Chasing wolves with paintball guns - Part 1

One day, I stalked some wolves with a paintball gun.

Wolves are pretty smart. They're resourceful, too, which often leads them into trouble. When I volunteered on the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project, I had to spend a few weeks dealing with a pair of resourceful wolves who, having found themselves hungry and in unfamiliar territory in the Gila National Wilderness of New Mexico, rather quickly identified a handy solution: haunt the campsites of the nearby National Monument.

Map of the area. The large green blob is the Gila Wilderness.

Because livestock depredation can be a serious temptation for the Mexican wolves in the reintroduction area, one of the jobs of us volunteers was occasionally to "haze" wolves away from livestock when they got too close for comfort. Most of the wolves had radio collars, so if one of us drove through ranch land and detected a wolf nearby, or the ranchers reported wolf sightings, we would spend the next few evenings sitting near the herds with paintball guns to prevent a depredation. As a volunteer, the only firearm I was cleared to handle was a paintball gun. The technicians who were employed by the Arizona or New Mexico state wildlife management agencies were cleared to handle shotguns loaded with nonlethal ammunition including cracker shells (also known as "noisemaker rounds"), beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets. Prior to the following story, I had only gone out on one or two hazing excursions during which the wolves never actually approached the livestock.

This story begins with two wolves, a male and female, who were translocated from captivity to the Gila Wilderness in an effort to start a new pack. I can't remember the particular backgrounds of the two wolves who were chosen, but I don't believe either one had been born in captivity. Sometimes wolves are moved to captivity if they're injured, orphaned, or have shown an inclination to kill livestock. After that, they are genetically profiled. Decisions to breed wolves in captivity or translocate them to other locations are based on a synthesis of all the data about the genetic potential, behavioral history, and health of each wolf, in conjunction with the status of the wild wolves and the identification of "holes" in the reintroduction area that could be filled with new individuals, to boost the genetic diversity and size of the entire population.

This particular pair of wolves was dubbed the Laredo Pack. The field team translocated them via a "soft release", in which a temporary enclosure is built and the wolves can chew their way out when they're ready to go. The wolves' diets were supplemented by a few other volunteers who stayed with them in the heart of the Gila Wilderness while the wolves got used to their surroundings. The Laredo Pack didn't spend too long in their temporary enclosure, flying the coop after only a few days.

The field crew monitored them in the area for a few extra days, then packed up their mules and headed back to the field office. It soon became clear, however, that the wolves weren't being so successful in locating food on their own; at some point in their wild roaming, they stumbled upon what must have seemed like a jackpot to them: the campsites at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.

The National Monument is located about an hour up a windy two-lane road north of Silver City, New Mexico, which is itself two and a half hours away from the Mexican wolf field office in Alpine, Arizona. The Monument is relatively small, with a visitors center, a small number of campgrounds, and some trails winding around to view the cliff dwellings or connect to larger trails that traverse the Gila Wilderness. There is a small town called Gila Hot Springs located just east of the Monument, in which a few people raised livestock.

Because of the livestock nearby, and the fact that the wolves were being spotted looting campsites during the early mornings and evenings, my supervisors decided to keep a staff member in the area 24/7 to haze the wolves as often as possible until they left. The other volunteers and the New Mexico state technician on the project (James) took the job in shifts, usually lasting about a week. I was the first person to go, and ended up having to go a second time right before I left the project. My supervisors had made arrangements for us to stay in a crappy cabin shared by two incredibly socially awkward fisheries scientists doing research in the Gila River (I think the West Fork). They had the craziest work schedules, and no place for me to sleep; as a result, on my second trip, I purchased a mattress pad from a store in Silver City and slept in the back of the Ford Explorer (which also didn't have a working radio, so I drove the whole 7-hour round trip with my iPod plugged into my iHome plugged into a power converter plugged into the cigarette lighter, which, oddly enough, did work).

Since wolves are most active during dusk and dawn (i.e. the "crepuscular" hours - how's that for science vocab?), I spent my days hiking the trails, checking out the cliff dwellings, chatting with the visitors center staff, reading, and making my rounds to the campgrounds to talk to the campers, asking if they'd seen anything, and telling them about proper food storage. Sometimes huge storms would roll in in the evenings, with dangerous lightning, torrential downpours, and frightening gusts of wind tearing through the willows and cottonwoods around the cabin, and I'd sit in the cheap outdoor furniture on the wraparound, screened-in porch and watch.

I monitored the wolves' radio signals closely, trying to learn their habits and figure out where they went during the day. For the most part, their signals were only barely audible; there are many creeks and canyons surrounding the National Monument, and they could have been hunkering down in any one of them. The one time I did try to hike back into the Wilderness to find them, I got so frustrated with the number of river crossings that I gave up - after all, not only is constantly taking on and off yours boots annoying, but toting thousands of dollars' worth of telemetry equipment over slippery rock beds over and over again isn't exactly prudent. I settled for hiking up to the top of one of the ridges every day to get a general idea where they were, then waiting for night to fall so my real work could begin.

Main road along the river, between the cliff dwellings
 trailhead and visitors center access road. 

It was interesting work. I have two good stories to tell about the time I spent here. For the most part, though, starting around dusk, I would just drive the main road back and forth between the visitors center and the trailhead to the cliff dwellings, scanning constantly with the roof antenna to listen for changes in the volume and quality of the signals. Later, I would sleep in the Explorer and wake up every hour to make another trip down the road. If I felt like the wolves were getting too close to the campsites, I would park the truck and stand there with my paintball gun at the ready, a sort of guardian of the campsites, sometimes hiking past the sleeping campers up the ridge behind and firing a bunch of warning rounds out into the darkness. I don't know how effective it was; the wolves never got close enough for me to hit them, and my objective was just to impress upon them the futility of their haunting by never letting them get access to the camp food.

One night, as I made another round, driving slowly and quietly down the road with the windows open, listening to the Gila River flowing swiftly on the other side of the thick rushes that separated it from me, a large herd of javelina ran out in front of my truck. I killed the engine, listening to their grunting and looking at my headlights reflected in their eyes as they turned and trotted past me down the road.

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The first story involves my coworker James, who was a volunteer with me before being hired on as the New Mexico technician for the wolf project. Because he was a paid employee, he was permitted to use the shotguns with nonlethal ammunition to haze the wolves.

James was sent out to take over the next shift at the Cliff Dwellings, but our shifts overlapped by a day or two so I could tell him what I'd learned. Since there were two of us, and we finally had more powerful ammunition, we decided to make a more concerted effort to locate the wolves and scare the crap out of them. Thus, very early one morning, we convened at a corral east of the campsites, a spot I'd located that provided easier access to the ridgeline north of the main road, and allowed us to avoid bothering the sleeping campers. James took his shotgun, and I took my paintball gun and the telemetry equipment.

Map of the area. The encounter described took place north of the main east-west road. 

It was a creepy morning. All was gray and silent, with a thick fog rolling through the canyons and up onto the ridges. We left the truck at the corral and headed uphill, arriving at the top of the ridgeline easily and hiking northwestward, all the while monitoring the radio signals. The male's signal was louder, but the female was nearby too. We sneaked along as quickly and quietly as we could through the scrubby vegetation.

The signals got louder and louder. I motioned to James to proceed more slowly. With the fog, we could see maybe 40-50 feet in front of us.

To our left - west - there was a shallow gully that separated our hillside from the one next to us. By now, the male wolf's signal was so strong, even with the gain on my receiver down extremely low, that I knew he had to be somewhere on the adjacent hillside. James walked in front of me a few paces, his eyes fixed ahead, as I followed with my gaze directed westward.

Suddenly, silently, like a ghost, the figure of the male wolf appeared out of the fog on the hill beside us. "James!" I whispered urgently. He whipped his head around and saw the wolf too, just as the wolf saw us and made a dash back into the cover of the clouds, heading northwest. James threw his shotgun to the ready and fired two cracker shells in his direction. I followed suit, albeit pathetically, with paintballs.

James quickly reloaded his shotgun and we took off running after the wolf, dipping down into the shallow gully and emerging on the other hillside where the wolf had been moments ago. We really had no hope of catching him, but James was determined to dog him, firing off more cracker shells as often as he could to tell the wolf we meant business. By the radio signals, I could tell that the male's signal was getting further and further away, but the female's was still somewhere north of us. It too was receding.

Finally, we gave up. I was out of paintballs, the sun was higher, the fog was burning off, and the radio signals were barely audible. The wolves were probably in a canyon somewhere. James and I turned around and headed back to the truck, which proved to be a bit more of a challenge than we expected - with the excitement of the chase, and the fog obscuring our view, we couldn't really remember how we'd gotten where we were. Fortunately, we were prepared with a GPS unit, and we eventually found our way back to the truck.

I returned to Alpine soon after. From James's reports, and the reports of the volunteer who went to the Monument after him, the wolves were still staying in the area, though they weren't coming down into the campsites as often. Thus, three weeks later, I arrived at the cliff dwellings once again. And that's when Part 2 happened.

To be continued....