The Wolves are Still Around....

Last week my grand daughter asked me if I seen or heard anything more about the wolf pack that's been hanging around all winter. I told her "no", and that I've seen or heard nothing and that they'd probably moved on. Well - I guess I spoke too early! Night before last, I was out on the back porch about 10:30 just watching the moon and the stars. Then into the stillness of the night there was a crystal clear and very loud combination bark/growl within a couple hundred yards of me. I stood there for the longest time, waiting to hear more - but nothing. Yesterday morning we took the dog out for a walk. And as we stepped onto the main road behind us there was a huge pile of wolf scat on the edge of the road. It was very fresh and was completely full of deer hair. We thought for a moment that there must be a deer kill very nearby. Then we realized that just a few days ago, a deer was hit by a car on the highway, immediately east of our road. We had got a phone call about 8 AM from somebody we knew who had actually hit the deer and he wondered what should be done about the carcass. That morning we had called the Wolf Center at the Haliburton Forest and told them that the deer carcass was available for food if they wanted to come and pick it up. But they couldn't come because their freezers were full. We decided to leave the deer, knowing it would be consumed by ravens and other predators within a couple of days. And - checking the carcass late yesterday, we found it's almost all gone. We assume that's where the wolf was eating since the distance between the carcass and the scat can be walked in less than ten minutes!