For the past several years, the scientists of the Voyageurs Wolf Project in northern Minnesota have revealed important new information about wolf diet and hunting in the boreal forest. They have revealed that the predators don’t just chase moose or deer, usually as a pack, but also rely on food sources from blueberries to fish to beavers.
To do this, they have relied on GPS collars that track the wolves every movement, on trail cameras that record their behavior and relationships, and on walking thousands of miles through the backcountry to investigate kill sites, dens, and wolf deaths. The latest discovery also took a good dose of luck.
In mid-September, the scientists received video from another wildlife biologist’s trail cameras that showed something only seen on camera once before: a wolf attacking and killing a beaver.
Lucky break
According to the Voyageurs Wolf Project, the camera was not set up to watch wolves at all. Rather, it was placed by Dani Freund, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and two field technicians, Sage Patchett and Olivia Jensen, as part of a study of beavers and stress caused by wolf predation. The camera was pointed at a “hair snare,” a strand of barbed wire that is designed to capture hair from the beavers, which can be tested for stress levels.
But in the middle of the night on Sept. 17, it showed a single wolf wrestle and kill a beaver along a trail where the aquatic rodents forage.
“The beaver put up a valiant fight and at a few points was only a few meters from the safety of water,” the scientists say. “If the beaver could have just freed itself for a few moments, it might have lived. But it couldn’t…there appears to be a thin margin for beavers between life and death when on land!”
Rarely seen
The only other video of a wolf killing a beaver that the Voyageurs Wolf Project is aware of was recorded in Quebec in 2015. It was so valuable the Minnesota scientists worked with the individual who recorded the video to publish a paper about it in a peer-reviewed wildlife biology journal. In it, they explored the idea that wolves have the necessary cognition to lay in wait and ambush beavers when they emerge from the water.
Earlier this year, the scientists were excited when one of their cameras recorded a wolf chasing a beaver on a beaver dam, but the prey ultimately escaped. This new video, recorded by pure happenstance, provided a groundbreaking look into the lives of northern Minnesota’s wildlife and their eternal struggle for survival.
“But sometimes it is better to be lucky than good! And we certainly think we had a stroke of luck,” wrote the Voyageurs Wolf Project. “We have had a lot of cameras out over the past 9 years in the area and we have never captured anything like this!”