Catching Luna, Part Two

It was a cool, windless June morning, the day before I was supposed to hand the trapline over to the next volunteer, that I left the run-down cabin once again to meet my supervisor on the road to Indian Creek.

Wolves are "crepuscular", meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk. I checked the traps every morning and evening (before sunset, because it'd be really hard to process a wolf at night), but the evening checks were always sort of pointless. If we were going to catch a wolf, it would be in the morning; thus one of my supervisors would drive out to cruise the line with me. It's possible to handle and process a captured wolf alone, but this was not something they wanted to leave to volunteers (especially since I had never captured a wolf before).

Helen met me at the intersection and I hopped in her truck, and together we drove down the rough, rocky road to the sandy wash of Indian Creek. We had traps placed here and there along the road, which culminated in a hairpin turn to the north to reveal the meadow where the creek washed out. One of these traps had been sprung; and for a moment our hearts raced, until we saw the empty trap a few yards away. An elk had stepped in it.

Similar (not exact) trap to what we used.
Offset, padded jaws reduce injury.  

We used offset, padded foothold traps with variable tensions to select heavier animals (versus bobcats or coyotes; they wouldn't weigh enough to spring the trap if they stepped on it). They were attached to long drags, which look like anchors, designed to let the captured animal run away and take cover (versus the animal just sitting there in a trap staked into the ground, out in the open, stressing out), where the drag gets caught up in heavy vegetation. Since elk and deer have slender hooves, they don't get caught in the traps, though they can spring them.

(**I want to note that I am very aware of the controversies surrounding trapping. Responsible trappers who capture furbearers to sell furs are constantly aware of best trapping practices, which are continually revised as technology advances to increase humaneness of traps and reduce injury to wildlife and capture of non-target animals; and trapping regulations are often passed in accordance with these practices. Unfortunately, misunderstanding has resulted in bans of foothold traps in many states - including their use in nonlethal wildlife research. Cage traps do not usually work for Canids. Even foothold traps must be boiled prior to use and handled with boiled gloves to eliminate human scent. And cage traps, as humane as they sound, do not prevent injury - I've captured bobcats and mountain lions who scraped up their legs and faces trying to push through the bars. It would be great if we could learn everything we needed to know without having to capture animals at all, but at the moment, it's a necessary evil.**)

We continued on our way, deciding to re-set this trap on our way out if the rest were empty. Trap after trap passed away beside us, untouched. As had happened every morning and night during the rest of the week, when I would set out with suspense and excitement in my heart, disappointment began to settle on me again.

And then we rounded that corner. The very last trap had been pulled out of the ground. Helen jammed on the brakes. At first I couldn't see anything, so I glanced back at her for direction - and she was staring wide-eyed into the deep morning shadows in the northeast. I followed her gaze.

There, in the shade above the creek where the thick forest came down to meet it, was a Mexican wolf.

For a few moments we just stared at the wolf as she crouched about a hundred yards away, caught up in a clump of shrubs. Capturing wildlife is always exciting, and I took the few minutes of stillness to breathe deep and calm myself down. Then Helen turned to me and explained how we were going to do this.

As quietly and calmly as we could, so as not to startle the wolf further, we got out of the truck, walked around to the back, and removed the capture equipment. Helen got the sedative ready and took the catch-pole (the rod with an adjustable noose on the end), and I took the Y-pole (a rod with a Y at the end for securing the wolf's head against the ground). Slowly, we crept toward her.

Helen had done this dozens, if not hundreds, of times, but I thought she still looked nervous. She told me to stand ready with the Y-pole while she went in with the catch-pole. It soon became clear that this wolf was not going to go down easily.

Coyote capture from 2007. He's not
at all sedated (and I'm actually holding
onto his collar, not punching him
in the neck)

I had been on numerous coyote captures prior to this. With coyotes, we never even needed a sedative - Canids in general, since they are so social, are quick to identify that fighting would be useless and often cower in submission while you do whatever you need to do. (Cats are an entirely different story. They'll kill themselves trying to get away from you.) I remember walking straight up to coyotes in traps, noosing them with the catch-pole, and easily sliding a muzzle over their noses while the animal didn't so much as move. I sort of thought this wolf capture was going to be the same way.

It wasn't. That wolf snarled and snapped and wouldn't let Helen put that noose over her head. No matter what I did to distract her, she would swing those golden eyes around just in time and jerk her head away from Helen's catch-pole. That's what I remember most about her - those eyes, and the whiteness around them, in the moments when her head was pointed at me but she could feel the noose coming again.

She had been caught on a hind foot. As traumatic as it may sound to someone who hasn't done it before, foothold-trapping is remarkably humane; aside from some swelling, there is usually very little damage done to the animal's foot. However, hindfoot captures are not ideal. It's harder for a wolf to try to lunge away with a foreleg captured. As it was, between our attempts to restrain her, sometimes this wolf would take off in the other direction and pull and pull against the trap around her foot. The risk of her dislocating a hip or a knee with all that pulling worried us.

Helen tried her luck with the Y-pole, with the same results. The wolf just wasn't giving up. I think we tried for about 15-20 minutes to secure her. I don't remember how we ended up getting her head secured - if it was some new tactic of Helen's, or the wolf was just getting tired - but somehow, we finally managed it. Helen got the catch-pole around her neck and gently pushed her to the ground. I followed with the Y-pole. While I held her head down, Helen injected the sedative. Then we removed the poles and went back to the truck to wait for her to go down.

We were both thoroughly stressed out now. So far, the capture wasn't going entirely to plan. As we waited for the sedative to take effect, Helen gave me further instructions for the rest of the process.

I always liked Helen. She was definitely my favorite supervisor on that job; she was patient and friendly, but also stern and confident when the situation demanded it. With a never-ending stream of expendable volunteers appearing and disappearing from the project, it was easy for the permanent staff to stop caring much about them. It was never like that with Helen.

Now, her usual friendliness was clipped. Our mentor-mentee relationship sort of transformed into a drill sergeant-soldier situation. This was an important moment for me; up until this point I had had a reputation for being somewhat willful, my pride often overcoming good sense when I felt that it was being challenged - even with supervisors. But somehow, this time, I was able to bury it all and commit to taking Helen's orders, not challenging her, and not being hurt by her criticisms or decisions. I had wanted this experience to benefit me - I wanted to learn how to do everything, from drawing blood to taking measurements to injecting PIT tags and vaccines, and there is perhaps nothing more crushing to a learning wildlife biologist than being sent to the sideline to write down the data. But in this case, the need for expediency was well-recognized by Helen and, fortunately, by me as well.

In less than half an hour, the wolf had been collared, vaccinated, vampired, and measured. I honestly don't remember how much of this I got to do, since we were trying to get it all done so quickly, but since there were only two of us, I'm sure Helen let me do quite a bit. The wolf was a young, non-breeding female, weighing only 45 pounds. She was beautiful. Most Mexican wolves are very rusty-colored, but she was surprisingly white, only a little of the rustiness on her head. She was given the unremarkable moniker of F1115. But it meant that the Luna Pack was back on the map.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this whole experience is what was going on in the background throughout the entire thing. From the moment we pulled up in the truck, somewhere off in the forest, we heard another wolf howling. Wolves have a variety of howls that are used for a variety of purposes - but this was bark-howling, which sounds just like it...well, sounds...and means that the wolf is stressed out. He knew that his buddy was in trouble.

It went on. And on. And on. For the entire thing. It might have contributed to F1115's anxiety as we tried to restrain her. The other wolf remained just out of sight the entire time, while his howls reverberated through the meadow. When I saw F1115 again in the other blog post, she was accompanied by a very large, rusty mate, and I feel instictively that it was him who was howling at us at her capture.

Anyway, we finally finished processing F1115 and prepared to set her loose. Helen let me hold her down while she administered the sedative reversal, and then we removed her muzzle and backed off. A few minutes later, she rose groggily to her feet, cast a last glance of loathing back at us, and took off through the forest.

Helen and I breathed a sigh of relief. It remains my first and only wolf capture, and a day I will never forget. And, as previously mentioned, this wolf was the subject of that later experience, which has been one of my favorite days ever on the job as a wildlife biologist. Also, once she was collared, we were able to locate and collar some of the rest of the members of her pack - including, I'm fairly certain, her friend (AM1155).

Hard to believe that was six years ago. And with the ongoing difficulties surrounding the Mexican Wolf reintroduction project, perhaps one of the most encouraging thoughts for me is that F1115 is still out there.

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