Yes; No Collaring This Year

It's official, the Inuit have refused to allow any more animal collaring, and our application to collar has been denied.  Again we were very lucky to be given approval to collar last year.

Thus we will concentrate on checking out > 50 probable muskox-kill locations based on 2 or more of Brutus's consecutive locations being in the same place.  We also hope to do a helicopter count of muskoxen and the few Peary caribou in the area.

Much of the information we obtain will be very useful to help explain Brutus' pack movements and behavior last year.  We will keep folks posted with new entries as we learn more.

Dave

2010 Trip: No Collaring?

Although we had hoped to collar a few remaining members of Brutus's pack in July 2010, that possibility is now in doubt.  We were very fortunate to receive approval in 2009 to collar Brutus because native people in Nunavut and other areas of northern Canada do not easily accept collaring animals. We are scheduled to arrive on Ellesmere Island on July 3, weather permitting, but our permit application for collaring has not yet been approved. We understand that there is considerable opposition to our
collaring more wolves or any muskoxen.

Assuming our permit to observe the Eureka wolves is approved, Dean Cluff, Dan MacNulty, and I will do what we can to locate this year's den and to examine as many probable kill locations as we can, based on Brutus's data. Thus we will report our progress here as we proceed.

And we are still attempting to discuss our collaring with the local Inuit, hoping that they will allow us to deploy at least one collar on a wolf.

Dave 

The Brutus Pack's Kills and Rendezvous Sites

Our analysis of the locations of Brutus and pack so far indicates that between July 9 and December 21, 2010 the pack made about 30 possible muskox kills. Our main assumption in this analysis is that if Brutus remained at, or within .5 km of a location more than once (i.e., for more than 12 hr), the reason was to feed on a kill.

From July through Nov. 17, however, multiple times at a single location could also indicate visits to pups at a den or a rendezvous site. We identified 5 probable rendezvous sites (RS) based on multiple visits/site:

Distance Between Sites

RS	First date	#Visits	Mi	Km
1	7-18-1200	6
2	8-5-0000	38	11.3	18.2
3	8-17-1200	6	8.4	13.5
4	8-25-1200	20	3.4	5.9
5	10-11-00	13	13.5	21.7

The above dates show when Brutus first visited each of the RSs, and their locations are shown in the accompanying map. However, the pack moved back and forth among the sites. For example, Brutus used RS 2 between 8/5 and 8/17, but he also returned there 8/21 - 8/25; 9/15 - 9/27; 10/8 - 10/9; 10/14; 10/22 - 23; and 11/17, while using other RSs in between.

Often during summer the wolves move pups to kills, and then the pups stay there for extended periods, and those become RSs. If that was the case with these RSs, that would add another possible 5 kills to the kill total through December 21.

Dave

Brutus' Necropsy

Dean Cluff necropsied Brutus last week and learned that:

1. The hole in his rib cage was the result of a scavenger, probably a raven.

2. The carcass was emaciated, with no fat even in the femur bone marrow. Fat there is the last to be used, so when it is gone, the animal dies.

Thus we conclude that Brutus died of starvation. Why he starved is unknown. The last time we know he was with the pack was March 29 (see April 29 blog). He could have been in marginal condition then, which we could not have detected from photos.

He traveled straight-line distances of 110.5 miles (176.8 km), or an average of 9.2 mi (14.7 km)/12-hr period from March 29 to April 4 when he then remained in a single location for at least 36 hr. We presume this indicates a kill. After leaving that on April 6, he traveled a straight-line distance of 70.9 miles (113.4 km), or an average of 5.9 mi (9.4 km)/12-hr period before reaching the location where he died, sometime about April 13-15.

A rough and very preliminary examination of all Brutus' location data from October on suggests that the pack's rate of kill was similar from October through January. However in February it dropped by 45%, and in March by 65% from the Oct.-January period. Had the pack killed most of the vulnerable muskoxen by then?

Was Brutus' kicked out of the pack after the last kill on April 5-6? Was he too old or weak then to compete for food at that kill? Was the kill only a muskox calf from last year that had too little food on it to feed the whole pack? Wolves can eat 22 pounds (10 kg) at a sitting, so a calf would not fully feed all 20 wolves.

Brutus' death raises this and many other questions.

Most of them will remain unanswered, but they help feed our motivation to learn more about this pack and its ecology and behavior. Hopefully this summer we will collar more wolves and thus continue to discover much more. We also will begin analyzing the data from Brutus. So, please check back with us periodically.

Thanks for your continuing interest.

Dave

Brutus to be Necropsied Soon

On May 6, Rai LeCotey, Weather Station manager who found Brutus' carcass, brought the carcass to Yellowknife, NWT for necropsy as Rai was flying home to eastern Canada after ending his most recent shift at Eureka. As indicated earlier, there was a hole in the left side of the carcass and yellow fluid in the snow beneath. Also Brutus appeared emaciated, and one photo shows blood around one haunch. These conditions are all possible clues to Brutus' demise, but nothing definitive can be determined until the actual necropsy, if then. Dean Cluff, who is headquartered in Yellowknife, will necropsy Brutus during the next week in hopes of determining his cause of death, and we will post the results here.

Dave