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Voyageurs National Park Wolf Update

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By NPT Staff - July 12th, 2023
Map of wolf packs in and around Voyageurs National Park/Voyageurs Wolf Project

Wolf pack territories in and around Voyageurs National Park. The number below each pack refers to the number of wolves in each pack in Winter 2021-2022. We will share updated information for 2022-2023 this summer! We currently have wolves collared in the Paradise, Bug Creek, Windsong, and Vermilion River Pack. The Vermilion River pack is not on this map but is just to the east of the Bug Creek Pack/Voyageurs Wolf Project

Mention wolves and national parks and most think of Yellowstone National Park right? But Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota has a growing wolf population.

There are about 16 packs and 66 wolves in and around the park based on winter 2021-22 counts, and so far this year three packs have had litters. Four packs are being followed thanks to GPS collars.

However, things are very dynamic with the wolf population in and around Voyageurs. According to Tom Gable, the project lead for the Voyageurs Wolf Project, the team went into the winter of 2022-23 with radio collars on wolves in eight different packs. However, by this spring that count had dropped to four packs as some wolves left the area, others had their collars go dead, and some collared wolves were killed by others.

One of the goals of the Voyageurs Wolf Project is to better understand wolf pup survival rates.

"So far, we have found some interesting results: pup survival from year to year appears highly variable. For example, we estimated that only 7 percent of pups survived till their first birthday in 2020-2021. That stands in stark contrast to the following year (2021-2022) when 53 percent of pups survived to adulthood," Gable wrote in an article for the Voyageurs Conservancy. "For context, the typical litter in the Voyageurs area consists of 5.1 pups based on data from 29 litters. Thus, in 2020-2021, an average of only 0.4 pups per pack survived compared to 2.7 pups per pack just one year later. Such variation in survival rates is fascinating and intriguing, or at least we think so.

"How could survival change so drastically from one year to the next? We have some strong suspicions but do not know for sure yet. Ultimately, we need several more years of data to have a large enough sample size to examine this topic robustly because there are a lot of variables to account for and we only add a few data points each year," he added.

You can find the entire article here.

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