Thursday, February 26, 2009

Wolf Wanderings

My cousin is a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana. He just sent me an email from one of his colleagues about the wanderings of a wolf they had collared.

The email follows, but is an amazing reminder of the huge range predators require. Cool story.

and so it begins... :) One of my gps collared wolves is now famous! For those of you that don't know, this 1 1/2 year old female wolf was trapped/collared by a FWP wolf specialist for my project at the beginning of July. She was trapped in Paradise Valley outside of Gardiner, Montana. At the end of September she dispersed and over the following 5 months managed to travel all throughout the western half of Wyoming, through the SE corner of Idaho, NW Utah, and as of Saturday was located just outside of Vail, Colorado. I roughly connected her GPS locations and she has travelled over 1,000 miles as the crow flies!! Her data doesn't do much for my project (since I am using the collars to get accurate estimates of territory size), but it sure is incredibly interesting.

A Colorado news story on the wolve can be found here.