'They're Out There'

After decades of conflict between humans and wolves, the Yukon is finding its balance with the top predator, which is thriving across the territory

- Eva Holland

IT’S A RARE THING to spot a wolf in the Yukon wild. While grizzlies and black bears forage on the hillsides above the highway, and moose stand knobby-knee-deep in the murky ponds below, putting themselves on easy display for passersby, the territory’s wolves play hard to get, offering only glimpses and hints: a dark flash on the riverbank as you’re paddling, a set of oversized paw prints on the snow-covered surface of a frozen lake.

But they’re out there. There are an estimated 5,000 wolves in the Yukon — that’s roughly one wolf per seven human residents, or one wolf for every 96 square kilometres. Their range spans almost the entire territory, from the boreal forest to the alpine and Arctic tundra; only the vast Kluane icefield is wolf-free. While wolves have been driven out and exterminated in many parts of North America and only slowly, painfully, reintroduced in some, in the Yukon they’re still thriving.

There’s nothing special or unique about the biology or physiology of the wolves in the territory — they’re grey wolves, Canis lupus, like the ones you might find in any number of wild areas. What’s different, though, is their surroundings: the ecosystem they move through so invisibly is intact. “What’s really unique is that they’re completely naturally regulated,” says Bob Hayes, author of Wolves of the Yukon. Mark O’Donoghue, a northern regional biologist for the Yukon government, agrees. “We have a natural predator-prey system,” he says. The wolves and their ungulate meals — moose, primarily, and caribou and mountain sheep to a lesser extent — are largely in balance.

Humans, of course, haven’t always been content to leave that balance alone.