Great stuff !

Boco, on average, how many wolves do you get a year?

Looks like you still got the snowmobile out. Still winter there…lol
Along with bucksnbears question, when you take a few out of a pack, do you notice another pack moving in pretty quickly?

Nice to see how a trapline should look this time of year. 62F on my line today. Dang near T shirt weather.

I set for a few each year.
Depending on how long my lines are I may get a couple or maybe 6 or so.
Regardless trappers need to take some wolves every year to keep the line healthy.
Trappers who maintain sizable beaver quotas always take a good few wolves every year.

An adjoining pack will start testing the territory once you weaken the resident pack.But you wont see it if your neighboring trappers are harvesting other packs and not the same one as you are.
Wolves are a lot like beaver when it comes to maintaining or expanding home range/territory.

Trappers here are pretty tight lipped…lol. JP traps in the Sandilands Provincial forest and has had wolf success this year……that should narrow it down. He gets nervous showing me pics cuz I’ll recognize a certain tree….lol. The guys that were trapping last year near us aren’t there this time, but there’s some activity a few miles from their old bait site.

Kinda the opposite here, some of the good ones are tight lipped, but if I believed every story I hear we'd be taking 10,000 wolves a year here in Idaho. Lol.

Trappers here,as front line conservationists, participate in studies from time to time to improve knowledge and organize workshops and field trips thru the councils to share knowledge and techniques in harvesting as well as fur handling..
There are some who are loners and dont participate in the group activities,but even they talk from time to time with other trappers and knowledge and management techniques get trickled down.Also when trappers transfer lines to other trappers from time to time and get new grounds themselves,they cover the lines with them for a few runs to show them trails camps etc to familiarize the incoming trapper.A lot of specific trapline knowledge is shared that way.
Just in the local area which comprises 3 councils,there are over 250 trappers,so quite a few trappers here.
We have a skinning workshop coming up in March,and council meetings range from once every 2 months to 4 times a year to take care of buisness and for the OFMF reps and MNR fur techs to keep trappers informed what is going on politically,both on the provincial level and the local level.

Boco, when you weaken a pack and another pack moves in, does the new pack kill the remaining pack members or do they join them?

And how do you know if a new pack moves in rather than the pack just growing?

If there’s a pack of 8 wolves and you trap 5 of them. This spring they have pups (assuming there’s a female and male out of the 3 remaining) and let’s say 4 pups make it till Fall/Winter. Now the pack is at 7 when you start trapping in the winter.
How do you know if it’s the same pack or a new pack entirely?

I check their territorial marking areas that I know are on my traplines.I have trapped a bunch of different traplines in my area over the years with other trappers as well as on my own and know where the pack boundaries on my lines and other lines thru observation and harvest and talking to trappers who have been on the land and know their lines and surrounding country and the animals well.I recently took over a new line and it took my about 4 years to find the pack boundaries on that line and figure out how many packs use the line off and on and which pack is dominant.I am on my lines all year round and constantly observe the sign.
Once you take three or four wolves out of a pack of 5 or 6,after freeze up the remaining wolves can no longer take down moose easily nor can they defend their range from other wolfpacks that start to make inroads after they no longer detect territorial marking from the resident pack.
Nothing is in stone and it may be that one wolf could be absorbed into another pack but I doubt it very much.Wolves are inherently "to the pack born"
Unlike out west this country is very lean in winter and is why you see cannibalism in the face of weakness.Only the strong survive and the weak become feed.
After travelling on the line for a few years summer and winter you get to know the country and where the animals use.For example in winter it is easy to locate where the moose yard up,and this is where the wolves hone in on in winter.If they are not hovering near the moose yards they are travelling between them on predictable routes that successive packs have used for decades.
Wolf behaviour is very different during freeze up than it is during open water here in the James Bay frontier.Packs become much more loosely attached and often hunt on their own for beaver within their pack territory though.They come together to mark their territorial boundary in summer,and communicate thru howling over long distances and thru whistle barking when they are hunting as a pack.

Good write up Robert
unfortunately we do not have a large enough population of moose in southern Manitoba to support wolves

In central Ontario there is a type of wolf that preys primarily on deer.These wolves tend to be a smaller type than Northern wolves that feed on moose(there are no deer)
The theory is that the smaller wolves can do well on deer as they dont require as much to sustain them,and big size is not critical to be able to take down deer.-natural selection at work..

Thanks for that!

So would you say by weakening the pack down to 2-3 wolves you pretty much killed them?

Or are those 2-3 survivors more likely to runoff as soon as another pack learns about their weak numbers and find a new area to start a new pack?

Really it probably depends on the time of year and amount of food,and pressure from an overpopulation(or not) of other wolves.If they can make it to break up they might be able to steer clear of the dominant pack and live on beaver,or hang back and scavenge like rejected wolves often do.
One wolf I caught this year was a rejected older large wolf on his own.He was in bad shape and infested with lice and not worth skinning.

Good info Boco.

Thanks Boco! I’d ride 2up on your sled any day!

Pppp…pardon me? Who’s who? Hahaha

Looks like you and JP.
Posing for the Manitoba trappers calendar.

That’s bucksnbears and Jbyrd.