Wolf Tracking
Animal tracking is a fascinating thing - by the signs left by the animals alone one can tell what they have been doing. Snow is the best at revealing the details of animals’ private lives.
Following a one-day’s track is like a detective story uncoiling its secrets right in front of your eyes. Let’s take a one-day tracking of a wolf pack in Kemeri National Park, Latvia, as an example. We head out to the forest on a fine spring day when the sun melts the upper layers of snow forming an ice crust at night. We find a track of two wolves crossing a stream. A few blood drops on the snow next to the track indicate that one of them was a female wolf in heat as March is the breeding season for this species.
Yellow and uneven ice doesn’t seem reliable but we follow the tracks of wolves and safely cross the river. Tracks go deeper into the forest and at some point divide showing that these were actually four animals moving step into step. They run through the forest, separating and re-uniting again, obviously in search of the prey.
The wolves stop for a while at an old kill’s spot - moose hair and a few bone fragments prove they had a meal here some time ago. Then they go again through the young dense forest heading for the big raised bog occupying about 60 sq. km. At the edge of the bog they are joined by the fifth pack member that has been wandering somewhere on its own, and then all of them purposefully go to the north east.
They follow almost a straight line for 3 km as if heading for a small island in the bog but they pass it, choosing as their resting place a thicket of higher pines clearly visible among dwarf bog trees. One can see from the tracks that wolves have spent some time there, resting and playing with each other - numerous tracks and patches of trampled snow (where wolves were rolling on their backs) are a clear evidence of that.
After spending some time there, wolves head back to where they came from - a sandy dune stretching out into the bog massif. Some animals separated on the way minding their own business, and we follow a couple of animals going to the west, zigzagging among frozen bog pools but keeping the general direction straight. After a couple of kilometres they reach the edge of the forest where their tracks get interspersed with numerous footprints of elks, wild boar and roe deer.
Not surprisingly, some 300m further we find a fresh kill indicated by the fresh blood on the snow, hair and a skull of a wild boar. We can tell from the skull that this was an unlucky young female not older than 3 years.
Such tracking can go on endlessly while there is snow on the ground. It is very interesting to follow activities of a wolf pack but, unlike the wolves themselves who can walk up to 50 km per day, humans haven’t got the same stamina and are limited by the daylight, too. We’ve followed these wolves for more than 8 km and can return the next day to the same spot in order to continue reading this exciting “snow book” again.