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
And that's with everything, and it hasn't changed because the number of wolves, too, went – from 0 to 31 to 160, 165. In the last 10 years, it's been right about 100 wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending the resource. So they're stable right now. The wolves are not increasing anymore.
Wolves killing each other and trespassing. People go, oh, that's awful. I said... Not really. I mean, if you had somebody coming into your home to steal your goods, wouldn't you shoot them if you had the chance? Or wouldn't you defend your home?
To defend your home, right? Yourself, your family. The wolves do the same thing. It's sort of like what's going on with the wars everywhere in the world. The wolves do the same, and they don't always kill the trespassers. If they can catch them, they beat them up pretty bad. Sometimes they kill them. Sometimes you may have a benevolent pack leader that just... kind of has the wolves chase it off.
But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think it's like 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, non-PAC members.
So you'd have to go to the Yellowstone researchers to look at it. But I would say genetic relations, if it's closely related, they're more likely to not kill it. And if there's abundant food, they'd be more likely to probably not kill it. I think it's a combination of the two.
Yes.
What, Mexican wolves?
The animal up in the northeastern part of the U.S. is called a coy wolf, and it's a coyote mixed with a wolf of unknown origin mixed with dogs. And there's lots of theories out there, and I'm not up on the most current theory. The original wolf up there was more like the red wolf. Then you get down here and down in Louisiana, Texas, Florida.
There were red wolves, and now they're just at the alligator refuge in North Carolina. But those are being bred almost out of existence because they're hybridizing with coyotes.
Yeah, not hardly ever.
Well, up in the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that's where he started doing wolf stuff, they look a little bit like coyote. And the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote. But it's very uncommon. When a wolf encounters a coyote, they kill it.
So they were, I mean, so you get a fox, it's like 10 pounds. You get a coyote, it's like 30 pounds. You get a wolf, it's 90 to 100 pounds. It's about three times between each step. And so the ones that are closest, so for coyotes, the foxes are a threat. They kill them. For the wolves, the coyotes are a threat and they kill them.
But a 100-pound wolf and a 10-pound fox, it might be a nuisance and you let it scavenge. But it's not a threat to you.
Exactly. So when wolves come back on the landscape, it happened up where we are, happened at Yellowstone, where it's just been a coyote economy since the wolves were taken out. Coyotes rule, right? I love coyotes too, but I shouldn't say love. I really respect them.
But when you have the wolves coming back and they start displacing and killing and hammering on the coyotes, well, surprise, all of a sudden red fox are coming back. And like where I work in the North Fork, All those early winters, we had people out all winter on skis tracking wolves. We never saw fox tracks. Never. And I never caught one in a wolf trap.
And then as time went on and the wolves took a foothold, so to speak, a toehold in the country, and they started hammering the coyotes. All of a sudden there's fox. I got fox denning on my property now.
Oh, yeah. Big time.
Big time.
Sure. Or do they eat them? I don't. You know what? I haven't followed that. I don't track that that closely. But I would guess most of the time not unless they're incredibly hungry. I would guess it's a strict eliminating a competitor situation. I've seen. I mean, you can look at the data in Yellowstone.
They have witnessed tons of times of wolves going up to coyote dens and digging out on killing all the pups and trying to kill the parents. And I don't think they usually eat them. I could be wrong in that, but I don't think so.
Showing 461–480 of 610 · page 24 of 31
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