Many of us living in the northland are familiar with L. David Mech, senior research scientist with U.S. Geological Survey and an adjunct professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. You may know him better as the founder of the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, or as an expert the media calls on when information about gray wolves is needed for an article.
When it comes to wolves, Mech is that go-to expert.
In his latest book, co-written with noted author Greg Breining, Mech takes the reader back to the early 1960s when, as a graduate student, he spent three years studying wolves on Isle Royale National Park.
Growing up in upstate New York, David came from a family that spent a lot of time outdoors. His father was an avid hunter and trapper, and David followed in his footsteps. A growing love of the outdoors led him to major in wildlife biology at Cornell University, where he studied mammals: deer, bear, rabbits, etc. As a college senior, Mech heard snippets about Isle Royale and he was fascinated. Then he got the break of a lifetime when his class traveled to hear Purdue University Professor Duward Allen speak.
Mech was tapped by his professor, Ollie Hewitt, to meet with Allen, and they had a long conversation about Allen’s plans to study wolves on Isle Royale. Allen encouraged Mech to apply for graduate school at Purdue and if he was accepted, he would become Allen’s first graduate student for the Isle Royale project. David was stunned to learn he would be in charge of the study because Allen had other time commitments. (Notably, Allen’s last graduate student was Rolf Peterson, who spent his career working as a researcher and teacher at Michigan Tech on the predator prey study between wolves and moose on Isle Royale.)
In the beginning, Allen advised David to get to know the lay of this 45-mile long, 132,018 acre island archipelago. Mech, burdened by a bad back he hurt while doing bear research at Cornell, wrote that he sometimes hiked 20 miles, and often covered more than 10 miles on his jaunts, always hoping to see a wolf but rarely spotting one. However, he did find wolf scat and he collected it. He also collected moose jawbones for study. When he wasn’t hiking, he would cruise the shoreline around the island on a boat that was named Wolf. During the winter months, he flew with pilots over the land in search of wolves and moose.
At that time, the vegetation was low. The land was recovering from a great fire in 1936 and subsequent forest fires in the 1940s. These burns made finding wolf packs in the winter easier to spot from the air. Mech most often flew with pilot Don Murray, who the book is dedicated to, recounting their adventures as they circled and landed near wolves eating freshly killed moose.
By his second year on the island, David was married to Betty Ann. The young couple and their baby daughter Sharon got to know the fishermen who came in the summer. Those families were the Sivertsons and Eckels, who lived and worked out of Washington Harbor at the southwest end of the island, and the Rudes, John Skadberg, and Holtes, “and a dozen others encamped around Siskwit Bay who were at the southwest end of the island.”
There is some gore in the book as Mech describes wolves killing and then eating a moose. But many places in these pages are charming. He notes that the ravens follow or sometimes fly ahead of the wolf packs, sharing in the remnants of a kill when the wolves are done eating. However, when the ravens would become mischievous, they would playfully dive at the wolves’ heads or tails. One raven landed and walked over to a resting wolf and pecked at its tale. Mech said he never saw a wolf hurt a raven, never saw any sign in wolf scat that revealed that a wolf had ever killed a raven. “Either ravens were keenly aware of the wolves abilities, or the wolves had no real intention of catching the birds. Perhaps both. Each creature seemed to enjoy the games.”
For L. David Mech, his three years of robust study, led to a sea change in the way wolves were studied. His articles and photographs about his research were published in magazines like National Geographic. His subsequent studies of wolves in Denali Park in Alaska and at Yellowstone National Park helped change many people’s perceptions of these animals, of which he says, “The wolf is neither a saint nor a sinner except to those who want to make it so.”
“More serious for the project was a strong recommendation from the college physician that I quit my job at the grocery store. I had injured my back while pulling a 300-pound bear out of a culvert trap the previous summer. The disc was causing a change to the muscle in my left leg, and the whole situation could get worse if I continued to lift heavy cans in the grocery store.
“I took the doc’s advice and quit my job, but that meant coming up with another source of money. So I sold my beautiful 12-gauge pump shotgun for $65. I wrote an outdoor story and sold it for Sports’ Afield magazine for $75. Then I got a $250 grant from the college, for which I was most grateful. By managing this money carefully and depending on fish (smelt from the local Cayuga Lake run) and road-killed rabbits and deer I found around the area, I managed to survive the last semester.”
And so it began.
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