The mission of the Voyageurs Wolf Project is to better understand the behavior of wolves in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. By attaching a camera collar from Vectronic-Aerospace to one of the wild park wolves, the project was able to capture footage never before seen from the animal’s point of view.
The camera took 30 seconds of footage at the start of the hour for a total of 14 hours. This means that researchers only obtained seven minutes of video from this experiment, but even from that small sample the project learned something about their feral good boys. The biggest revelation was that this lone wolf was able to fish. Just in those seven minutes, we see the wolf consume three fish from the same spot at Ash River.
The project concluded that given the footage, it’s likely that this wolf killed more fish than was documented. Until this instance, they only documented a single wolf pack — the Bowman Bay Pack — catch fish at the same spot. Now, they know that other wolves in the area know how to do so as well, even if they’re not in a pack.
While this wolf’s hair obscured some of the camera’s lens, the Voyageurs Wolf Project considers this a success and plans on using the camera collar again. Next time, though, they’ll trim their beards.
