I thought viewers might be interested in checking the current weather where the wolves are roaming.

To see current weather, visit the National Climate Data and Information Archive Web site.

Select "Nunavut" and then select "Eureka."

Need help converting Celsius to Fahrenheit? Visit CalculateMe.com.

Dave

After returning from Axel Heiberg Island, Brutus and probably his pack spent most of their time in the south end of their territory. In several places, 2 consecutive locations were the same, possibly representing kills.

Certainly a pack this size will have to be making kills frequently. How they do that in the 24 hours of darkness is a good question that we wish we could answer. The fact that the pack is spending so much time in the south end of its territory implies that many muskoxen may be spending their winter there too.

Just as wolf movements and activity at this time of year are unknown, so too are the movements and behavior of their shaggy prey. Hopefully we can draw some inference about muskox distribution during winter from examining the locations of the wolves.

Dave

Brutus Crosses to Axel Heiberg Island!

Lying immediately west of Ellesmere Island is Axel Heiberg. On maps, the 2 islands appear as a single entity dissected by fiords. The closest distance between islands is about 8 miles (12.8 Km).

That area is where Brutus and presumably his pack crossed to Axel sometime between October 18 at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Central time (times on the map locations are UTC, Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time).

Remembering that each location is 12 hr apart, we can do some quick calculations to find how much time they might have spent on Axel. Assuming a 5 mph (8 kmph) travel time, they would have spent about 5.5 hr traveling the 27.5 mi (44 km) between their last location on Ellesmere to Axel and back to their first new location on Ellesmere, leaving 18.5 hr as the most time they could have spent on Axel. Of course they could have spent much less time. The location on Axel is just 1.27 mi (2.0 km) inland, but again, they could have traveled farther inland. Nevertheless, we can’t help but wonder why they did not spend more time on Axel.

Could there be another wolf pack there whose scent marks our pack detected? Did our wolves find no muskoxen they could kill? Did they maybe kill a calf, eat it, and then decide to leave? Our guess is that they detected another pack. Otherwise, one would think that after all that travel across the fiord, they would have spent more time searching farther and wider and finally made a kill there. But who knows? Hopefully later travels to the area will give us more insight.

Dave


Note: The Google Earth maps we are using to plot the data were taken during summer when some of the fiords are relatively ice-free and the ground is barren, right now, the entire area is covered with snow, the fiords are frozen, and it is dark, 24 hr/day.

Here on this new map that covers Brutus' locations from September 24 through October 13 one can see several interesting things:

1. the pack's visit to the Eureka Weather Station on October 2 (see Oct. 14 entry);

2. the pack's visit on October 3 to the vicinity of a couple of old kills we found along the S. shore of the fiord in mid July; and

3. Brutus' visit to the shore of the SE arm of Eureka Sound on October 6 (Map 2). If you have Google Earth and zoom in on the area you will see that this shoreline is at the base of a pretty high ridge, possibly > 900 ft. (270 meters) high.

The Weather Station reports that the fiords are frozen and a layer of snow covers everything. By early November, the sun will have set, not to be seen again until mid February. Dave

It looks like the pattern we began to see during the past installment is continuing. Most of Brutus' locations are different rather than often showing him returning to a given point which presumably would be where the pups are staying. This tends to confirm that the pups are probably moving more often with the adults as observed by the weather station folks on October 2.

Dr. Pierre Fogal, a leading scientist working out of the weather station for the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change (CANDAC) snapped a few valuable photos of the pack as it passed by the weather station.

Dave