be a wolf out there hunting. Now imagine having a baby and then a year later it’s out there in the trenches with, you know, trying to bring down a bison.
Dean Klinkenberg 21:04
No kidding. So are there any tricks that the parents do to help teach their pups how to hunt? Do we know anything about that?
Matt Fox 21:16
Yeah, I mean, play is a very important part of being a young animal, basically, of any kind. And if you look at the prey behaviors of wolves, almost always it’s hunt mimicry. It’s tussling around, battling each other, laying low in the grass and stalking each other. So play is really how they learn to be ferocious killing machines. I say that in the kindest possible way.
Dean Klinkenberg 21:44
Of course, with all due respect. It’s interesting, like some of the things that I think it’s one of those things probably that unless you’re not looking for it, you don’t see it. But I was reading about loons not too long ago. And I think one of the tricks that the parents do to get their children to learn how to dive and go after food, because they, they, they’re great divers, and swimmers. They will catch a fish but then they’ll throw it far enough away to force the loon to sort of go dive after it. So I was wondering, like, if wolves have any other tricks up their sleeves to help sort of move those hunting behaviors?
Matt Fox 22:22
Yeah, I mean, in somewhat of parallel to that, before actually participating in a kill, young wolves will come to the kill site as the animal is being brought down. So they will essentially shadow. It’s their first day on the job and they’re just shadowing. And so they won’t usually participate until they are physically ready for it.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:43
And I would guess when they’re pups, they’re vulnerable to other predators. What would be the predators that would be most likely to be going after young wolves.
Matt Fox 22:54
So an early stage wolf is most in danger, not necessarily in the modern U.S. in the southeast as we are now, but in their native conditions, from bears. So the den site is the most dangerous place to be a wolf because the longer they occupy this den, the more it’s going to start to smell like wolf. The longer they occupy this den, the higher the load of parasites is going to be in the area. So it’s in their best interest to have babies, raise them and get out as quickly as possible. And a nightmare scenario would be for a hungry bear to smell a den, come over, and for the pack not to be able to do anything about it. And for the bear just to fish out and eat the pups. Yeah, the same thing happens all the time in Africa with African painted dogs, a member of the wolf family, but with lions, leopards, and everything else under the sun.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:47
So the mobility is a survival strategy.
Matt Fox 23:50
Oh, yeah, absolutely true.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:54
Okay, so let’s talk about what wolves themselves eat. What do they hunt? And do they have any vegetables in their diet?
Matt Fox 24:01
Yeah, wolves are generalists. They’re not obligate carnivores, as in, they are capable of digesting things other than just purely some animal which they have slayed. But they don’t really go out of their way to eat much vegetation. More than 90% of a wolf’s diet is meat. They’re great hunters using, as we discussed, their pack dynamics in order to flush prey into ambushes to run it down. They’re primarily what are known as persistence hunters. So they will begin to chase and they’ll chase after this deer or this elk, which is much faster than they are, but does not have the stamina that the wolf pack does. So eventually, this animal will start to flag, it will start to tire, and the wolf surround it and the jig is up. But they are consummate hunters and will take anything from the gray wolves, a bison, all the way down to a jack rabbit. So they will catch what they can catch. And they will share it together.
Dean Klinkenberg 25:05
And as I recall, too, like there’s a lot of, I think misunderstanding about the animals that they do attack. But for the most part, like when, especially with bigger prey, like deer or probably elk and bison too, they’re not going after the healthiest, most active in those groups. They’re usually going after the older or the most vulnerable, the sickest, that kind of thing.
Matt Fox 25:27
Absolutely. Now, if you think about like the lifestyle of a carnivore versus the lifestyle of an herbivore. Let’s say an herbivore is out running around, trips over a log and it sprains its ankle. Well, it’s not going to starve because its prey doesn’t run away. But if a carnivore gets injured, its entire life is at stake, almost no matter how superficial that injury is. It steps on a thorn, that’s going to impact its hunt performance. And we have to remember that these animals adapted together, coevolving over millions of years to be in lockstep competition. The prey doesn’t want to die, the hunter doesn’t want to starve. And so these are finely tuned machines. And anything that diminishes the carnivores capacity to hunt, could be enough to end its life. And so when these carnivores are out there in the field hunting, they are going to be as careful as possible in order to survive.
Dean Klinkenberg 26:29
Right, because if they go after a healthy bison, there’s a good chance they’re gonna get injured, and that could be fatal. Whether the injury is life threatening itself or not, doesn’t matter, because it’ll affect their ability to hunt.
Matt Fox 26:41
Indeed. And so you will find prey selection across the board for carnivores, not just wolves, is they prefer the younger individuals that are not quite at full strength yet and they prefer the older individuals that are long past full strength. And the other injured or sickened animals along the way, are also fair game.
Dean Klinkenberg 27:00
Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks for people who want to get to know the river better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series set in certain places along the Mississippi. Read those books to find out how many different ways my protagonist Frank Dodge can get into trouble. My newest book, “Mississippi River Mayhem” details some of the disasters and tragedies that happened along Old Man River. Find any of them wherever books are sold.
Dean Klinkenberg 27:35
So how old do wolves live to in the wild? If we left them alone, what would the life expectancy be?
Matt Fox 27:41
Yeah, that’s the other side of the coin there. So in human care, it’s absolutely possible for a wolf to live to 12. I’ve even known wolves, which have lived to be 15. But in the wild, general life expectancy for wolf is about five years. Yeah. It’s because life is so so hard as a carnivore. Whenever people I talk to people about you know, wildlife and the animals I’m studying, people often say, “Oh, I would love to be a wolf or I would love to be a tiger. I’d love to be a jaguar”. And I’m like, guys, guys you’re thinking about it all wrong. You want to be an herbivore. If you can survive through babyhood you might live 25 years of nobody messing with you, nobody chasing you. And then when you’re old and tired, and frankly you’ve had enough, that’s when the wolf comes along. But if you are a wolf, you have to struggle every day of your life until you die. And you will die way before you reach adult like old age and senescence.
Dean Klinkenberg 28:39
Right. So wolves are also territorial as I understand it, right. So when one of the children leaves to go on their own, do they have to go a certain distance away to establish their own pack? Like, is there a battling for who’s gonna get to hunt where with mom and dad?
Matt Fox 28:58
Interesting. Yeah. So So wolves establish home ranges, which are large regions which they hunt in but they don’t fight over. One of the cool things about wolves is again, thinking about carnivores. Carnivores don’t want to get hurt, so wolf packs no way are they going to fight each other. Definitely all of them will get hurt and then they’re all done for it. And so if you think about that most iconic of wolf behaviors, howling. It serves so many roles in their lives, one of which is just establishing these territorial boundaries or these home range boundaries, telling all the other wolves we’re over here, we’re hunting here, please don’t come here. And the other wolves will respectfully agree 100% of the time. But when younger wolves disperse to go look for mates, it’s not treated as an intrusion. And it’s excellent for the genetic stability of the wild population that these wolves leaving their families will either find other wolves, young wolves which have left their families looking for mates, or they’ll find an established wolf population, a pack somewhere else and join that pack.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:11
Interesting. So, I don’t know quite how to ask this question. But it makes me wonder like, how do they know they’re not about to mate with a sibling? Like, do they have a mechanism to recognize relatives to know, this is not somebody that is a partner selecting?
Matt Fox 30:27
I mean, they’ve obviously grown up and been raised with each other is one of them. But you’re right, in not every case would they know which one’s a sibling? There is some thought that with their incredibly acute sense of smell, they’re able to easily distinguish close relatives. There are a few papers on this subject. But the jury is still out on exactly how they do that. But in the wild, they do prefer non blood relatives.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:54
That’s a system that seems to be working fine.
Matt Fox 30:56
It seems to be working fine.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:57
Yeah. Are there any other like tidbits about the the lives of wolves that I think we we don’t know very well, or you’d like to tell us about?
Matt Fox 31:07
That’s a great question. I mean, they are incredibly complex creatures and they are so like us. It’s amazing to think that, that the wolf and humans together, dominated the Ice Age in the early days of dog domestication. It was a team and that’s how we pulled it off. I’ve worked and lived with indigenous communities all over the world in carnivore research. And there was this beautiful phrase I heard in Ecuador. A local Quechua friend of mine named Don Senwell, said he would rather go into the wilderness without a gun than without his dog, if he was going hunting. And just that makes so much sense. Like our modern technology is nothing compared to how much of an advantage in a survival context a wolf or a dog is with you. So I just I, it’s endlessly fascinating that this creature is so beloved, I mean, we elected to take them into our homes as our first domestic animal as our first like ‘team human’ member. And yet, they are so totally maligned. In a lot of ways, I mean, in pop culture, in folklore, like I was saying earlier, in their antagonistic relationship with ranchers and landowners pretty much ubiquitously worldwide. In that it just, it is, it is sadly fascinating that a creature can capture the imagination of not just us, but the line of our ancestors stretching to the beginning, and still be thought of as this diabolical creature out there on the hunt.
Dean Klinkenberg 32:49
Right? Well let’s talk about that a little bit. Because that’s something that’s always fascinated me too. We’ve attributed a lot of contradictory characteristics to wolves. And you know, if you look just if you look up, you know, the symbolism of wolves, sometimes you see these attributions that are completely different from each other. And I’m wondering, sometimes, like, how much culture affects that, like I wonder if for a lot of indigenous cultures, if they saw wolves in one particular way. In North America, I know and many Native American communities, are attributions of wolves for particular spirit animals, for loyalty, for being strong family members, for intelligence, for those kinds of things. But I wonder if it’s more of Western or European cultural thing to look at wolves as more threatening because they might take our domesticated animals.
Matt Fox 33:48
I mean, there’s been so much research on this topic, and essentially, you hit it perfectly right there.
Dean Klinkenberg 33:54
Well thank you, this podcast is now over.
Matt Fox 33:54
Yeah, you know you hit it perfectly right there that hunter gatherer societies revere and adore the wolf, as a fellow hunter. These are creatures that we can empathize with and understand because we share a similar livelihood and a similar important role in the system. Whereas, more settled societies which are agrarian in nature, or pastoral, as in raising cattle, generally have an antagonistic relationship with wolves because they see wolves as a competitor to their livelihood. And once that distinction is made, it’s hard to establish a sense of kinship and family with an organism that just, you know, took food directly out of your family’s mouth. So that has persisted to this day. And it’s so odd, especially here in North America, that those two ideologies live in all of us. We, I mean, even the most hardcore rancher out in Wyoming who loves his property, loves his cattle, loves his family, hates wolves because of what they might do to his livelihood. Will still probably have, you know, a ceramic wolf in his office. I know like gas station tchotchke stores are full of like wolf dream catchers, wolf this, wolf that. The spiritual nature of the wolf and its entanglement with the idea of American freedom cannot be overstated. Like the howl of the wolf gives you goosebumps for a reason. Because it’s incredible. And so it’s possible to believe that and know that to be true. But also know, or also think, that the wolf is your adversary.
Dean Klinkenberg 35:44
It’s almost as if it’s particularly out West where this has been more of a frontline battle. And it’s almost as if like, we liked the idea of the wolf but we just don’t like the reality of the wolf.
Matt Fox 35:56
Yeah. That’s, that’s what’s especially difficult is that the reality of the wolf is that they are a critical part of the ecosystem, which must be preserved and taken care of. And it kills me that, in the end, the amount of cattle that are taken by wolves, is less than the amount of cattle that are killed by other cattle. One estimate is it’s between one and three percent of the value of a herd in the United States is threatened each year by predation from wolves. These are the groups in and around the Yellowstone Area. So well, this is the area, this is the wolf epicenter of North America and it’s one to three percent. And, we have a federal program, where if your your livestock are killed or wounded by a wolf, the federal government will fully reimburse you. So the actual threat to livelihood is zero. But at the same time, I also understand how a lot of these communities are built on the concepts of self sufficiency, and independence, and having the federal government come into your business for any reason, is not fantastic.
Dean Klinkenberg 37:12
I wonder sometimes too, though, it’s just another case of with us as human beings that, you know, facts about the matter don’t always matter nearly as much as our feelings about it. And wolves have tended to spark a very visceral reaction in people. It’s like snakes, like, yeah, people will kill snakes without thinking about it even though many of them are beneficial to, you know, their habitats around their homes or whatever. And wolves are probably like that. They’re just, they inspire such a strong emotional reaction. You can spew out all those facts, like you just have, and it’s not going to change anybody’s mind.
Matt Fox 37:50
Right, right. I mean, the hope is that if you can really connect with someone on maybe a humanizing factor of a wolf, that you can get them to open their minds a little bit. There’s a joke actually, in academia, which is told to people that are interested in getting into carnivore biology, which is don’t get into carnivore biology get into human dimensions instead. Because carnivore biology is just human dimensions. It really is. It’s how do we interact with people? How do we convince people that these organisms are important for their system? How do we ameliorate their fears, and get them to see that they are not in danger? I mean, in the entire history of North America, I think it’s less than five people have ever been attacked by gray wolves or killed by gray wolves. And zero people, zero, have ever been harmed by a red wolf in the wild.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:49
You’re right about the the call. There is sort of a visceral reaction. There’s one time in my life I was lucky enough to hear a couple of gray wolves. I was up in northern Minnesota, hiking around and off in the distance I heard a pack starting to howl for just a couple of minutes. And they’re like, it was almost like that, you know, stereotypical response of my hair standing on end. But it was such a meaningful, I guess, experience to feel a part of this world; to be a part of a world where I had the opportunity to hear that and to know that those important animals were out there let’s say managing that habitat.
Matt Fox 39:29
Exactly, exactly. It’s a beautiful feeling for everyone. And I think a lot of us don’t have the vocabulary to describe why. And that’s okay. You know, that’s that’s just part of nature. I mean, like nature doesn’t have to come with a with a Merriam Webster dictionary definition. It’s like, just feel it.
Dean Klinkenberg 39:52
It’s more of an Ikea manual. So you hinted at this before. So let’s talk about it now. The story from Yellowstone about the effect wolves had on the part of the park where they were introduced. Can you kind of summarize?
Matt Fox 40:07
So to summarize it briefly, Yellowstone National Park, seen by not just us here in the United States, but people all over the world as this crown jewel of the wild earth, this place where you can go and you can see what North America has looked like for eons. You can sit in that beautiful space surrounded by that system and know that this is what wildness looks like. Well, it’s funny that for decades, the top carnivore of that system, the grey wolf, wasn’t even there. It had been completely exterminated. The wolf was hanging on by a thread in North America. And in the the late 20th century, the concept of wolf reintroduction was groundbreaking. Oh my god, we’re going to reintroduce a predator, what will the landowners think. You know, how will the local people think and there was so much back and forth, and ultimately, it was decided by the federal government that this was not just good for the ecosystem but it was good for for the national parks. It was good for America to have this carnivore back where it belonged. And so we did it. We reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone. And it wasn’t long, before, and I’m not exaggerating, everything started to change. That system was reshaped from the ground up. Because again, carnivores are the ecosystem engineers. I mean, not in the strictest sense, they’re ecosystem biologists, but they do work to rebalance systems which have been damaged. So in the absence of top carnivores, the elk were just standing around, they were standing in one place and they were grazing until that grass was bare. It was bare earth. Then they take one step over and graze the grass down again, or the young trees and the regrowth as it may be. And this had completely ravaged the system. There was nothing holding in the banks of the rivers. And so they were just catastrophically flooding off and veering, meandering. Erosion was out of control. There very literally, the mountains were coming down because erosion was so out of control. With the introduction of wolves, everything from the ground up started to shift. Literally from the ground up, because the elk were terrified now. They would be listening for the wolves. They would be smelling for the wolves, they would take a couple bites here or there of the prairie, and then they would look up. And then they would walk a distance if they thought they heard something and they’d eat a little bit more. They would hide in the trees until they thought they could make a break for it to go eat. And the places they grazed and the types of things they grazed completely changed. And that’s not because the wolves were eating so many of the elk that the population dropped, as is often kind of thought with predator-prey dynamics. No, everything changed because the elk were afraid, and their behavior shifted. And so that’s the major thing carnivores do is they change behavior. They do change populations by a fair amount. But they change behavior most of all. They keep the elk acting like wild elk. And after that, the rivers, the regrowth along the rivers, shored up their banks, which allowed them to flow straighter again. Beaver returned to the park after more than 100 years and they started making dams which made pools which created completely new ecosystems which hadn’t been in the park in 100 years. The grass in its undisturbed state was able to proliferate and flourish. Wildflowers came back. I forgot how many species of wildflower but it was a ton. Butterflies of all type types came and returned there. Certain species of trout which hadn’t been seen in forever returned to the rivers. So in order to like explain the impact that wolves have on a system you have to really just think about it. You introduce wolves, butterfly and trout comeback. Think about the tendrils of that wolf’s interaction stretching completely throughout the system in order to make that possible. It is incredible the amount of power that reintroducing a large carnivore has to fix an ecosystem which has been damaged or degraded by us.
Dean Klinkenberg 44:35
Right. There’s a really nice video I’ve seen on YouTube about the the impact of the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone. And so if you just search for wolves in Yellowstone in YouTube, you’ll probably find it. It’s a nice, great summary, shows it with great pictures of you know the impact.. So you had a term for this before about how fear was, what was that?
Matt Fox 45:00
It’s called the landscape of fear. Yeah, that’s an ecology term describing the predator prey dynamic, not as a direct one to one. You know, this wolf eats this elk and that’s what changes the system. It’s, this wolf changes the psychology of everybody else and that’s what changes the system. It’s actually fairly new research. And it’s really shaking the game in carnivore biology.
Dean Klinkenberg 45:28
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, though. Yeah, they can’t, they can’t kill enough animals. They can’t eat that much. Right? They have a direct effect through that, but just the fear that they create, the concern that they create by being around, you know, animals change their behavior because they just don’t get to hang out and eat leisurely like they did before, right?
Matt Fox 45:51
Exactly. Like if you eat one elk, you affect that elk quite a bit. But if you eat one elk, you also affect every single other elk in the system.
Dean Klinkenberg 46:01
So the absence of wolves we’ve seen in other ways, and I’m, so we had to rerecord this, and I’m trying to remember the first time if we already covered this. So one of the direct effects of the absence of wolves has been the spread of coyotes. Coyotes used to be prairie animals and now they’re all across North America. They’ve moved into the vacuum of areas left behind by wolves. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Coyotes it turns out are remarkably adaptable.
Matt Fox 46:38
Oh my god, yeah, they’re incredibly adaptable. So now you can find coyotes in every single state in the United States, including Alaska, even though they were originally native to the southwestern United States and Mexico and a little bit further south. But no, their range has exploded. And again, it’s because of this lack of competition with the true apex predator, of which they somewhat emulate the gray wolf, or in the case of most of its range, the Mexican wolf, the ability for them to adapt, it’s ridiculous. So you can find them everywhere from like I said, Alaska to Florida to Arizona. So those are very different ecosystem types. But the most different ecosystem type is the urban one. So coyotes fall into this community of super adapting organisms, which have taken their skills in the natural environment and adapted them to the human one. Their great senses, their night vision, their hearing, their smell, have allowed them to find ways to survive, such as being primary detrivores. So devouring of dead organisms, and what we would see as debris and trash. So in their natural system, they’re mesocarnivores. They hunt small things like mice, rats, rabbits, small burrowing organisms. And they are not supposed to be filling this role. I mean, supposed to is a strong word. This is not what they’re designed to do. But they’re doing it now. And they’re doing a great job. And they’re in their attempts to fill the roles in some of these empty systems like the Missouri woodlands are only now getting their carnivores back. So coyotes for the last…the last gray wolf was shot in Missouri in the early 1800s. So that’s a long time without gray wolves. Tthe last red wolf was shot in 1950. So that’s still a long time without the red wolves. And so the coyotes here have been getting bigger, more robust, and they’ve started actively hunting in packs. And that can be seen all throughout the ranges, which have been, sadly, devoid of wolves for so long. I mean, nature doesn’t sit still, as we were talking about before, when things happen, there are reactions, every time.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:01
When there’s a vacuum, something’s going to come in to fill that vacuum. So do we know what happened with the coyote population around Yellowstone?
Matt Fox 49:10
Oh, yeah, so Well, that’s a great question. So in the absence of gray wolves, the coyotes got gigantic. I mean, there are confirmed accounts of 80 pound coyotes out there. Bigger than red wolves. Bigger than almost all gray wolves. So they got gigantic and they were attempting to bring down elk. I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors of of big kills by coyotes. So they took it upon themselves to by biological imperative, become the new apex carnivores.
Matt Fox 49:10
And then after wolves came back, did coyote population start to fall back?
Matt Fox 49:52
Yeah, the coyote population has crashed dramatically. There used to be so so many coyotes in Yellowstone. I don’t remember the figures off the top of my head, but now there’s a tiny, tiny fraction of that volume left. These coyotes are not supposed to be in Yellowstone really at all. And like I said, wolves have a very important job to do and they do it very well. So once they’re back, things change.
Dean Klinkenberg 50:20
This is probably a question we could ask about a lot of things in our relation with the natural world, but what do you think we’re going to have to do to get to a point where we can coexist with wolves and with top predators?
Matt Fox 50:31
Well, I actually just spent three months living down in Zimbabwe, with this great research biologist named Dr. Greg Rasmussen. And as far as I know, and as far as he thinks, he’s the only person ever to solve the conflict between carnivores and pastoral landowners, as in people that raise cattle or things like that. And therein is the primary conflict between humans and carnivores. We raise animals, the carnivores see them as an easy source of prey. So Dr. Greg, he initially started with the same payoff system that we have going on here in the United States, where if a landowner’s cow or sheep or goat is killed, then the government will come in and they’ll pay for it. And it was not working well at all it. It continued to foster that sense of antagonism that, oh, the wolf is the enemy. This, this terrible thing is going to happen on my property. And Greg found that the best way to actually change things was to meet the ranchers one on one to talk to them about this animal that he loves. In that case, it’s the Lycaon pictus. It’s the African painted dog, relative of wolves from about 3 million years divergence. But he would talk to him about how important they are and systems and more than that, he would go to the schools, this seems kind of nefarious, but he would go to the schools of their children and teach them about how cool the painted dog was. And so that kid would come back home and be like, dad, dad, dad, I love painted dogs and he would hear about it all day. And so Greg did this for decades. And it slowly pushed, pushed over this, this long trepidation of like nah, nah, nah, these are our enemies. And finally, the kids that he taught to love wolves or to love carnivores in the wolf family ended up owning those farms over time. And eventually, they understood as Greg described to them, that it’s between one and 3% of their herd is going to be affected or monetarily over the entire course of the year. It’s very, very few kills. And there are so many ways that you can stop them from coming onto your property. Like I said, carnivores are super shy. If you have a livestock guardian dog, they were developed for this. And they do such an amazing job at it. Staying with the flock, barking, scaring away carnivores. I mean, with a tiny bit of investment in something like that, or a tiny bit of investment in your own energy to take your flock and put them in a corral at night or put them in a barn something like that, these kills can be can be prevented outright. And it’s just a matter of not thinking of that as something unexpected that is ruining your livelihood. But thinking about it as a necessary part of your profession, in order to live in harmony with organisms that deserve to live also. The moment you start thinking about these carnivores as deserving to live also, you start thinking about them as your neighbors that you want to live peacefully with. Not some enemy that you want to destroy the moment it shows its face.
Dean Klinkenberg 53:52
Right? Absolutely. Well, a lot of Native American communities in North America, you know, animals were relatives. It’s a lot harder to exterminate your relatives, no matter how much some people thought that was sort of inlaws. But it’s changing the dynamic. It just flips that whole dynamic around. So basically, we have to start when they’re young.
Matt Fox 54:15
Yeah, get people interested in wolves. Just like I was saying that, like I started from a super young age, and that the world kind of drives that out of us. It’s like, think realistically, you need to be used car salesman. No, not everyone needs to engage in in society in that manner. Like there are, there are whole wild lives out there waiting for you if you embrace the things you love and you never let go.
Dean Klinkenberg 54:41
Right? Well, I want to thank you on the behalf of the rest of the human race for doing the things that you love and for doing this and for sharing what you’ve learned about the experience. The importance of carnivores and top predators in the system. You are just a fount of information. You’re extremely smart and I wish that we had hours and hours. I have a feeling we could have very long conversations.
Matt Fox 55:10
Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me on this podcast. I, as you just said, I’m a fount of information, but god do I adore getting to teach people about wildlife. And more than that, getting to have meaningful conversations about issues which affect all of us, right? And by all of us, I’m not just drawing a circle around me and my human friends. I’m drawing it around all the organisms which we share this planet with. We need to start thinking about them as our neighbors.
Dean Klinkenberg 55:38
Absolutely. If people are interested in following what you’re up to, is there a way for folks to do that?
Matt Fox 55:45
Yeah, yeah. So as a field biologist, and as Dean said in the intro, I’ve worked with conservation groups all over the world. Currently, I’m working with the African painted dog research trust out of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and we’re studying carnivore research there. But I also have a video project in the works called Uprise Conservation. And you can check us out on our website, upriseconservation.com. We have videos which are going to be coming out with basically monthly, showcasing the adventures that I go on to save this wild earth that we live on together.
Dean Klinkenberg 56:22
Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you for all the great work that you do. And I’ll see you at the coffee shop.
Matt Fox 56:28
Thanks Dean. I’ll see you this week at some point.
Dean Klinkenberg 56:41
And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. Well, in the interview with Matt, we talked a lot about wolves. So for the Mississippi Minute, I want to tell you about a few places where you can reliably look at and learn about wolves. Northern Minnesota has a resident population of about 3000 gray wolves and northern Wisconsin has maybe 1000 or so, but they’re very shy and the odds that you’re going to come across any of those wolves in the wild is pretty remote. You may hear them howling if you’re lucky, but you’re not likely to see them. So if you really would like to see them up close and personal and why wouldn’t you? One place you could go is the International Wolf Center, which is in Ely, Minnesota about four hours from the Twin Cities in a city that’s better known as the gateway to canoe expeditions and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The International Wolf Center has a resonant pack of gray wolves, so most of them are rescues or wolves that couldn’t be rereleased. And they live in an enclosure that is open for viewing. Plus, they have a whole lot of exhibits about wolves. For example, you can read about the amazing variety of attributes we as human beings have projected onto them. Things like a vicious predator or a wise and loyal friend. So most of these just reflect our primal fears rather than the real threats wolves pose. And I think the museum or the International Wolf Center does a good job of getting into that. They also have some displays about our often troubled relationship with wolves. And some displays that give you a pretty good detail about the lives and life cycles of wolves. They’re open all year, but they have reduced hours in winter as one would expect given their location which is basically on weekends. And so if you’re anywhere up in the Ely, Minnesota area I highly recommend stopping in at the International Wolf Center. If you’re more in the middle of the country, say in the St. Louis area, I would highly recommend going to the Endangered Wolf Center, which is in Eureka, about a half hour southwest of downtown St. Louis. It was founded in 1971 by Marlin and Carol Perkins. And if you’re in my age bracket that name Marlin Perkins may ring a bell. You may remember him for the show that he hosted for many years, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The wolves raised at the Endangered Wolf Center provided the initial stock, the initial source for the reintroduction of Mexican wolves. You have to book a tour in advance and you’ll get a guided tour around the ground. So most of the wolves live in enclosures that are open for public viewing but they’re pretty spacious. You’re not guaranteed you’re going to be able to see any of the wolves. Some of them are a little shy and maybe hiding out on a particular day. But they have a good range of wolves including those Mexican wolves but also red wolves that Matt mentioned during our interview. So I highly recommend that. They are not open on Tuesdays and major holidays. At the end of the year they also shut down. If you can’t find a time that works with their public schedule you can, for a fee, also just book a private tour if that’s what you’d rather do. So that’s the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota and the Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka, Missouri. Both highly recommended places to visit to see wolves in person and to learn more about them. And I’ll post links to those places in the show notes as well as links to some of the other things that we talked about during the interview.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:00:15
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you helped keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series at certain places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.
