John Curran
Northern News Services
Published Monday, January 21, 2008

FORT GOOD HOPE - Elder Thomas Manuel is warning people wolves are becoming a huge problem around Fort Good Hope and he said he thinks it's time for a bounty.

"They are moving around in packs of 30 or 40," he said. "One person told me they watched wolves kill four moose on the big island across from our community."

By placing a bounty on the head of every wolf in the area, he said it would create employment in the community.

"Our young people could hunt them year-round," said Manuel.

Perhaps more importantly, he said it would also protect the caribou populations which he suspects are being overly preyed upon by wolves.

"They keep telling us the caribou population is going down," he said. "But we're not killing any caribou here in Good Hope ... it's the wolves."

For now, with so many of the predators on the prowl around the community, Manuel said it is critical people carry strike-anywhere wooden matches with them if they're going out on the land.

"Especially if you're going to have meat out on the ground, you need to stand up matches around it in the snow," he said. "There is something in the white tips at the end of the matches that wolves don't like and they won't cross them."

Fort Good Hope's wolf worries don't surprise Dean Cluff, the North Slave regional biologist with Environment and Natural Resources (ENR).

"Every year there's at least one community in conflict with wolves," he said.

While Cluff doesn't work in the Sahtu, he is one of the territories' foremost wolf experts.

"This time of year you would see an influx of wolves," he said, adding it could result in a great many of the predators being active around somewhere like Fort Good Hope.

There are really two distinct populations of wolves in the NWT: boreal wolves and tundra wolves.

Cluff generally studies the tundra wolves which migrate with the barren ground caribou herds. Boreal wolves, he said, don't really migrate but instead reside in treed areas where there would be prey available year-round.

Fort Good Hope would likely have a resident boreal wolf population and at this time of year it could also host tundra wolves showing up with the caribou.

There are no firm numbers on wolf populations in the North, he said, adding surveys are difficult to do as the animals are so secretive by nature while the Northern landscape is so vast.

"Our impression now is that the populations associated with the caribou herds are going down," said Cluff.

ENR looks at different things to get clues about the population. These include monitoring den site activity year after year and performing autopsies to examine the reproductive tracts of any female wolf carcasses turned in by hunters.

"It the case of tundra wolves it seems as though the number of pups being born is decreasing," he said. "But that could easily go against what someone in one of the communities, such as Fort Good Hope, is seeing locally."

Cluff said he doesn't think a government bounty is the solution to Fort Good Hopes wolf worries.

"Bounties in the past haven't really worked that well," he said.

Wolves have a very high reproductive potential - mature females are able to produce more than five or six pups each and packs can even yield multiple litters when times are really good.

"You might lower the population, but it will be right back up where it was in a year or two," he said. "Government wolf programs need to clear out 75 to 80 per cent of the population if they're going to have any sort of lasting effect."