My home line is 12 marten boxes one cat jackpot and one snare fence.
Closed it down today will set up another short line on my camp trail and powerline once the mild weather is done.
I had some moose hide and bones at the end of the home line but no snares set there.The wolves hit it hard a few days ago by the look of it.Moose hair turds and urine all over the place.They dragged the hide around out of the bush and onto the trail and completely devoured the hide and leg bones just left the hair,lol
I got a different place to set up a new jackpot for another pack near the camp trail.Do that sometime in the new year when me and the wife go out to stay at the cabin for a few days.
Cat sign is pretty scarce,I think I will give them a pass for the rest of the year.

Go get them Boco

How do you know they’re a different pack, unless it’s quite a distance away? I know the boundaries have changed this year on my line. After taking 6 last year, a fella 10 miles south of one of my jackpots got a pic of an adult with 8 pups in summer. Another trapper who mainly does summer depredation has gotten a dozen over last summer. He lives about 30 miles from my line and traps within a 10 mile radius from his place.
I just started reading a book all about wolves, learning that the biologists don’t really know much, lots of theory and educated guessing. In the end, a wolf will do whatever it wants, nothings written in stone regarding them……lol

I'm sure Boco will tell us, but I'm assuming by the tracks. I know I had a new pack move into an area this year. There was a bunch of three in there last year, all big adult wolves, I took out an old male, leaving a female and a male (could tell by them peeing in the snow, for completely positive sex ID). There was a big bunch with some small tracks in it this fall, that I assumed was that pair with a litter of pups. But I caught six out of them last week, an old, almost toothless female, an older male, two pups and two two year old males. So that is not the pair that was in there with a litter of pups. I think I cleaned that pack, and a couple days later seen sign of a pair in there again. Probably the old pair who has been living there.

Yes further away and I Know the area well being in the bush here since the early 70s.One wolf pack core area is North west,(resident pack on my driftwood line) and other pack comes in periodically from the north east.(resident pack on adjacent line) This is the pack that ripped up the hide and bones.
There is another pack that is core location south of my driftwood line that comes in occasionally but does not stay.
The trapper who used to trap wolves on my north west side sold his line a few years ago and the new trapper does not take wolves so that pack is all mine now,lol.
I believe the trapper on the east boundary may take the odd wolf once in a while.And the big line on the south has not been trapped in at least 15 years Lots of moose in that area and the pack is larger than normal,why they make incursions once in a while into the other packs home ranges.

Once you find the locations where two wolf packs mark territory at a boundary you will see if you monitor the location over a few years that when one pack is thinned out the adjacent pack will know from the regular scent marking that the pack is weakened and will start to make incursions more frequently or in some cases take over new territory if their numbers are left to increase.
Once the individual wolves in a pack come together after freeze up to hunt moose,you can go out near the boundary location that you have identified on a cold clear night and do some howls or even moose calls.Often you will get wolves howling right away,then short time after you may hear another pack howling from a totally different area

When I stayed at the camp on my more remote Mattagami line in the late fall before freeze up I would hear wolves howling west side of the river,then sometimes another pack would start singing over on the east side of the river.

Wolves communicate a lot.The times the hair really stands up on my neck is when you hear them whistle barking to each other in the bush very close and on several sides of where you are.
The first time I heard that was one fall I was checking beaver traps and seen fresh wolf tracks where a wolf had pulled the trap and beaver up on the bank,but had not eaten it,I was sure from the sign I had chased it off when it heard the bike coming on the trail
As i reset the trap and took the beaver I could hear 3 wolves whistle barking just out of sight in the brush on 3 different sides of me.
Had similar happen a few times since,and Ovila Sylvain a big number local wolf trapper had told me about that before I had experienced it so I knew what it was.

What does whistle barking mean in wolf lingo?