"Wilderness"? We don't need no stinkin' wilderness! We're wolves!

Coming soon (maybe) to a North Woods near you:

Wolves Come Back (on Their Terms)

Courtesy of google if you don't want to register:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/s...00&en=76e6179e3c1fe0ee&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Maybe someday they'll wander back into the Adirondacks and Northern New England. A long shot, maybe, but worth hoping for.

I got a wolves desk calender for Christmas, so every day this year I've learned a really cool factoid about what becomes more and more my favorite animal.

Much more civilized creatures than the creature who eradicated them... (present company excluded, of course)

in fact, todays tid-bit: The pads of a wolf's paws contain more scent gland surfaces than any other part of its body. Pheromones are constantly being discharged from the pores of a wolf's foot pads, which is how they mark their territory.

Maybe that's why human's have so many scent glands on their feet

Ever since I read Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf I've been fascinated, too. Great book, if you're interested in wolves.

Way off the topic of hiking here, or perhaps even the wilderness. But in Jean Auel's series of books 'Earth's Children' she mentions quite a bit about the social behavior of wolves and how they behave towards each other. The specific novel with the most information is 'The Mammoth Hunters'. This _is_ a work of fiction, but the author has done a lot of research to get as close to the facts as possible.

I found at least one website with information about wolves in Maine & New Hampshire .

For those interested in things lupine (the furry, not the floral):

The Wolves of Mount McKinley, by Adolph Murie (United States Government Printing Office, 1944, reprinted 1971). In the words of Dr. David Mech, Murie was "the first biologist to conduct an intensive and objective ecological study of the wolf." Read it to understand how far wolves and our attitudes toward them have come, since the days when Murie noted that "many persons wish to retain the wolf somewhere in the North American fauna, perhaps in the more remote parts of the continent, in wilderness areas where there will not be interference from economic interests."

Three sources from Dr. Mech:

The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species , by L. David Mech (Natural History Press, 1970). IMO, the seminal book that started a revolution in scientific and popular attitudes and changed the political environment for wolves. (And the serendipity of providing insights into dog behavior.)

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). Comprehensive worldwide survey of current wolf research.

Dr. David Mech Publication List (USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center). List of mostly scientific publications, many available by online links. The recent materials on taxonomy and on potential conflicts with human interests are worth the wandering among the URL forest.

Of Wolves and Men, Barry Holstun Lopez (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978). Still the best examination of the origins and evolution of human attitudes toward wolves.