Transcripts

LEIF ENGER: 10 years ago, no one would have expected to see a wolf in this spot. Camp Ripley, near Little Falls in Central Minnesota, was too far south. Besides, it's a military base. The artillery they fire here rattles windows 20 miles away. And what kind of wolf wants to live next to army tanks? Actually, the military presence is one of the reasons this study is remarkable. You'll see why later.

We're parked in a spot state biologists have come to call Wolf Junction. There's a full-fledged pack nearby, some 15 animals with young ones almost ready to declare independence and set off on their own. They're shy this morning. Sometimes, researcher Bill Brown knows they're close, not by sight or by sound but by smell.

BILL BROWN: Like a real musky dog, and I guess essentially that's what it really is. And of course, they roll in a lot of their own matter, what they eat. And they do eat some carrion. So they do pick up some of that odor.

LEIF ENGER: Brown is helping DNR biologist Sam Merrill with a new kind of wolf study. As with conventional radio telemetry, the animal is first trapped and collared. And the collar Merrill's holding does look very much like the standard-issue, Marlin Perkins-type transmitter. It came off a wolf recently. And if you get within 10 feet of it, you'll see what Brown means about the smell. But Merrill says under that eye-watering veneer lurks a space-age piece of equipment.

SAM MERRILL: There's a little antenna on top of the collar. And what it does is it's looking up into the sky. And there's a set of 24 satellites orbiting the Earth at all times. And as long as the antenna can look at and get the location of three of those 24 satellites, it can do what's called triangulate and determine its location on the face of the Earth to a very precise degree.

LEIF ENGER: The technology itself is only somewhat new. It's known as GPS for Global Positioning System. Many hunters now use similar devices to keep from getting lost in the woods. But this is the first time wolves have carried GPS units. And it works this way-- every 15 minutes, the collar reads its exact position on the globe. It stores that information on a chip, along with the date and time of the reading. When the battery wears out in a few months to a year, a tiny explosive charge releases the collar from the wolf's neck.

SAM MERRILL: Then I home in on it, pick the collar up, hook it up to the computer, and download 1,500 points of beautiful data.

LEIF ENGER: Four to six collars have been in use since spring with dramatic results. The GPS readings show the wolves' haunts and habits day and night. The satellite sees what no human in a helicopter can. What's emerging is a whole new picture of the timber wolf.

SAM MERRILL: We have assumed wolves to be highly sensitive, deep wilderness dwellers, unable to cope with or adapt to human activities. That is proving really not to be the case. We here at Ripley and lots of other places really are now witnessing wolves performing all of their normal biological functions in bastions of human activity. Really, wolf habitat is in the human mind. It is wherever we will let them be.

LEIF ENGER: Grand Rapids wildlife biologist Bill Berg agrees. He studied wolves since they were hunted for bounty, since before GPS or Sam Merrill existed. The study's real value, he says, will be in forecasting the growth and direction of wolf range as the collared pups leave home or disperse.

BILL BERG: And if these GPS collars work, we'll know exactly where they're dispersing to. Are they going to go farther north and run into other wolves? Or are they going to go farther south, establish a totally new wolf range and pack area? What we really want to know is where wolves are going to end up in the state and where they can be managed.

LEIF ENGER: Anecdotal evidence suggests wolves continue to migrate to new ground. Government trappers this year have taken a record number of the big predators in response to livestock killings as far south as Cambridge. The state expects to find at least 2,000 in an upcoming census, far above wolf recovery goals. The animals could shortly be removed from federal protection and wolf management handed over to the state. With that on the horizon, wildlife managers want all the biology they can get their hands on.

In his Camp Ripley office, Merrill rattles two maps across his desk, maps of the military base overlaid with zigzagging lines. They look like dot-to-dot pictures by someone perplexed at numerical order. But they're actually travelogues, exact records of where the wolves went and when.

SAM MERRILL: So here are the maps of two pups, GPS maps. And you can see here that they have been moving along with each other. Now, these trips they took together. Then they took this trip up here, up to the Northeast. And one animal came straight home, and one animal did not. They split up and got back together later.

LEIF ENGER: Now, here, Merrill says, is why a military base is perfect for this study. Just as every movement of a wolf is recorded, Camp Ripley keeps strenuous records of human activity. Every tank, every troop, every firearm is tracked. For example, Wolf Junction, where we were parked a few minutes ago, is near an artillery area. During the week denoted on this map, the family of wolves was sharing its home with live ammunition.

SAM MERRILL: You can see that the pups were sleeping quite a lot in the impact area. They're sleeping in there while the troops are firing in there. And they don't leave.

LEIF ENGER: Later this fall, the DNR will hold public meetings on wolf management. Part of the reason is to let people know wolves are slowly but surely spreading. They've been seen near Elk River now. They've been seen near St. Cloud and outside of Rochester. Researcher Merrill says people shouldn't be surprised. To an animal so blase about mortar fire, what's the occasional freeway? Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.