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Students spend summer tracking wolves By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau SUNLIGHT BASIN, Wyo. – Northwest College students Sharon Baruch-Mordo, Marty Mononi and Seth Oakes have started many days this summer by rousing themselves at 3 a.m., hiking miles at a time, searching for quarry they rarely see and scooping up smelly animal droppings, all for virtually no pay.
“It’s the experience – you can never put a price on it because it’s something you could never get in a classroom or a lab,” Oakes says while the three bounce in a pickup over a rocky dirt road high in the Shoshone National Forest northwest of Cody. “How often do you get to work with an endangered species?” Not just any endangered species. Oakes, Baruch-Mordo and Mononi, along with fellow students Carrie Brown and Jerad Wering, make up a small team of Northwest College wildlife sciences majors volunteering this summer to track gray wolves in northwest Wyoming for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s the first partnership of its kind between a local college and the Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf recovery program, which reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone National Park and has watched them multiply and spread in all directions. At least 20 wolves and possibly more now inhabit the wide Sunlight Basin northwest of Cody, but the wolf program employs only one full-time biologist to keep track of wolves throughout all of northwest Wyoming, a huge region that reaches from north of Cody to south of Dubois and Jackson. “Obviously the students are a great help to the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of manpower and I think, educationally, it’s a great opportunity for the students,” says that lone biologist, Mike Jimenez, who oversees the student volunteers. “It’s a positive side to having wolves and I think shows they don’t need to be the bearers of bad news.” Despite the early mornings and hard work for a daily payment of $15 to help cover their expenses, the students clearly see the predators they are tracking as good news, although the realize not everyone else does. Since they started tracking the animals in mid-June, the student trackers have found the wolves to be intrepid travelers, patrolling vast home ranges and traipsing many miles in search of prey to feed their packs. “You learn the truth about them – not just the myths,” Oakes says. “I have a lot more respect for wolves now that we’re keeping track of what they’re doing every day.” They tracked one wolf as it traveled more than 20 miles and back within a few days. “That’s what makes the tracking so hard sometimes,” Mononi says. “Because they move so much, even though we know the area and where they generally should be, it’s really hard to find them.” The students awake long before daylight, sometimes spending the night at Northwest College’s field station near Dead Indian Pass and other times hauling themselves out of bed at 3 a.m. to make the drive from campus in Powell in time to start tracking wolves by 5 a.m. They start before sunrise so they can gather as much detail as possible about how far and wide the wolves move at night, when many wolves tend to be most active. Only four wolves in the Sunlight area wear radio collars - the others are either pups, have not been collared or their collars have quit working - so the student trackers focus on those. Each wolf’s collar broadcasts on a different frequency. The trackers start with a non-directional antenna attached to the roof of their pickup that tells them if any wolves are within range. Then, if they detect the telltale beeps from a wolf’s radio collar that way, they stop and swing a hand-held antenna back and forth until the beep grows loudest. They then know the wolf lies in the direction the antenna is pointed. Taking a compass reading, they then draw a line on a map from their location toward the wolf. With a series of such readings, they can draw at least two or three such lines. The intersection of the lines gives them the wolf’s general location. Mapping those locations over days and weeks gives them the rough boundaries of the wolf’s home range. But the wolves do not always give themselves away easily and the rugged topography of the Sunlight Basin and the surrounding Absaroka and Beartooth ranges often scatters and blocks the signals from their collars. “You get a faint signal and then you look for places you can gain elevation to get a better signal,” Baruch-Mordo explains while the receiver sputters away. As they drive, they listen carefully to the crackle of static on their receiver for the hint of a beep that might mean they have picked up a wolf. Because their pickup’s engine can generate interference, though, they regularly pull to a stop and turn off the engine while they listen for a signal. One of the wolves they are tracking is the prolific Number 9, the first Yellowstone wolf to give birth to pups. Number 9 has since left the park and taken up residence to the west of Sunlight Basin, where biologists suspect she may have produced yet another litter of pups. The student trackers have been listening for 9 all morning, but cannot pick up her signal. Finally, from the top of Clay Butte in the Beartooth Mountains, they get a break. “There she is,” Baruch-Mordo calls excitedly as beeps finally burst from the receiver. “Get the compass, Marty! We’ve got 9!” If they can’t locate the wolves from the road, the trackers often hike to higher or better vantage points with their receivers. They commonly come across wolf tracks, which are not easily mistaken for coyote or dog tracks. “They’re huge,” Oakes says. “We found one and we laid a dollar bill down next to it and it was longer than the dollar bill.” They see the wolves themselves only once in a while and usually only in a fleeting glance from a distance. They have to make do mainly with the radio signals, although the students have also joined biologists to inspect the wolves’ abandoned dens, where the team collects hair and scat, all part of the routine in the wildlife profession, which they hope to join. “You learn that there’s a lot more than just the allure – there’s a lot of hard work involved and there’s even a lot of politics involved,” Baruch-Mordo says. “You collect scat and after a while you smell like the scat, but it’s all part of the deal. It’s fun. It’s the way you learn.” Baruch-Mordo, originally from Israel, will leave Northwest soon to continue studying wildlife biology at Colorado State University, where she received scholarships at least in part because of her experience tracking the wolves and working on a separate study of mountain plovers also led by Northwest College. All of the student wolf trackers note that although Northwest may be a small, rural college, they couldn’t track wolves anywhere else. “This is the kind of experience you might be able to get at a bigger school at a graduate level, but not at a community college,” Baruch-Mordo says. “It’s really letting us take advantage of a very special opportunity.” Michael Milstein can be reached at (307) 527-7250 or at gazette@wavecom.net
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