The Ellesmere Wolves: Behavior and Ecology in the High Arctic

In a fascinating story of discovery and science, we meet a remote population of wolves unafraid of humans.
 
For parts of twenty-four summers, wolf biologist L. David Mech lived with a group of wolves on Ellesmere Island, some six hundred miles from the North Pole. Elsewhere, most wolves flee from even the scent of humans, but these animals, evolving relatively free from human persecution, are unafraid. Having already spent twenty-eight years studying other populations of wolves more remotely by aircraft, snow-tracking, live-trapping, and radio-tracking, Mech was primed to join their activities up close and record their interactions with each other. This book tells the remarkable story of what Mech—and the researchers who followed him—have learned while living among the wolves.
 
The Ellesmere wolves were so unconcerned with Mech’s presence that they allowed him to camp near their den and to sit on his all-terrain vehicle as he observed them, watching packs as large as seven adults and six pups go about their normal activities. In these extraordinarily close quarters, a pup untying his bootlace or an adult sniffing his gloved hand was just part of daily life. Mech accompanied the wolves on their travels and watched as they hunted muskoxen and arctic hares. By achieving the same kind of intimacy with his wild hosts’ every action that we might experience living with domesticated dogs, Mech gained new insights into common but rarely studied behaviors like pup feeding, food caching, howling, and scent-marking. After Mech’s time at Ellesmere ended, his coauthors and fellow wolf researchers Morgan Anderson and H. Dean Cluff spent parts of four summers studying the wolves via radio collars, further illuminating the creatures’ movements and ecology. This book synthesizes their findings, offering both a compelling scientific overview of the animals’ behavior—from hunting to living in packs to rearing pups—and a tale of adventure and survival in the Arctic.

L. David Mech is a senior research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. He is author of The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, The Way of the Wolf, and The Arctic Wolf, among other books, and is coauthor of The Wolves of Denali.

Morgan Anderson is a senior wildlife biologist with the British Columbia Ministry of Water, Land, and Resource Stewardship for the Omineca Region in northcentral British Columbia. Prior to her current position, she was a wildlife biologist with the Nunavut Department of Environment, where she worked with Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord on wildlife monitoring and management initiatives, including the Ellesmere wolves.

H. Dean Cluff, retired, was a wildlife biologist for the Government of the Northwest Territories, Department of Environment and Climate Change, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. In his thirty-year career with the department, Cluff studied polar bears, grizzly bears, black bears, wolverine, caribou, muskox, moose, coyotes, and wolves. However, wolves were Cluff’s mainstay, and he studied them from 1995 to 2024 when he retired. Cluff has been involved in over thirty publications concerning wolves. In retirement, he still continues to be involved in wolf and caribou studies in the north.

Luigi Boitani is a professor of vertebrate zoology and animal ecology at the University of Rome. He is author of Dalla parte del lupo, coauthor of Simon and Schuster’s Guide to Mammals, and coeditor of Research Techniques in Animal Ecology.