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Originally Posted by Bushleague
Just wondering if you could explain why nearly all the wolf droppings I encounter in my area are full of deer hair? And if not white tails exactly what do you feel the wolves are living off of?
Now to address the rampant doom and gloom predictions on this thread. In the areas I hunt the wolves and deer have been co-existing as long as I've hunted there... and significantly longer than that I'm sure. Maybe when wolves move into a new area there is an initial rampant slaughter on the uneducated deer population, but after awhile the deer smarten up. The wolves move in, the deer move around to avoid them, their behaviour changes and they get harder to hunt. But even in the most wolf over run areas I've seen, there are still generally huntable numbers of deer, although they are admittedly very smart, cagey animals.
On rare occasions I've seen deer move in closer to industrial activity when the wolves are around, where the wolves don't want to go, but more often they start avoiding the open areas. Wolves like to use trails, roads, and cutlines to cover ground, just like humans. Favored hunting spots are often the first to go dry, and depressing conversations take place over unfilled tags. A few years back if one drove down practically any road in the Swan Hills after a fresh snowfall and the first tracks down will be wolves and coyotes, while the deer tracks will take far longer to accumulate in these exposed areas, and things can look pretty dismal from the road. When the deer wise up one rarely sees them out in the open, you might find some tracks but to actually see a deer in the open during daylight can become somewhat abnormal. Get 20 to several hundred yards back into the bush and suddenly the ratio switches, far more game tracks, far less predator tracks.
I've hunted the Swan River valley pretty regularly over the past few years, there are so many bear and wolf tracks traveling up and down that river, every single day I've ever hunted there, one would wonder how deer or moose could ever survive in there. But the tracks are plenty, though the animals hard to hunt. This is probably the worst predator concentration I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty of downright terrible ones north of Slave Lake, and the deer are still in that valley. IMO they are a smart enough animal that once they adjust they can survive just about anywhere, though not always in as high of numbers as hunters have come to feel is normal.
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This is my experience as well. Wolves move through, maybe grab a deer or two and deer disappear. I am not saying they do not eat them, I am saying they are not their target species and that they don't eat up all the deer and move on.
Once deer know that wolves are in the area, IMO wolves would starve to death targeting them.
When I was a kid there was no coyotes in the province I grew up in. When the coyotes arrived on the scene, the deer population dropped like a stone. The majority of these were determined to be crossed with wolves on their travels through Ontario and Quebec. The Whitetails adapted and the numbers recovered.
A good sized doe would feed maybe 2 or 3 wolves, certainly not a pack. A decent sized pack would have to be killing 2 or 3 deer a night. That would be a tough way to make a living.