The Voyageurs Wolf Project had a camera on a wolf that crossed from Minnesota into Ontario.
VOYAGEURS NATIONAL PARK, Minnesota — Wolves in the wild are constantly on the move.
That’s nowhere more apparent than in a new video released by a research team working near the Ontario/Minnesota boundary.
It shows everything a wolf might do from daybreak to dusk.
Members of the Voyageurs Wolf Project captured “Wolf O2L” and fitted him with a collar-mounted camera to record his activities last spring.
As it happened, the animal – a lone wolf without a pack – travelled into northwestern Minnesota before crossing the border into Ontario.
After the GPS-equipped collar dropped to the ground, as it was programmed to do, the study team made contact with a couple who live in the Bergland area, about 30 kilometres north of the town of Rainy River.
They were able to locate the device nearby and ship it back across the border.
What the scientists retrieved from the video was everything Wolf O2L did between 6:45 a.m. and 9 p.m. on June 5, 2021.
The video is long because it shows all the wolf’s activities at five-minute intervals.
It’s well-known that wolves can travel long distances over the course of a day looking for food and places to sleep.
But research team lead Tom Gable says anyone viewing the video will “feel the rhythm” of the animal as they see how it is “constantly moving, for long periods of time, and then just crashing and not moving, then moving again and making a kill.”
Although the study group didn’t see anything scientifically novel in the video, Gable said they still found it insightful.
“You can look at the GPS locations [the researchers track these] and say ‘Oh yeh, they travel a lot.’ It’s another thing to watch it. Here it’s in a farm field, then it’s in a forest, now it’s in a wetland. It’s constantly moving,” he said.
June 5 of last year happened to be an exceptionally hot day, with the temperature reaching almost 33 degrees Celsius.
Gable said the heat had an obvious effect on the wolf.
“You can see that in the middle of the day, he sits down and just does not move. You can see him panting, because it was so brutally hot.”
Wolf O2L also happened to be noteworthy for its size.
When the researchers tranquilized him for collaring, he weighed in at 91 pounds (41 kilograms).
That’s the biggest wolf that’s ever been studied over the years that the Voyageurs Wolf Project has operated.
source tbnewswatch