Diane K. Boyd
speaker
610 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Diane K. Boyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What's up? How are you? I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great. Thank you.
Oh, good. Oh, good. You got to watch it.
Thanks, and I'm excited, too, because I thought, well, we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you've got an interest in wolves. It's all good.
Well, I grew up in Minnesota, and you can probably tell from the Fargo accent. But I grew up in Minnesota, and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in Wisconsin. And so I was interested from the beginning with that.
And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meech, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus. So I just stopped by and kept bugging him. I wouldn't go away like a good parasite. Persist, persist, persist.
You know, I'm kind of a wildlife person. They're the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal. They're a carnivore. They're social-like people. And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life growing up until I was about 15. So I had this passion for canines in general. I love dogs.
No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan. They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like 1949, 50s, early, and they stayed and they got seated there and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that. And is it still like that there? Yes.
And the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because, you know, in nature, nothing is here. We always wanted to be here, but it's always doing this. Right. And yeah, they're doing there. And then interestingly, when they when they arrived, they migrated on their own power. There was very little immigration there.
There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently genetically there was no influx of new genes. So the wolves that came and went didn't breed. And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies.
And eventually, just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father-daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over. And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally. So they just did a reintroduction to Iowa oil, too. That's been relatively new, just a handful of years.
So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep them going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.
Yeah.
No. So in my book, I've got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf. And so people call these wolves super wolves because they say that they're not native. They're Canadian super wolves and they weigh 170 pounds and it goes on and on and on. But I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, Wolf 8551. And we just had VHF collars. We didn't have satellite collars in those days.
And she hung around for a while and then she just disappeared. And seven months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry game warden called me. He says, we got one of your wolves killed. Do you want to call her? Yes, please. Where is it? Puskupe. I said, oh, where is that? Well, it turns out that is 540 miles north of Glacier Park in seven months. Wow.
So we didn't know if the guy, a farmer, shot it in July. If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her. But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park. So clearly they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf is
is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia. And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were. So this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon.
It's connected because it's a walkabout for a wolf. It's not a big deal. We just didn't back then, we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals. But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently, and it was from the Midwest. Think about that, to Colorado. Wow.
Yeah. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It just said the Great Lakes region. It didn't just identify because they're all kind of the same. But it was not a Western wolf. It was not from Wyoming or Montana. Really interesting.
The wolf that I'm talking about. Yes. Yeah, she was born in Glacier Park. We caught her first as a pup, so we know where she was born. We know the den. And then at about a year and a half of age, almost two... She dispersed that far and she didn't have to go that far.
I mean, if she wanted to find other wolves and start a pack or join a pack, she could have gone any direction, 50 or 100 miles and found other wolves. You know what? If you tell me why wolves do what they do and I'll buy a lottery ticket. I mean, I don't know how these things work.
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