Thanks for taking time to get me up to speed. Interesting stuff.

No problem BP.
To be able to catch any animal at will you need to be well schooled in their habits.
Best way to do that is spend lots of time out on the line and cover some territory..

Yes, very interesting.

Thanks for the observations from your area. I presume the main large diet is moose in winter or hibernating bears.

Definitely Moose John.
The wolves actually spend their winters around the moose yards and travelling between the moose yards.
They switch over to mostly beaver during the summer and the pack members are more loosely associated in the summer.
That said I have often seen bear hair in wolf scat in the fall.I believe the wolves get the bear out in the open in an old burn or clearcut.

one of the Phd students gave his presentation on the wolves they are tracking here. They are concerned with one of the last woodland caribou herds remaining. The some of collared bears were predated on in Feb-March period, trail cameras picked this up. More and more info is coming out with the DNa hair on the diets they are having come to light.
What was interesting was some of the Minn data on their wolves.....or I should say some of the shared wolves that cross the boarder so much.

Temps are starting to get cold enough to frostscrape.
Did this wolf pelt this morning.

I always find your frost scraping fascinating.
Do you work in a certain direction like top to bottom or doesn't it scrape any different or have a bearing on the final product?

I do top to bottom for the most part but scrape across in harder to get to places on cased skins like wolf where you can do the legs and around parts of the head.
Beaver or other open skinned is top to bottom then flip the board and do bottom to top.It doesnt matter it scrapes the same.
The heavy saddle on the wolf scrapes right off clean with no effort at all really.

Here is the frostscraped wolfskin dried and off the board this morning.

That is a pretty lookin' pelt there. Going to FHA?

No,BP I will send that one to the tanner and sell private.I have several people looking for tanned wolf pelts so the 3 I have done up so far are basically already sold.I also have a couple from last year coming back from the tanner in a couple weeks.
I have two bigger ones,nicely furred, in the freezer that I will soon be putting up that I may send to the auction.
Its getting expensive to get wolves tanned,but I can easily recoup those costs when I sell them,and with the cold weather setting in for frostscraping it is not as much work to put them up.

That’s a good looking wolf Boco! Why turn it fur out if you’re tanning it though? I’m guessing because you like looking at it lol.

Fur handling habits are not easily changed.

Great job Boco !! You got any videos of you first scraping ?

It doesnt take long to turn the skin.Plus I still have some wolf sets out and things change,
I make my final decisions on what gets tanned and what gets shipped or sold to someone else in the raw state when they are all put up
They need to be fur out to grade them.
But yes if you know for sure you could leave it fur in.But that limits your options if you change your mind.
Fur out is standard handling for wolf.

No I never made a movie about frostscraping-never made a movie about anything.

One Fine looking hide Boco. Interested to hear if any more have visited you jackpots or trail sets. Things are chillin down there i see!

Yes there are still wolves around.There is a pack across the river,one wolf from that pack has started making exploratory incursions into the other wolves territory last little while since I weakened the resident pack.They normally swing north along the east side of the river as the river seemed to be the pack boundary.
I hung a couple trail snares,they use an old overgrown logging road as a main trail on the other side of the river.One has now been coming across the ice on the river using a short section of trail by my cabin,and swinging north along the west bank.
Should be able to pick up a few more if I keep trapping until end of feb.
Just got a foot or so of snow from a mini blizzard so that should have got them moving.
I need to chop up a couple more wolf carcasses for bait.

You use the wolf carcasses for baiting the wolves yea?