Working with wolves has been a passion of mine for 40 years, both trapping for the fur market and trapping for research. First it was in Alaska, then Idaho and a short stint in Mongolia. Here are a few pictures of some wolves.


This is from Alaska. Look close and you can see the snare cable. Nice typical gray, although it was a pup.



This was a nice wolf trapped for fur with a beaver carcass under that stump on a river in western interior Alaska.



Blow-gunning a "blue" to attach a radio-collar.



Here's a big adult male singing to me. He was not happy.



This one was a real nightmare. It was in June, but there was 10 inches of new snow, and he was 1000 feet below the logging road. A real pain.

Mystery eye are a looking

Nice pics Gulo, care to explain "blowgunning"? Thanks

Amazing pics Jack!!!

Very cool. Nice pictures.

Always enjoy your post,some great pictures,thanks for sharing.8117 Steve the blow gun is for the immobilization drug.

Yeah Rick, I figured that but I was wondering about the details vs using a tranq gun.

Always a treat looking at your pictures.

WS

Gulo Some more of your excellent pics You have an eye for framing some truly good shots And of course it is a great species o take pictures of .

Jack, that was Garth, wasn't it ? You'd fit right in with the South American dart natives . I think there are some African tribes who were masters in blowgun tactics too.

Always love the wuffs.

The pencil image is JR's wuff, the North Slope Range.

Yeah Steve. As Rick said, the blow-gun is to deliver the drug for putting them down just enough to handle safely. With the blowgun, I can adjust the speed of the dart, making it a "softer" delivery. I've necropsied wolves that have received a shot from the Cap-chur guns, and the amount of trauma at the dart site is massive. Sometimes (as from a helicopter) you have no choice, but when restrained in a foothold, I think it's better to deliver without injuring them severely. I want to release that wolf in just as good of condition as he was before the trap.

Jack

Pretty cool Gulo!

Where are you hoping to hit when aiming with the blow gun?

Also another question, the wolves you necropsied that were shot with a cap-chur gun, how much time went by before you examined the trauma site?

Love the picture of the blue. Great scene!

JP -

With a little practice, and at those short ranges, I hit them in a large muscle mass; usually the ham, but sometimes the shoulder meat, on occasion, even in the neck.

In about 1982 or 1983, I helicopter darted some wolves in the Susitna. Two days later, a couple of them were harvested by land-and-shoot hunters. Those were the two I necropsied. I originally used a Palmer Cap-chur rifle with a fairly heavy aluminum dart. One wolf was hit in the front shoulder; the other in the lower mid-back. The Palmer darts have an internal charge (.22 blank) that discharges the drug into the wolf. This causes undue injury, as well as the dart just hitting the animal. Remember E = mc2? The "force" is dependent on the weight of the projectile, but more so, the "force" is dependent on the speed squared. Slowing down the dart is not an option (hard enough to hit them from a helicopter anyway), but going with a lighter dart (the blow-gun darts are light plastic) and delivering that dart much slower reduces that trauma.

Jack

After reading your posts, I researched blowgun delivery and learned its common in zoos. They must agree with your opinion.

Jack, is that Garth the blue wuff ? Looks like him.

Sharon -

Once again, your artwork is divine! Fantastic! Yes, that was Garth again.

Thank you, kind sir.

I know a pretty blue face when I see it

Sharon, has Garth visited your work?

Nice pics.

I know on a bear study I was around they were using a 16 Gauge shotgun to deliver the darts to treed bear. I don't know how much trauma the dart was inflicting, but I know the fall out of the tree when the drug took effect was inflicting a lot. Tried to tell them that we had the dogs tied back, after they darted it we could pepper the bear with marbles out of a slingshot and they would come out and run off, but within a minute or two they would be asleep and we could track them up with a dog on a leash, they weren't going to go far, and you would actually have a live, healthy bear. But the "biologists" on that study didnt care, as long as they darted it and it was breathing when they removed the collar it was a "live bear" in their book. Didn't matter that it fell fifty feet, landed on a stump and was bleeding out of both ends.