This week Wisconsin's Natural Resources Board approved a new wolf management, in the meantime the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission GLIFWC is teaming up to learn whether wolves play a critical role in the ecosystem.
Can wolves help control the spread of CWD in white-tailed deer?
Last week, as scientists gathered inside a cozy research station in north central Wisconsin, not far from Minocqua, Michael Menon was one of the researchers in the room.
He’s the UW-Madison PhD student chosen to conduct the wolf study that’s being funded and co-led by the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission.
Menon drew laughter from the crowd when he said, “If you’re on the landscape this winter and you happen to know of a wolf kill or see a good carcass, let me know."
Deer carcasses are key to the study. It’s designed to reveal what effect wolf predation has on the spread of chronic wasting disease, or CWD in Wisconsin’s deer population. The disease is both infectious and fatal.
“We’re going to sample wolf kill sites and then we’re going to use GPS collar to identify a kill site and we go to that kill site and collect data there,” Menon says.
The study will look at how effectively wolves remove a carcass with CWD from the landscape; it will also monitor whether wolves keep other scavengers away from the kill site. It will take time for Menon to pull all those study pieces together.
I met him a day before his presentation, as he trolled State Highway 47 in search of fresh deer kill.
Menon spotted a buck. It weighed around 200 pounds; hoists it in the back of his truck, then transfers or rather pulls the buck onto the back of a small utility vehicle.
“So I still need to extract the lymph nodes,” Menon says he’ll put them on ice and take them back to a UW lab to test them for CWD. He gathers what he’ll need, “OK, machete, rope, batteries,” then we trek out to the study site.
Menon might need the machete to whack down brush that’s grown and obscured the cameras he’s strategically mounted on trees. They capture activity around the deer carcass.
Menon says this study element sets out to mimic nature.
“So what we’re hoping to see here is in the presence of wolf predation pressure, what species are scavenging on this particular deer. So we put in on the landscape. Who is coming in to clean it up? So far we’ve seen vultures coming in, turkey vultures and maggots. But that was based on summer stuff. So with this being the first fall deer that’s getting put out, it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a change in who comes out and who scavenges on it,” Menon says.
This is one of two sites Menon set up in Oneida County. There are six more including in Ashland, Sawyer and Door counties.
Each needs to be outfitted with sturdily installed photo and video cameras. Menon is working out how best to tie the deer down, to prevent predators from dragging it off and rendering his camera system useless.
But there’s more to the study of wolves’ role in controlling chronic wasting disease. It also includes tracking wolves with GPS collars.
Menon says that means more collaboration. He’s conferring with the Wisconsin DNR to see if he can tap into the agency’s existing monitoring system. He’s also in conversation with the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
“They do have some collars on the landscape so I’ve sort of initially talked to them about using that data,” he says.
Menon also hopes to collar additional wolves.
“So this winter is when we hope to be looking at GPS collar data and identifying where a kill site might have taken place, so where wolves have taken down prey,” Menon sys.
He means deer of course.
“Let’s say we get a GPS data that we think OK this is what we think is a kill site. We will then go to those coordinates, fly a drone overhead to make sure the wolves aren’t still actively feeding,” Menon wants to make sure wolves can mainin their normal cycle. “Once we know it’s safe for us, safe for the wolves and nothing else is lurking around and then we’ll go into the site and sample whatever’s left of the carcass for CWD, the soils that’ around the carcass and then any scat that we find.”
But first, Menon says they need to determine the best path to access the site.
“You know a straight line, or do we need to go around a snowbank or water or something like that. So that’s what the drone is for. And it may be effective and it may not so we’re employing that to see if it works,” Menon says.
Menon says once he, the study's principal investigator Tim Van Deelen along with the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission biological services director work through the questions and kinks, he’ll meet with tribal members and ask them to weigh in on the how the study will unfold.
“The gray wolf plays a significant role culturally for the Ojibwe. So Ma’iingan, which is wolf in Ojibwe, it’s their brother. Their creation story of original man and wolf talk about that they’re walking the earth together and whatever happens to Ma’iigan, happens to the Ojibwe,” Menon says.
Menon says the study is designed to bring together Indigenous and scientific ecological knowledge.
“The hopes of the project are to have this as a true collaboration between the tribes and GLIFWC as their representative; and doing the work of ensuring that their treaty rights are upheld and everyone has a seat at the table and everyone benefits from the knowledge that’s gleaned from the study,” Menon says.
It's Jonathan Gilbert’s job to make that happen. He's GLIFWC’s biological services director.
Gilbert says the study is an example of tribal-driven research.
“The tribes know that wolves help take care of these herds of deer, kill the sick ones and all; so as CWD was coming north, tribes would ask me will wolves keep it from entering here. That’s a very good question. And now we have this nice study that’s come from the tribes … brought it to the university to do our best scientific work on it and try to bring those two together -that cultural view and that science view,” Gilbert adds, “That’s the essence of my job.”
The essence of this particular study, Gilbert says is to the protection of treaty rights.
“If CWD comes north, that’s a problem. Success will be to continue to hunt deer. The other part of it is the role of wolves in one ecosystem ... They’re playing a role in a full-functional ecosystem by keeping sick and injured deer, taking them down to keep the (deer) population healthy,” Gilbert says. “When the tribes talk about wolves keeping their place in the environment, this is part of that.”
But there’s more at work here.
Gilbert, who is not Indigenous, believe it’s critical that the next generation of wildlife professionals learn to work with a variety of cultures.
“We do a really good job of training them in statistics and experimental design and habitat monitoring and population ecology and all of those things, but I’ll maintain that no matter where a person goes in the United States in wildlife, they will work in a multicultural environment and yet we are not training our graduate students to work in a a multicultural environment; and we need to do that,” Gilbert says.
That too, he says will take time.
He says he’ll be guiding Michael Menon through that process; a process Gillbert’s learned through personal experience, can’t be rushed.
“When I started, whenever it was, 40 years ago, I didn’t know anything. Frankly it wasn’t a big part of my job the first decade because we were so focused on court and battling,” Gilbert says. “And then gradually more of that cultural part of my job started to become more apparent to me, and so over the years I’ve just learned things.”
Gilbert says he’s sure he’s made mistakes, “but I’ve gradually and slowly tried to incorporate what I know about tribal culture into the science work that I do, just by listening.”
It’s clear to Gilbert, there’s much to be learned from Indigenous knowledge.
“It’s obvious that there is. They have thousands of years of observations of living here, being with these resources They’ll collected all kinds of knowledge. There’s obviously ways that this can help in this ‘management of natural resources’ we just gotta figure out how.”
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