From the field:
stubborn cold, frozen lakes, and cryptic wolves
By Maggie Baham
'From the field' articles chronicle the adventures, difficulties, and hard-earned insights that come with doing fieldwork in the remote and wild Northwoods.
The Minnesotan winter is no joke. I grew up crossing my fingers for snow days in winter. Snow was the highlight of the season, and I would do just about anything to be out in it. The first day of the winter field season was no exception. Snow and ice decorated the trees, and a turquoise sky peeked through the blanket of clouds. The negative temperatures forced me to burrow into my jacket, but nothing could deter my mood - especially after the sighting I had just earlier.
It didn’t take me long to plan and head out for the day. With this being my third season, I navigated to my starting point without needing my phone or GPS. It was a typical start to a field day. Of course, in this field, one should never expect their day to go exactly to plan. I turned off onto a forest road and immediately slammed on the brakes.
The sun peaking through trees adorned with snow and ice on a cold winters day out in the field. Photo credit: Maggie Baham
A figure perched in the middle of the road. The spotted tan pelt gave the creature away, and as it hightailed out of sight, I caught a glimpse of its bobbed tail. I sat dumbfounded in my car at the bobcat. Felids are a rarer sight than canids in our study area. I’d seen a variety of wildlife, but never a felid, let alone a bobcat!
If that sighting wasn’t a good omen for the day, I didn’t know what was.​
...
A snapshot from a trail camera of a bobcat playing along a snowy trail in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem.
The bobcat still fresh in my mind, I made my way to my first location of the day. P6T, a young subordinate female from the Bug Creek pack, was who I was tracking for the day. I followed her all summer and had some idea of what to expect from her. Then again, wolf behavior in the winter differs from the summer. And after the bobcat, it was obvious I shouldn’t be expecting anything.
A glance at my GPS showed P6T’s location from a couple of days ago just off into the woods. The area seemed pretty open compared to the thick vegetation of summer, which should have made bushwhacking easier. One step in changed my mind. My boots sunk into snow over my ankles. A few more steps and the snow reached my shins. Every step was a battle to push through the snow. This wasn’t quite what I’d imagined winter bushwhacking to be, but there was a clearing just ahead.
NEED PIC OF P6T.
I broke out from the trees onto a ridge. The sun peeked out from the clouds, and I savored the warmth as I caught my breath. As I got my bearings, a dark spot against the snow caught my eye. I knelt down for a closer look and was rewarded. Patches of brown deer hair spread across the ridge, along with a few bone shards. But, even after brushing snow away, there were no stomach contents or blood, the tell-tale signs of a wolf kill. P6T consumed deer here, but this wasn’t where she and the Bug Creek pack took it down.
I checked my GPS again. This ridge wasn’t the first place P6T had visited in the area. Past field seasons taught me that visiting the first spot a wolf stopped at was a good place to find clues about what occurred there. I would have to bushwhack further to get to that first GPS point. With this much deer hair, there had to be a kill nearby; I just had to pinpoint it.
​
Bushwhacking back into the trees, I kept my eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary - wolf and deer tracks, disturbances in the snow, anything that looked off. A couple of circles through the area yielded nothing. I was about to go back to the ridge when a splotch of bright red appeared through the trees. Finally, I found the kill site!
Left: A wolf track next to deer frozen deer blood in the snow.
Right: Maggie Bahma investigating the site of wolf P6T and the rest of the Bug Creek pack's deer kill.
​The snow was stained red - the blood - and brown - from the stomach contents. Even more hair and bone shards were scattered through the area. Deer kills were a rare thing to find in the summer, and they didn’t look anything like this. I could see the game trail where the wolves had chased the deer down, blood smeared on the base of a tree where P6T and her pack had taken down the deer, and every direction the wolves had gone off in to consume their kill. I took my time deciphering the event and recorded every detail in excitement.
...
Temperatures rose slightly above zero by the end of my day. After the thrill of finding a kill first thing in the morning, all P6T and Bug Creek left me to find were bed sites. Though, I was finally settling into my pace hiking through the snow. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, I drove up to my last spot of the day.
One more trail remained to hike down, followed by a short bushwhack around a frozen beaver pond. The location yielded another bed site - a lovely bed beneath a conifer. Bushwhacking out, though, I found a set of wolf tracks, likely from P6T or a pack member.
The paw prints traced the shore of the beaver pond until they veered off onto the ice. I hesitated following them. I had been on lakes already, but I didn’t know if I could trust frozen beaver ponds, and didn’t feel like testing it. From the shore, my eyes followed the wolf prints - one set going out, one set coming back. I looked to where exactly they led and spotted a mound in the middle of the pond, the beaver lodge! My breath formed in the air as I laughed at the wolf’s antics. This wolf had no reservations about heading out onto the ice, especially if it meant it might get a bite of beaver. It had left near perfect paw prints, and I couldn’t help myself as I whipped out my phone for a video and photoshoot.
Wolf tracks, likely from wolf P6T - the picture of the tracks that Maggie took that day headed out across the frozen beaver pond.
About the author:
MAGGIE BAHAM about the author paragraph here.