Amazing forest friends
Maybe an ‘out of bounds’ post about animals and not hiking, but this article and the animals highlighted made an impact. These animals are, after all, my forest friends with whom I share the woods every time I go.
Who was wolf 57? is an article worth the read!
This article also has special meaning for me as I am drawn to OR’s Indigo Pack after hearing them one night at Diamond Lake.
The story starts with a human finding an empty radio collar that was fully intact – found near Little Bitterroot Lake in Montana. The wildlife person found “Banff” on the collar and contacted Canadian officials. Their response provided this inference
The collar, she learned, had last been seen more than 18 years earlier, on a young female grey wolf in one of the Banff-area packs. But after she’d vanished from their range, nobody in Banff had ever been sure what became of her. Now, it seemed that she had traveled hundreds of kilometres before eventually meeting her end.
Cottage Life
18 years and several hundred kilometers and no sign of destruction / damage on the collar. Whew! that’s something, right?
Her last ping came on June 11, 2003. She was near Two Jack Lake, a small, road-access lake that juts off the western end of Lake Minnewanka, just a 15-minute drive from downtown Banff. After that, she disappeared—until her collar was rediscovered, 18 years later and more than 400 kilometres away.
Cottage Life
One might jump to the conclusion that Wolf 57’s story is an anomaly- an outlier. Sorry.
But, according to Parks Canada, it’s not uncommon for wolves in the Banff area, like Wolf 57, to make it to Montana. Just a few months before Wolf 57’s collar was discovered, another young wolf (WM2001) from the Banff area, one fitted with a GPS collar, travelled 480 kilometres to the state in just five days before being legally shot when he was only six-and-a-half kilometres past the U.S. border.
Cottage Life
Not so unusual for wolves and the article talks about a moose in the east that traveled similar south to north. Just amazing animals. The article concludes with an obvious – ‘large animals need more space that we thought’ and the call for help to make sure that animal ‘through-ways’ are created through people, over / under roads and railways and other obstacles between here and there (wherever there is).
We all have a part to play … conservation, awareness and support for animal migration paths … there can be no hope without action. What can you do?
