The footage highlights the dynamic between a remote beaver dam, wolf packs and other wildlife in an area called Capsaicin Pond.
ORR, Minn. - Wildlife researchers often focus on rates of survival and causes of mortality.
Sometimes one animal serves to illustrate both.
Within minutes of the start of a field expedition in northern Minnesota to learn about gray wolves, Thomas Gable and Austin Homkes provided our group with a fresh, up-close, real-world example of wolf life and death.
The Voyageurs Wolf Project researchers pulled a stiff, sheet-covered animal out of storage and placed it on the ground outside their workshop.
They pulled back the cover and revealed a wolf pup, 5 months old and 29 pounds. The young wolf had recently been struck and killed by a vehicle on a nearby road.
"Two things," said Gable, founder and leader of VWP. "Most wolf pups don't make it to their first birthday. And although deer numbers are a primary driver of the wolf population, human-related sources of mortality are important to wolves, even here in a remote, mostly wild area."
Homkes, who has also been with VWP from its start in 2015, proceeded to take hair and muscle samples from the wolf for future analyses.
I was among 11 participants in a Sept. 16 and 17 VWP field expedition, one of several offered annually as a fundraiser for and outreach of the project.
Over two days VWP staff, including Gable, Homkes and Sophie Heny, described their work and gave demonstrations, including with GPS collars, trail cams and foot-hold traps, and led the group on site visits where wolves had raised pups and made recent kills, as well as tour of a nearby cattle ranch with a predator-proof fence.
The sampling of the dead wolf pup was an impromptu addition to the agenda.
With 11 GPS-collared wolves "on the air," VWP staff was ready to head out immediately if one of the devices indicated a wolf had made a kill or had been killed.
It's all part of the state-of-the-art wildlife research being undertaken by VWP in the northern reaches of Minnesota.
The VWP is a University of Minnesota research project that got its start when Gable, who was doing a study of beavers in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, learned not much was known about wolves in the summer.
Since wolves were the primary predator of beavers in his study, Gable decided to expand his work to include the large carnivore.
The Voyageurs Wolf Project was officially born in 2015 with the goal of researching wolves in summer, but it encompasses much more, including wolf predation behavior, number of pups born, where they make their dens and impacts on prey species.
The VWP receives most of its funding from the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (derived from state lottery proceeds) and donations from about 10,600 private citizens.
Additional support in 2025 came from the University of Minnesota, International Wolf Center, Northern Michigan University, Van Sloun Foundation, Voyageurs Conservancy and Voyageurs National Park, among others.
The VWP's work is notable to me not only because it focuses on the wolf, arguably the most controversial wildlife species in the U.S., but because it is refreshingly objective.
"We are here to learn and provide facts," said Gable, 34. "Our hope is that by sharing what we do and discover, it will really help inform the public on wolf issues."
The participants in our field expedition came from nine states spanning the U.S., including Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon, as well as the Midwest.
There were two common denominators: a respect for facts and science and appreciation for the work of the VWP on a topic often laden with misinformation.
The VWP study area covers about 900 square miles, with about one-third in Voyageurs National Park and the balance on adjacent private and public lands. The VWP researchers have permission from about 200 landowners to access their properties for the work, Gable said.
In addition to the chance to interact with VWP researchers and learn and see their methods at work, the field expedition allowed attendees to spend a couple days in beautiful northern Minnesota.
In fact, this is the only area in the Lower 48 that has harbored wolves continuously since before European immigrants settled the region.
Wolves were aggressively targeted for reduction or elimination in most of the U.S. through the mid-1950s (Wisconsin had a bounty on wolves until 1957).
After wolves were wiped out in Wisconsin and Michigan and most of Minnesota, the animals persisted only in what is known as the Greater Voyageur Ecosystem. Given protections, including the federal Endangered Species Act in 1973, wolves began to increase in number in this source population, expanded their range and eventually dispersed into and recolonized Wisconsin and the U.P. of Michigan.
Minnesota now has about 2,900 wolves, Wisconsin 1,200 and the U.P. of Michigan 800, according to recent estimates by the respective state natural resources agencies.
The two-day field expedition started with a tour of the VWP field base in Orr, Minn., to see and discuss the equipment, including GPS collars and trail cameras, used to study wolves.
After the tour of VWP headquarters and sampling of the young wolf, the group caravanned to a two-track dirt road where Homkes demonstrated a key component of the project: setting a foot-hold trap.
He deftly made a dirt set and covered the trap with leaf litter.
The traps are fitted with an satellite-linked notification system to alert VWP staff when an animal is caught. Most of the trapping occurs from May through August.
Among the facts gleaned from trapping: Of the dozens of adult wolves VWP has handled over the last decade, the heaviest weighed 92 pounds. Sixty-eight pounds is the average for male wolves trapped and collared in its study.
Through the GPS tracking of wolves and about 400 trail cams positioned across its study area, VWP staff can also get a precise assessment of the wolf population, Gable said.
"We want to know not only how many wolves are in each pack but who all the pack members are, what they look like, how many pups and subordinate adults are in each pack," Gable said.
The array of cameras allows the researchers to observe two or more wolves from each pack traveling together once every 2 to 3 days all winter. And by regularly getting "eyes" on the packs the VWP staff is able to record high-resolution data and therefore population information in the study area.
What has it shown?
The wolf population in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem has declined considerably over the past few years, and is at the lowest level in 11 years, Gable said.
The reason is linked to the population of white-tailed deer, the primary prey species for wolves.
"We had two very harsh winters in 2021-22 and 2022-23 and the deer numbers dropped," Gable said. "That was followed by two mild winters, which are easy on deer but tough on wolves."
It's an important fact from the VWP work: wolf numbers are linked to deer numbers. If deer numbers are down, wolf numbers follow. It's a classical predator-prey relationship.
Another wolf fact: the average wolf pup survival is 1.3 pups per pack over the course of the VWP, Gable said.
The group moved on to lunch at the Elephant Lake deer yard, a dense, conifer forest, then to a wolf kill site a few miles away.
The kill, of an adult deer, was about two days old. Only some rumen, hair, dried blood and a piece of bone remained. The researchers were able to find it because of the wolf behavior relayed by the GPS collar.
Homkes said the GPS tracks of a wolf at a kill site often resembles a "wagon wheel," with the prey in the center and the spokes the path of the wolf as it travels to resting spots between feedings.
The GPS collars cost about $3,000 each and last 2 to 3 years. The researchers are evaluating a solar-powered GPS collar that might offer longer life, but it is unproven.
The technology has helped VWP staff to surprising discoveries. One: wolves were spending time in berry patches in summer, consuming fruits in a lean time of year. The researchers captured what is believed to be the first video of a wolf eating blueberries.
Two: wolves fished for, caught and consumed suckers in spring.
And three, wolves spend a lot of time attempting to ambush beavers. In fact, in the VWP study area, wolves get about 35% of their food from beaver kills from April to October, Gable said.
On the second day of the field expedition, the group visited a site where a wolf had killed a beaver. Only a caster gland, which wolves don't prefer to eat, was left.
The outing then traveled to a bear hunters bait site. A rock-lined depression was empty, but in previous weeks had been filled with candy, bread and pastries, Gable said. Wolves visit the sites and eat the bait. It doesn't provide much nutrtition, Gable said, but might help satiate the wolves hunger during a tough time of year.
Over the history of the VWP the researchers have found no evidence of wolf predation on a bear cub. The wolves do, however, opportunistically consume bears they find dead, most likely shot but unrecovered by hunters, Gable said. Wolves also eat the gut piles left at sites where successful bear hunters field dress the animals.
The VWP staff works closely with bear hunters in the area to share information about bait sites and wolf activity.
The final stop on the second day was to the cattle ranch owned by Wes Johnson. It's the largest in northern Minnesota and had chronic issues with wolf depredations on calves. And it's in the VWP study area.
In 2012 trappers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Wildlife Services killed 16 wolves on the ranch, followed by 13 in 2016 and 11 in 2017.
The situation was problematic for all parties. Johnson was losing livestock, the federal trappers were overburdened and the wolf researchers occasionally had GPS-collared wolves killed.
Gable held a meeting and suggested a predator-proof fence be installed around the entire 7.5-mile perimeter of the ranch. A key to the design is a wire apron along the top of the ground that prevents wolves from digging under the fence.
It took two years, and a lot of sweat equity and funding by all involved, including the VWP staff, but the fence was erected. It has been an unmitigated success.
The field expedition joined Johnson on his ranch the afternoon of the second day.
"It's all better," Johnson said. "The cows are calmer, and we haven't lost any to a wolf in two years."
Gable said no wolf now living in the area has been on the ranch and wolves don't even try to enter the property anymore.
"It was a wolf magnet, now it's a wolf desert," Gable said. "If it can work here, it can work in more areas."
Several similar predator-proof fences are in place on farms and ranches in northern Wisconsin. They, too, have been successful. The fences are expensive to install and aren't suited for all landscapes, but results such as at Johnson's cattle ranch will no doubt compel more livestock producers to utilize the technology.
No live wolf was sighted during the two days of field outings.
But Mark Kjolhaug, 66, a field expedition participant who lives in Shorewood, Minn., saw a wolf bolting across Highway 53 south of Orr as he left the area on the day after the event.
Kjolhaug, a retired wetland scientist, said he had only seen one wolf "back in the day" near his cabin in Frederic, Wis.
"We obviously know there are wolves out there," Kjolhaug said. "But seeing one was a nice way to end it."
Gable said in the early days of VWP he would think "well, that was a good year, can we get enough funding to do it again?"
Now things are more stable and the approximately $500,000 in funding needed for VWP operations is set for next year.
He's thinking farther down the road now, including expanding the work to include studies of survival and habitat uses of deer in the area.
"We've got more questions we want to try to answer," Gable said. "It's been a good run so far and we'd like to keep it going."
For more information, visit voyageurswolfproject.org or search for Voyageurs Wolf Project on Facebook.