These ones revolve around wolves.
Sort of. There are wolf packs here, but only small ones of three to four pack members, and they mostly live in Banning State Park (which is a park about twenty minutes away). However, about a month ago there were some lone tracks spotted in our pine plantation, so I was really excited at the prospect of possibly seeing a wolf. I've never seen one before, and I've been enamored with them ever since I was a child and would play wolf pack in my childhood best friend's basement and wear holes in the knees of all my leggings. Just a couple of weeks ago, JMack burst into the office white as a sheet and panting, collapsing on the office floor as we watched passively from our desks. We let her hyperventilate on the floor for a bit before asking her what had happened. She had been gathering enrichment in the forest, up the winter road (which is the old path people used to take to our land when it was a dairy farm in the 1800s) with one of the carts from the barn when she saw two wolves trot out of the trees just a couple of feet in front of her. Her story entailed them sprinting towards her, hellbent on ripping out her throat, so she spun around and booked it out of the woods, leaving the cart there and running all the way back to the office. I immediately sprang from my chair and exclaimed, "I'M GOING TO GO FIND THEM!" and Chagh joined me. I impatiently whined that they were going to be gone if Chagh didn't hurry up as he moved at .0001 MILES PER HOUR getting on his coat and gloves. Finally, we headed out into the woods. We found the cart abandoned at the side of the road and saw definite HUGE, CANID footprints surrounding it. The gait wasn't a running stride, however, but more of a healthy trot. So JMack's story of terror was actually fueled by panic (but I don't blame her). We followed the tracks up the road and met up with the J-Term TAs (J-Term was a college class going on at the time that was learning about predatory ecology). They told us that they were also tracking the wolves and had even seen them, so we all decided to follow the tracks deeper into the woods to see if we could see the wolves. We tracked them about a mile into the woods, trailing over fallen logs and through snowbanks until we reached one of our deer enclosures, a fenced off area to keep deer from eating all the vegetation. At this point we heard barking, which really confused me. One of the TAs ran up ahead and excitedly beckoned to us. We followed to see a very large, aggressive dog snarling at all of us with hackles raised. We saw another canid-like shadow slink away into the trees, which we all thought was the wolf, but it turned out to be another dog that was tagging along with barky mcbarkerton. Once the aggressive dog caught sight of the rest of our "pack" members, it changed its mind about trying to take us down and instead turned around and trotted down the trail again, the shy ghost dog on its tail. At this point, we all thought, "are we idiots and have we been tracking dogs this whole time?" We were comforted when we saw the paw prints the dogs had left behind: they were tiny compared to the wolf prints, and wove in and out of trees while the wolf prints were in a straight, determined line. I figured that the wolves were probably miles ahead and the dogs were also tracking them, we just caught up to the dogs instead of the wolves. Disappointing, but still pretty funny. Funnier still is that Danny was treed by the same dogs later that afternoon, and we had to help him get down and provide a getaway car. We had aggressive dogs holing up in our bird blind at the wetlands, which is bad news for our school groups, but don't worry because the story doesn't end there.
In the meantime, we went to Banning State Park to track wolves some more with J-Term! Don't worry, now I have pictures instead of just a daunting block of text.
On the way to Banning State Park! Once we got there, we assembled our teams and split up.
I was really distracted by taking frost pictures. But THEN we found our first wolf signs! As well as a lot of other animal tracks and signs.
Chagh got really excited and went right for smelling the scent mark we found. We also found wolf fur by it, which I stored in my coat pocket (and still have. I think I'm going to tape it into my journal).
Wolf print!
Cute little mouse tracks
Fox tracks
"Fern eggs", as I call them
PRIDE ROCK
Based on direction from either JMack or Megan
Explorers
This was right after she fell off that log
Trackin'
A jawbone we found!
Kim, one of the J-Termers in our group, told us that aspen trees have a form of yeast on their outer bark! I asked if I could bake bread with it, but I don't think she answered. Maybe I can!
Yeast plus ice crystals
MORE wolf signs, a RLU (raised leg urination)
can't stop, won't stop with lichen pictures
Then came possibly the MOST exciting discovery: WE FOUND WHERE THEY SLEEP. This is a bed made out of leaves, absolutely COVERED in wolf fur. There were several others in the area, as well as some more on the upper level of the cliffs
We found a couple of wild porcupines holed up in small dens in the cliffs and caves we were exploring. You can tell this one is really upset because all of his quills are up
Gotta defend your territory
At this point, we had walked our transect, discovered tons of different animal tracks (fox, wolf, rabbit, short-tailed weasel, pine marten, mouse), lots of other wolf signs, had collected several different pee samples in our special "pee bag", decided we were Team Urine-Shot, since we agreed we needed to make a shot based off of deer pee when they've been eating maple bush (because it smells like brown sugar and cinnamon). We then unfortunately lost all our pee samples, but it was still pretty cool. We made our way up to a cave on the other side of the small valley we ended up in (where the porcupines and wolf beds were) and hung out in a cave that used to be some guy's house while we ate lunch. Brian made us a fire and we watched as the porcupine we'd taken a picture of just a couple of minutes before scaled a tree like Speedy Gonzales.
Noel and a J-Termer having an intense snow fight
I saw this as we headed back and, even though it's probably from a Pileated Woodpecker, still said "BALTO'S BEEN HERE
On the way out, we found a kill site, which was SO COOL. There were wolf footprints everywhere and the half-eaten carcass of a deer. There was deer hair EVERYWHERE, which are really obvious because they're thick and hollow, as well as frozen blood and scattered bones. We figured the jawbone we'd found was from the kill site. We also found more RLUs, scent markings, fur, and prints.
Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries at this point. Which is too bad, because we visited a place called Pancake Falls at that point and it was so much fun. There were giant, beautiful icicles and the entire pond was frozen over, so we penguin slid on it (of course). The small waterfall leading into the pool was also frozen over, so I was determined to slide down it. Everyone gathered to see if I would make it or hurt myself tremendously, and Megan thoughtfully stood as a buffer between me and one particularly sharp rock. Halfway down the waterfall slide, I immediately thought:
But I was already on my way to the ice and did indeed crash into a couple of rocks before getting to my ultimate goal of the pond. It was not fun at all, but it WAS hilarious and a good story. One J-Termer got a pretty amazing picture of me sliding down it, so if I ever manage to get ahold of it I'll post it here DON'T WORRY.
So we didn't get to see actual wolves, which was a little disappointing, but it was still really fun to track them and see all the signs that they'd been there. We tried howling a couple of times to see if they'd respond, but they never did. I didn't hear or see any wolves or wolf-like activity after that, BUT we did try to track down those dogs. Noel and Chagh were charged with tracking them down, but it seemed like they'd left the property. One week later, a family that was staying at the wetlands cabin were chased down by the dogs as they cross-country skied. Luckily, the couple were really into dogs and felt like they should give them a chance, so they started to feed them their leftovers. The entire week they slowly won their trust and eventually, on the last day, got them to come inside their cabin. They were at first INCREDIBLY mistrusting and growled with hackles up whenever anybody moved, but slowly started inching towards people and then allowed petting. They even started enjoying it. I visited the cabin with the intention of giving Chagh a radio and telling him the dog rescue we'd contacted were willing to take the dogs, but was kept there by the prospect of having dog interactions. The most aggressive one, the one who barked at us territorially when we saw her in the woods a couple of weeks before, and who regarded humans with fear, slowly crept towards me with her tail tucked between her legs and glanced into my eyes. I carefully offered my hand for her to sniff, which she did, and then pressed her forehead into my palm. I immediately engulfed her into a hug and wanted to cry. When we called the DNR asking what we should do about aggressive dogs on our property, they responded with, "Well, it's not illegal to shoot them if they're threatening you". Which is why we never called them back. I was so happy the couple that was staying there was so patient with them, and so kind. We were able to get them into the back of the van and take them to the dog rescue in Hinckley, where they whined and stared at us with their big brown eyes and my heart broke. They were already abandoned or lost once and had survived some incredibly cold nights on the ACNW property, and now we were leaving them in their eyes. We hurriedly gave the manager their background story and then left, so that we wouldn't do something drastic like adopt them or burst into tears in the main office where a terrifying bichon frise would NOT stop barking at us. Before we left, we gave them a quick cuddle goodbye and the aggressive girl (they were both females) jumped up on Chagh, as if begging him to stay. I was like NOPE and dragged Chagh back to the van so we could get back to work without going into dog hysteria. I hope so much that they find a good home, they were good dogs (though Danny would disagree).
Lots of canine adventures in the past few weeks. This weekend was a perfect mixture of relaxation and productivity. I got a couple of chores done, made TONS of charms (right on schedule), went on adventures out into the snow, and got to visit a wood shop, where I started making a super secret project. It will hopefully be done in about a week or so (depending on how much time I have), so then I will unveil it. This week we're going to Sax Zim Bog to go birding, which entails getting up at 3 AM to do barn (USDGOEOIGGB), but I'm still excited to go to the bog. Now it's time to go to bed I GUESS (since it's not a 3 day weekend this time). Nighty night, friends!
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