Follow the Pack, December 31, 2011
San Mateo Tracks
Follow the Pack returned to the home range of the San Mateo pack of Mexican gray wolves just after the autumnal equinox. We camped in the same little valley where we had camped in August, but we weren’t sure we would find any sign of the San Mateo lobo family this time. By early fall, wolf pups are getting bigger and packs are starting to move around, so we weren’t sure the pack would still be nearby. Rainy weather had left the ground soft and muddy, however. If the wolves were in the area, we hoped to find their tracks.
The next morning we hiked up the forest road that leads up the valley to the southwest. Not far from our camp we found our first tracks in the muddy road. Can you identify the animal that made this track? It’s a large animal that is omnivorous. That means it eats both animal and plant foods. (Answer at the end of this story.)
A little farther along we found this track. Can you tell what animal made it? It is an ungulate, an animal with hooves. It’s the favorite food of Mexican gray wolves. (Answer at the end of the story.)
As we continued hiking up the valley, we found more and more evidence of recent heavy rains. The road was so washed out that it began to look more like a creek bed than a road!
In a little while we came to a place where a small stream crosses the road. In the muddy creek bed we found dozens of Mexican gray wolf tracks, both adult and puppy size.
We all made casts of lobo tracks.
After the casting material hardened, Pamela and Cynthia washed the mud off their track casts.
Everyone went home with a wolf track cast as a souvenir of our trip.
In early October we returned to the little valley and pitched our tents. This time we got a surprise when we woke up the next morning.
A light snow overnight had turned the San Mateo pack home range into a fairyland.
Soon the warm sun melted most of the snow. We hiked back to the place where we found the stream bed full of lobo tracks ten days earlier. Rain had raised the water level in the stream. The tracks were now under water!
Although many of the tracks were below the surface of the water, we were able to make casts of a few tracks higher on the muddy banks. Lora is pouring the wet mixture into a circular “dam” made of strips cut from a plastic report cover. This prevents the mixture from spreading out too far and gives the cast a nice, round shape.
Middle Fork Serenades
After Thanksgiving, Follow the Pack made the first of two short trips to the home range of the Middle Fork pack. This pack is special because both breeding adults 
have only three legs. Alpha male AM871 lost his leg when he was caught in a leg-hold trap. Alpha female AF861 suffered a gunshot wound to her leg that required amputation. In spite of their lost legs, the pair has produced several litters of pups. This year they had seven! Biologists with the Mexican wolf reintroduction project are keeping a close eye on the pack to see how many of the pups survive until the end-of-year population survey in January 2012.
The Middle Fork home range consists of rolling grasslands, rugged canyons, and forests of ponderosa pine, piñon, juniper, and oak trees.
We pitched our tent in a valley surrounded by low hills. Night comes early in late November. Cold air sinks down into the valleys as soon as it gets dark. We were glad to crawl into our warm sleeping bags right after supper and listen to the sounds of evening in the woods. A gentle breeze made a rustling sound in the pine needles. Raven wings beat a soft “chuff, chuff” as the big, black birds flew low overhead and settled into nearby treetops for the night.
As the evening sky faded to the dark of
night, we heard musical notes in a minor key drifting down a small ravine from the hills to the east. We sat up in order to better hear the lobos howling. There was at least one low voice and some higher notes that may have been half-grown pups. The song moved up and down the scale for twenty minutes, sometimes stopping for a minute or two and then starting again. Now and then we thought we heard answering voices from much farther away.
The following morning the Middle Fork lobos howled again as it began to get light. Again, they sang for over twenty minutes, with answering howls from the southeast. As the sun rose, it was a chilly +14°F in the valley. Wisps of smoke from our campfire of the night before hung in the air.
The sun shone through the last colorful leaves of autumn. Can you identify the kind of leaves shown in this photo? Is the tree a pine, juniper, or oak? (Answer at the end of the story.)
Later in the day we took a hike on a ridge east of our camp, in the general direction from which we heard howling. The ground was rocky and covered with fallen tree trunks left from an old forest fire. We found no lobo sign, but enjoyed the warm, fall sunshine.
The next morning, before daylight, we heard wolves briefly howling twice, at about six and seven in the morning. As we drove along the forest road on our way to the highway, we found fresh wolf scat on the road in the direction from which some of the howls seemed to come. The scat was so fresh that it was still very damp and there were drops of liquid on the ground underneath. It was also full of elk hair, giving us a clue about what the wolf had been eating. (Note: the track ruler measures in centimeters, not inches. Three centimeters equals a little less than 1 ¼ inches.)
A week later we returned to camp near where we found the fresh wolf scat. In just a few short days the warm, sunny afternoons of late autumn had turned to blustery, snowy days of early winter.
During the night we heard wolf music to the northwest, not far from where we heard the Middle Fork pack in November. After breakfast and some good, hot coffee, we set off to hike down the snow covered road in the hope of finding lobo tracks.
The snow began to fall harder as we walked, covering the rocks and fallen logs with a blanket of white.
Cooney Point was barely visible through a veil of snow and fog.
By noon the snow was falling heavily and the temperature was dropping. We decided to cut our trip short. We were afraid we might get snowed in, because the road crews don’t plow the roads into the heart of the Gila National Forest. We found no tracks, but we did enjoy the early morning concert by the Middle Fork lobos. We plan to return to their home range early in 2012. We’ll report on what we find.
Answers to questions:
The track of a large, omnivorous animal is a black bear track.The track of an ungulate that is the lobo’s favorite food is an elk track.The leaves in the close-up photo of the tree branch are leaves of an oak tree. The acorns of this Gambel oak provide food for wildlife. Native Americans use them in traditional dishes like acorn stew. Deer also browse on the leaves.
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Follow the Pack Update, August 22, 2011
A long weekend in Mexican wolf country
Follow the Pack recently spent a long weekend in the Mexican gray wolf recovery area. Late summer in eastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico is the monsoon season. The weather is pleasantly cool, with rain showers almost every afternoon.
We camped on Saturday night in the home range of the Paradise Pack in Arizona. The pack consists of the nine-year-old alpha male, AM795, his six-year-old mate, AF1056, and five pups born earlier this year. We saw lots of cows…
...and wildflowers…
…and colorful mushrooms…,
…but not a single wolf or wolf track.
After a very damp night and a short hike on Sunday morning, we decided to move to New Mexico and look for signs of the San Mateo Pack. The alpha female of the San Mateo Pack, AF903, was born in the wild, most likely in 2003. She is now eight years old. Her mate, AM1157, was also born in the wild. He had his third birthday in April. Like the Paradise Pack, the San Mateo pair had at least five pups this spring.
We pitched our tent in a little valley among some ponderosa pine covered hills. Monsoon rains had resulted in a good growth of green grass. Elk, like two males with large racks of antlers that we saw as we drove to our campsite, had the grass all to themselves. As far as we could tell, there were no cows in the area to compete with the elk for the succulent grasses.
We crawled into our tent early to escape the rain. Sometime after midnight we awoke to the sound of hoof beats on the rocky hillside nearby. Could they be the footsteps of deer? Elk? It was too dark to see what sort of animals passed so close to us in the night. We solved the mystery the next morning, as we set off on a hike up the canyon. Just a short distance from our camp, we found fresh tracks of an adult elk and an elk calf crossing the muddy forest road.
As we continued on our hike we saw more good elk and wolf habitat…
…and a stock tank (known as a pond in many parts of the United States) filled to the brim with muddy water from the recent downpours…
…and more colorful mushrooms.
The most exciting thing we found, by far, was a long line of wolf tracks running straight down the road for at least a quarter of a mile.
The cloudy skies made it hard to take good photographs of tracks, but you can see that this wolf track is about 10.5 cm (over 4 inches) long and about 9 cm (about 3½ inches) wide. We were so excited to find tracks of at least one San Mateo wolf that we didn’t mind being soaked by a sudden, heavy shower on the hike back to camp.
Follow the Pack hopes to return to San Mateo territory in September or October, when the weather is not so wet and there’s a little chill in the air. When we do, we’ll report on what we find.
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Follow the Pack Update, June 15, 2011
Exciting wildlife adventure on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation
Follow the Pack spent an exciting five nights and four days on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, looking for Mexican gray wolves and other wildlife and learning about the history and culture of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The tribe has welcomed Mexican wolves to tribal lands since 2000. A number of lobos make their home there today.
As we drove from New Mexico to the 1,600,000 acre reservation in eastern Arizona, we encountered smoke from the huge Wallow Fire burning in the Apache National Forest. The thick smoke burned our eyes and made day seem like late evening. When we reached the reservation late Sunday afternoon, we found we had left the smoke behind us. The air was clear and the sky was deep blue.
Our tour began on Monday with a trip to historic Fort Apache, which housed soldiers during the Apache Wars of the late 19th Century. The oldest building at the fort is this log cabin dating from 1871, known as General Crook’s Cabin. Walking around Fort Apache, you can imagine what life must have been like for men stationed at a frontier fort without electricity, air conditioning, central heating, and other modern conveniences.
We continued our tour at the Kinishba Ruins. This village began as a group of pit houses in about AD800. By AD1325 as many as 400-800 people lived in the village, which by then consisted of about 600 ground-floor rooms. The people who lived in the village are believed to have been the ancestors of today’s Hopi and Zuni people.
In the evening, we enjoyed a picnic of traditional Apache dishes, including acorn stew and fry bread. After dinner, the father and sons of White Mountain Apache tribal wolf biologist, Krista Beazley, sang and played drums.
Ms. Beazley (in the pink shirt) and her daughter danced to the music, with trip participants joining in.
Tuesday morning we got up early to go looking for wildlife. At Hawley Lake we watched two ospreys soaring above the lake. Now and then one of the birds would plunge down to the lake after a fish.
We stopped at a place where photographs of wolves have been caught on remote cameras, called “camera traps.” We placed a camera trap on a tree to see if we could catch a photo of a wolf or other animal.
Then Krista Beazley demonstrated how radio-telemetry works. Using a radio receiver with an H-shaped antenna, you can hear the signals coming from a wolf’s radio collar, helping to locate the wolf.
Back at camp, we learned how to make Apache fry bread, no measuring cups or spoons allowed! Hands are for kneading the dough. After the balls of dough rise, you flatten them between your hands and slip the flattened dough into hot oil. The dough puffs up and turns to hot, delicious, brown, fry bread.
Later, we watched the amazing Apache Crown Dancers, who came all the way from the village of Cibecue to dance for us.
Wednesday morning we again set off early to look for wildlife and check the camera trap for photos of any animals that happened to walk by and set it off. As we drove into the forest, we got a surprise. A big, black bear ran across the road in front of our van, his dark coat shiny in the sunlight. Later, we saw two more bears, but they were much farther away and partly hidden in the woods. Not long after we saw the first bear, we found bear tracks along the road. Black bears have big paws!
On our way to check the camera trap for photos, we hiked down a road and through the forest. We found a line of wolf tracks, but the sun was too high in the sky to get good photos of the tracks. Before going on to check the camera trap, we hiked to an old den of the Paradise Pack. The den site was among rocks on a steep canyon wall with an amazing view.
We could imagine a litter of pups emerging from the den for the first time, their eyes dazzled by the sun, sniffing the fresh air and tumbling playfully in the pine needles.
After visiting the old den site, we went to check on the camera trap.
Unfortunately, the only photo we found when we downloaded the pictures from the camera was a photo of us, walking away from the tree where we fastened the camera the day before. As we drove back to our base camp, we stopped at Hawley Lake to watch the smoke from the Wallow Fire billow up into the sky. We were concerned about all the people and wild creatures whose homes were threatened by the enormous fire.
Thursday morning we took a three-and-a-half mile horseback ride through the beautiful ponderosa pine forest, stopping to rest at a grassy meadow halfway through the ride. We were glad to take a break. We imagine the horses were, too!
Although we didn’t see any Mexican gray wolves, we enjoyed seeing the beautiful mountains, meadows, lakes, and streams on the White Mountain Apache tribal lands.
We were thrilled to see wildlife, from the big, black bears to this tiny butterfly.
Most of all, we appreciated the friendly welcome we received from our White Mountain Apache hosts. They made us feel right at home. We would happily sign up for another trip tomorrow.
Follow the Pack Update, January 20, 2011
Winter snow makes spotting and tracking wildlife easier
Follow the Pack made two trips to the Mexican wolf recovery area this winter, one in mid-December and one in early January. Snow made finding tracks much easier than it was during the summer and fall.
On a visit to the home range of the Hawk’s Nest pack in Arizona shortly before Christmas, we found the tracks of several wolves along snowy forest roads. One line of tracks led to a reflective road marker, where the wolf left a scent mark of urine. After leaving its mark, the wolf returned to the road, where walking is easier. We often observe this behavior when there is snow on the ground.
Mexican wolf tracks lead to a road marker, where the wolf left its scent mark.
Mexican wolf tracks on a forest road in Hawk’s Nest home range.
In early January, we returned to the home range of the Middle Fork pack in New Mexico. We found no wolf tracks, but the footprints of elk, coyotes, wild turkey, rabbits, mice, and ravens were everywhere. Coyotes howled every morning and evening.
Coyote tracks in Middle Fork home range; East Elk Mountain and O Bar O Mountain in background.
We found many more tracks on a return visit to Hawk’s Nest territory. This time we saw some of the animals that made them, including these elk. Elk are the main prey animal for Mexican gray wolves.
Elk grazing and resting at dusk.
Although we saw and heard no lobos, we enjoyed hearing coyotes howl and observing elk and pronghorn in the snowy grasslands. It was fun to try to figure out who made the many trails of tracks we found in the snow. Most of all, we enjoyed camping and hiking in the peace of winter, when it is so still that the wing beats of ravens can be heard, as the big, black birds fly overhead. We’ll definitely be making another winter trip in 2011!
Watching for pronghorn from our campsite in Hawk’s Nest territory. Escudilla Mountain in the background.
Photo of wolf tracks with ruler by Billie Hughes. All other photos by Jean Ossorio.
Follow the Pack Update, November 24, 2010
Few wildlife sightings, beautiful sunsets mark late fall trip to wolf territory
Follow the Pack spent five nights camping in the home ranges of the Hawk’s Nest and Rim packs of Mexican gray wolves in mid-November. We saw very little wildlife other than coyotes, wild turkeys, a pair of bald eagles, and some waterfowl, and found only a single dried-up wolf scat and no fresh wolf tracks. We did enjoy beautiful sunsets almost every night, however.
The weather is turning cold in the wolf recovery area. The temperature dropped below freezing every night. Little snow fell, but heavy frost made the tall grass sparkle in the morning sun.
During the day, we hiked the dusty, forest roads looking 
for tracks and scat. Just after this photo was taken, we surprised a coyote crossing the road in front of us. As soon as he saw us, he dashed away into the woods.
As the day drew to a close, we sat around the fire, listening for the howls of wolves and the sounds of other animals.
As night fell, we watched the stars of the winter sky make their appearance, including the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters; the Hyades, a little group of stars that looks like a v-shaped flock of geese flying south; Orion, the mighty hunter; and Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which some cultures identify as the Wolf Star. Next time we watch the brilliant Wolf Star from the recovery area, we hope we’ll hear the music of Mexican wolves from the dark hills nearby.
Follow the Pack, October 22, 2010
Pups growing fast; Hawk’s Nest pack moves around
Follow the Pack just returned from five days camping and tracking Mexican gray wolves in the home range of the Hawk’s Nest pack. We saw signs of fall everywhere in the mountains of eastern Arizona. The leaves of aspen trees have turned from soft green to brilliant gold.
Small animals like this spruce squirrel are busy preparing for the long, snowy winter ahead.
Mexican gray wolf pups have been growing all summer and are now able to travel with their packs. The weights of three Hawk’s Nest packs pups caught and radio collared since August ranged from 20 to 35 pounds. Soon the pups will be difficult to distinguish from adult wolves when seen from the air.
The Hawk’s Nest wolves are moving around much more than they did while the pups were small, making them more difficult to locate and see. On this trip we didn’t see or hear the wolves, but we did find some of their tracks.
Billie made casts of several tracks by pouring track-casting material into the them. After the casting material hardened, she was able to remove the casts from the dusty surface of the road and clean them off. The resulting casts make wonderful souvenirs of a trip to the home range of the Hawk’s Nest pack.
Lifting track cast from the dust.
Casts of adult Hawk’s Nest wolf and pup.
Follow the Pack, May 26, 2010
Return to Hawk’s Nest territory
Follow the Pack and friend Billie hiked about four miles in the home range of the Hawk’s Nest pack in eastern Arizona on Monday. The weather was sunny, with a high temperature in the 60’s.
We found several wolf scats along the way. As we hiked back to camp, we stopped to make a cast of a wolf track in the dried mud of a forest road. It takes a half hour or more for the cast to get hard enough to remove from the ground, so we sat down to wait and have a snack.
Mexican wolf tracks in dried mud
While we waited, we had a good view of a grassy valley. It must have been our lucky day, because we soon noticed three canids (members of the wild dog family) moving up the valley. Although they were as far away as the length of one-and-a-half football fields, a look through the viewfinder of my camera clearly showed the dark radio collar on one of the animals. They were Mexican gray wolves!
All three wolves moved slowly up the valley. Apparently they didn’t realize we were watching. Perhaps the breeze was blowing our direction, so they couldn’t catch our scent. The wolves didn't hurry, as long as they didn't know we were watching.
One lobo even stopped to check out something on the ground.
Finally, one of the wolves must have gotten a whiff of us or heard us talking, even though they were still far away. The wolves gave two or three short, sharp barks. One gave a single howl. All three wolves ran quickly up the ridge across the valley and disappeared.
When they caught our scent, the wolves quickly ran up the hill and out of sight.
I’ve been following the Mexican wolf packs for twelve years, but this was the first chance I’ve had to get good photographs of lobos in the wild. The wolves usually act just like these three, running away as soon as they are aware that people are watching. If you ever get a good look at a wild lobo, you can be sure it was your lucky day.
Because Mexican gray wolves are so rare and endangered, wildlife biologists study them intensely to find information that can help ensure their survival. To aid in their efforts, wolves in each pack are fitted with radio tracking devices. Biologists use hand-held antennas to pick up signals from the tracking devices and follow the beeps to the wolves where they can observe behavior, study kill sites and monitor animal health.
