Unlike domestic dogs, who will imitate their sleepy human companions, wild wolves don’t yawn because they’re tired, but because they’re anxious.
Unlike domestic dogs, who will imitate their sleepy human companions, wild wolves don’t yawn because they’re tired, but because they’re anxious.
Summertime and the Livin’ Is Easier
Ask anyone what his or her favorite time of year is—especially any kid who’s off school—and the answer probably will be summer. And why not? The weather is warm and sunny, and it doesn’t rain much. And almost everything is in season. When else do you get fresh raspberries, blueberries, cherries and peaches? Summer is also when the grass in your lawn grows tallest and thickest, and when the trees in your backyard are heaviest with leaves.
In the Great Bear Rainforest the weather is also at its best during the summer. The rain still falls, but not as much. The wind still blows, but not as hard. The sky can still be gray and cloudy, but it turns blue more often. And in the middle of June, when the sun is at its highest point, it hardly gets dark at all. You can go outside and read a book at ten o’clock in the evening or four in the morning.
Roses don’t just grow in gardens. This rainforest estuary filled with wild roses and sedges (a kind of tall grass) is prime habitat for coastal wolves and bears.
Summer is also when almost every kind of plant in the rainforest is at its best. Wild berries become ripe and juicy. Ferns and horsetails that vanished into the earth over winter reach for the sky again. Sedge, a grasslike plant that looks like a long green saber, grows as high as a grizzly bear’s eye. In fact, the rainforest floor all but disappears under an explosion of new plants struggling for a place in the now warm sun.
For animals living in the rainforest, summer, like spring, is also a welcome change. Many animals—bears, marmots, bats, frogs, newts and snakes among them—spend winter asleep underground. Insect eggs laid in the fall lie dormant until spring. Most birds have flown south. But in summer, when the temperature rises and the plants come back to life, animals come to life too. Many birds have returned north and now perch in trees. Beavers build dams. Tadpoles swim. Fawns explore. Sandhill cranes roost with their newborn chicks. Humpback and killer whales breach, dive and slap their tails. Bees pollinate flowers, and the bears of the Great Bear Rainforest stuff their faces with berries.
Old-growth temperate rainforest is among the rarest forest type on Earth. One of the many reasons the Great Bear Rainforest is so special is that it contains a quarter of all the temperate rainforest left in the world.
For wolves and deer, summer is welcome too, though for different reasons. Unlike bears, who sleep the winter away, wolves and deer are active all year. This means they never stop searching for food, and in December and January that can be tough. So tough that some wolves and deer don’t make it to spring. But in summer the living is easy—or at least easier. Food is everywhere. The rainforest is a banquet—a green feast nature has laid out for her many residents.
In winter, wolves, who eat only meat, have to rely on deer (their main staple), moose, river otter and mountain goats to fill their stomachs because so many of the smaller animals they hunt—marmots, beavers, voles and mice among them—are underground or in dens, And hunting larger animals can be dangerous. A buck or bull moose has a tremendously powerful back kick, and a wolf who finds him- or herself on the receiving end of one can be crippled for life. In summer, with many more different kinds of prey available, hunting isn’t as treacherous. Small animals obviously don’t provide the same kind of meal a deer or moose does, but there are lots of them around.
Regardless of the time of year, the most important question that hangs over every hunt is whether the wolves will gain more energy from hunting than they’ll lose. What does this mean, exactly? Put it this way: suppose you had to walk ten kilometers every day to get a peanut-butter sandwich. At the same time, suppose your body needed two peanut-butter sandwiches a day to survive. That would mean you’d have to walk twenty kilometers every day to get your two sandwiches. But that’s a lot of walking, and you’d expend a lot of energy doing it. So before you started, you might ask yourself: Is it worth it? Should you risk expending all the energy it takes to walk twenty kilometers for the promise of two peanut-butter sandwiches? What if, when you finished the twenty kilometers, the sandwiches were no longer there? What then? Wolves face this kind of dilemma all the time. When they plan a hunt, they can’t be sure they won’t burn more energy going after a deer or moose than they’ll gain in bringing their prey down. Remember, not every hunt is successful. Deer and moose get away all the time. So it’s a hard decision—especially for an animal that doesn’t have a refrigerator to store food for long periods of time.
Wolves are usually born in dens hidden deep in the rainforest, but when the cubs are old enough to travel short distances, the pack will often move to what’s called a rendezvous site. These sites are usually close to the ocean, where wolf pups can forage for food when the tide goes out.
This is also why a wolf will sometimes let a healthy deer walk by without a chase. Wolves have to weigh this balance every time they consider hunting. In summer, when there’s more food around, these decisions are easier to make. But even summer brings wolves special pressures in the form of caring for pups. Usually an adult is deputized to look after the young. But what if, for some reason, this adult is needed on a hunt too? What should the wolf family do? Leave the pups on their own and expose them to possible harm? Or leave the adult behind and risk the hunt’s success? Who knows? Sometimes when pups are too young to take part in a hunt and too young to travel, adults may choose to hunt near the den. But this can limit the amount of prey available to them. Or they may decide to move the pups farther away to what’s known as a rendezvous site. These sites, which are considered safe zones for pups, are scattered throughout the rainforest, usually within a kilometer or so of the den door. If the wolves can do this, their food supply may be that much greater. But again, they don’t know for sure. You can see how decisions are a big part of a coastal wolf’s day.
Wolves are built for running, and while they can sprint over short distances, they are best traveling long distances at a lope or trot.
However, wolves do their best hunting at night. Their eyes are built specially to see in the dark, and their excellent sense of smell allows them to track prey in all kinds of weather. They also work cooperatively. A single wolf can be a good hunter, but nothing like a family of wolves. A family will spread out through the forest and travel silently until one of them smells prey. If it’s a deer, the wolves may circle the animal before moving in. Sometimes the deer will try to run for the ocean because usually it can swim faster than a wolf. Sometimes it’s so frightened it will just run—in no particular direction. Sometimes it sits quietly, almost as if it knows that its contribution to the rainforest, the wolves and the endless life cycle is to give up its life. Regardless, wolves are fed by their feet, so they will always do their utmost to find prey and kill it. And when they do, they eat as much as they can because when they get back to their dens they will regurgitate, or throw up, some of it for their pups. Sometimes they will take back a whole deer leg. This gives the pups a chance to chew bones and marrow. A fresh deer kill can keep a wolf family fed for a couple of days.
Because the Great Bear Rainforest is as much about the sea as the land, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that wolves find food in its inlets, bays and fjords too. During the late summer and fall, salmon return in the millions to swim upriver and lay eggs, and when this happens, wolves feast hungrily on the fish. But wolves don’t have to wait until then for the sea to serve dinner. In spring and summer as well as fall, the jagged rainforest shoreline is full of barnacles, mussels, crabs and clams for wolves to eat. That may seem strange—to think of a wolf eating seafood. But rainforest wolves, like every other creature on the planet, adapt to where they live, and in a place defined by the sea as much as the Great Bear Rainforest is, seafood is a constant. Seafood is not the biggest part of a wolf’s diet, but when you’re as hungry as a wolf, every morsel helps.
Almost like squirrels, wolves frequently cache, or store, meat in hidden locations to eat later. They will dig a hole in the ground with their paws, place the meat inside and then cover it up with their noses.
Wolves also chase and eat shorebirds living along the rainforest’s coasts: ducks, geese, herons and cranes. And now researchers have found that the wolves even hunt seals when they climb on land to sleep on little rocky islets called haulouts. A fat, blubbery seal is a big bonus for a wolf family—like having Thanksgiving turkey in the middle of summer. And if a giant squid somehow ends up on a beach, wolves won’t say no to it either. While wolves normally catch and kill what they eat, they’re not so fussy that they’ll turn up their noses at something that’s already dead, providing it hasn’t been dead too long.
The part of the rainforest where the seashore slips into the ocean—what’s known as the intertidal zone—is also a good place for wolves to catch land animals because it’s a place that attracts river otters, mink, deer and bears. Yes, bears. Rainforest wolves hunt them occasionally. Most animals, including bears, can outswim a wolf if they get enough of a head start. But the wolf is seldom one to give up. So even while that deer or moose is swimming away, the wolf may take one last all-or-nothing leap into the water after whatever it’s chasing in an attempt to land on top of it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. On hard ground a deer or moose can use its hind legs to kick a wolf. But in the water it can be a sitting—or swimming—duck.
If you see a rainforest wolf on his own, he may have left the pack he was born into to join a new pack or start one of his own. These wolves are called dispersers and are quite common.
What we know about wolves is largely the result of what First Nations people have been able to learn from watching coastal wolves firsthand for generations. As well, many recent observations have been made by scientists and conservationists. Even so, few people ever get to see a wild wolf because they’re so elusive. They’re also mainly nocturnal, which makes sighting one even more difficult. So if you are determined to see one, your best chance will come early in the morning or late in the day, as the sun rises or sets.
As challenging as it is to see a coastal wolf, it’s worth it. Watching a rainforest family of wolves up close as they dig for clams by the seashore or tear into a whale carcass that’s drifted in on the tide is a rare, remarkable and wondrous thing. It’s an experience you’re guaranteed never to forget.
