Sam Cook from the Duluth News Tribune recently wrote a couple of articles on Minnesota’s wolf management. He specifically looked at research being conducted by the 1854 Treaty Authority, a natural resources management arm
for the Grand Portage and Bois Forte bands of Lake Superior Chippewa.
Wildlife research biologist Angela Aarhus-Ward traps wolves with the group, equips them with collars and monitors their GPS coordinates. Through the study, researchers have located five packs in that area and determined that a pack’s territory is about 40 square miles, though they know of one “wanderlust” wolf that traveled over 175 miles in just one month.
Research projects like the one in the article that aim at determining the number of wolves in specific areas and help us better understand their behavior will likely go a long way toward determining if there will be trapping and hunting seasons on wolves in the future and to what extent the wolf population will need to be controlled.
For those interested, there is also a photo gallery of the wolf study HERE.