In 2021, a group of wildlife enthusiasts from the Algoma Highlands Conservancy began a three-year program to track wolves in Algoma and compile research about the four-legged creatures.
“We initiated it because we realize we live in a beautiful area and there is very little research being done in this area about wildlife, wolves and how they interact with people,” said Kees Van Frankenhuyzen, Algoma Highlands Conservancy president speaking to SooToday.
Photographing wolves on Algoma trails, near power lines and in the forest, trapping and tagging them with GPS tracking devices before releasing them back into the wilderness, the group has discovered that wolves travel farther than what was originally thought.
One female - known as Ruby to the group of wolf watchers - was tagged with a GPS device in the Prince Township area in March 2022 and her movements were followed to the North Bay area, the creature covering 500 kilometres in three weeks.
Ruby then swam for 500 to 1,000 metres across the Ottawa River and made it to the Laurentides Wildlife Reserve in Quebec, covering a total of 2,500 kilometres in four months.
“That’s her territory now,” Van Frankenhuyzen said of the wildlife reserve in Quebec.
“The adventures of Ruby are completely surprising. Nobody knew that the wolves in the Great Lakes region are connected with wolf populations as far east as Quebec. We’re talking about a huge distance.”
Since 2021 the wolf program has attracted interest and funding from several different agencies and it is felt that its work will go beyond the original three-year period.
“We’ve cobbled together a budget of about $100,000 to do this work,” Van Frankenhuyzen said.
The money from donations has come in handy, as the Conservancy group has installed approximately 100 trail cameras in Algoma that look for and take photos of wolves throughout the day, each trail camera with a cost of about $150 each.
“We started the study small but garnered interest from other groups like the Canadian Forest Service, power company Evolugen and Ontario Hydro,” Van Frankenhuyzen said.
The MNRF, University of Guelph and Garden River First Nation have also joined the project.
The group’s study consists of five study areas, such as the Prince Township Wind Farm, the Stokely Creek area, Garden River First Nation, Sylvan Valley and another area north of Iron Bridge.
Wolves are not bad creatures, Van Frankenhuyzen said.
“That’s a very old school of thought that has pervaded our thinking for centuries. That’s why in many parts of the world wolves have been extirpated."
He said that has changed over the years.
“Wolves are actually an extremely important part of our ecosystem because they play an important role as a top predator.”
Eliminated in Yellowstone National Park, wolves were reintroduced there around 1970.
“There were too many deer, elk and bison changing the landscape by overgrazing. They were turning the forests into grasslands. There were so many beavers damming up rivers and changing the flow of the rivers and the vegetation. When they reintroduced wolves back into the ecosystem all those things reverted back to normal because the wolves were a balancing factor,” Van Frankenhuyzen said.
In winter, wolves prey in packs, hunting deer and moose, and in summer tend to prey more on their own and target beaver, birds, rodents, and small deer.
Humans should not be afraid of wolves, Van Frankenhuyzen said.
Through activity seen on the groups’s trail cameras, he said that “the hikers are there in the day, the wolves are out at night. There seems to be a happy coexistence between people and wolves and that's a story that‘s not being told because we don’t have the documentation of that.”
“There’s a distinct pattern and we have lots of pictures of wolves adjusting to our presence. They see you but they stay out of people’s way.”
Wildlife enthusiasts can follow the Algoma Highlands Conservancy wolf project, the group's blogs and other activities on the group's website.