VIDEOS
Below are several videos from the Voyageurs Wolf Project. Most of this footage was captured via remote cameras. We have many more fascinating videos on our Facebook Page and Youtube Channel.
Here is the first-ever camera collar footage from a wild wolf to our knowledge. We hope you enjoy seeing the world from a wolf's point of view! What is particularly fascinating is that this wolf (V089, a lone wolf) knew how to hunt and catch fish. He can be seen eating 3 different fish, which were all killed and consumed at the same spot along the Ash River.
This video is a compilation of the wildlife that crossed a beaver dam just south of Voyageurs National Park from March 2019-April 2020. That is, this video was literally a year in the making! Beaver dams can be wildlife highways in boreal environments like the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, allowing all sorts of wildlife to easily cross wetland habitats which might be otherwise difficult to get across. While the wildlife is undoubtedly neat, we particularly enjoyed watching the changing of the seasons on this beaver dam! It summarizes life in the Northwoods: cold snowy winters and hot, humid summers with lots of vegetation!
Can wolves actually alter wetlands and change the course of streams and rivers? Yes!! Research by the Voyageurs Wolf Project demonstrates how wolves in boreal ecosystems do this. Volume up!
We got this crazy footage in early May 2020 of the breeding pair from the Paradise Pack fending off a black bear from their den with 4 pups in it. The pack only consisted of a breeding pair (Wolves V077 and V085) and we know from GPS-locations that the pair were, at times, both away from the den getting food leaving the pups alone. If the bear had visited when both wolves were away, the bear could easily have killed all 4 pups! The pack continued to use this den for 2 more days before moving their pups a short ways to another den.
The first-ever footage of wolves eating blueberries in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem! We tried for 2 years to get this footage of wolves eating berries and finally got it in Summer 2019! As far as we know, this is the only footage that exists of wild wolves eating blueberries. Though, we know of a few clips of wolves eating other kinds of berries or fruits.
We got this wonderful footage of a Sheep Ranch pack adult moving the pups across a rock ridge in late July. As the wolves moseyed along the ridge, the pups grabbed some blueberries and the pack let out a few howls (see and hear one in the video!). There were other adults traveling with the pups but they weren't seen on this camera.
In March 2019, we set up three remote cameras at a den that had been used by the Sheep Ranch Pack from 2016–2018. The pack did not use this den in 2019 but wolves and a variety of other elusive animals visited this area. This video is a compilation of the wildlife activity that was recorded.
This is the first-ever recorded video footage of wolves hunting and killing freshwater fish. We were ecstatic to catch this one-of-a-kind footage on remote cameras set up in May 2018 near Voyageurs National Park. The Bowman Bay Pack (the wolves in this video) are the only pack that exhibits this fishing behavior, and each spring the wolves spend ~50% of their time hunting and catching spawning white suckers at one creek. While wolves in coastal areas of Alaska and British Columbia are well-known to eat spawning salmon, wolves hunting fish in inland ecosystems was practically unheard of, with the exception of a few anecdotal reports in older government reports and theses. The Bowman Bay Pack has now hunted fish every spring since 2017.
Some of the first howls from a pup of the Wiyapka Lake Pack in early May 2019. The pack had a total of 5 pups in 2019, and the pups were about 1 month old when this video was recorded.
Here is the story of an active wolf den in spring 2019 and how a female wolf had to save her 7 pups as the den began to flood. This is without a doubt the best glimpse into what happens at an active wolf den in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem that we have ever seen. This footage was made possible by a collaboration with PBS Nature for their series 'American Spring Live' which aired on national television on May 1, 2019.
We thought Wolf V074, who was collared in October 2018, was the breeding male of the Shoepack Lake Pack. However, he was not localizing around a den in spring 2019 and we suspected the pack might not have had pups. Then one day, completely to our surprise, while searching clusters of GPS-locations from V074 to find kills, we found the Shoepack den in a huge old beaver lodge in a beaver meadow. V074 had stopped by the den for a few hours and then moved on. This was totally unexpected, but fortuitous, as it provided the first pup count and den location we have ever documented from this pack.
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