Howling in the dark
An hour’s drive over the battered roads winding across the Middle Atlas mountain range, Campbell’s team comes to a halt. Research assistant Samantha Siomko sets up an enormous megaphone on the hood of the car and Campbell walks 20 meters, about 22 yards, down the road with a parabolic microphone.
After a few minutes to let the night-time quiet return, Siomko presses play and the howl of a North American gray wolf blasts out into the forest.
Within seconds, a thin, high-pitched arrr-oo-oo-oo echoes back through the forest: local wolves calling back, warning the digital gray wolf that this territory is theirs.
Campbell freezes, all her attention disappearing down the wire of her headphones and out into the forest. “There’s that connection where you can hear them responding to you and you know that they’re right there,” she says. “Not many people have heard golden wolf howling.”
Pulling a compass and GPS unit out of her winter coat, she enters the coordinates and bearing of the howls and notes the audio file number.
Her team is using the howling survey to determine the size of the wolf population, its density, as well as habitat use. Patrolling every night for two months this past winter, the team carried out 165 trials at 70 locations across Ifrane National Park. They heard 20 responses from an estimated 10 packs and found two other packs through snow tracking, camera traps, and thermal camera surveys. In total, Campbell estimates at least 12 territorial groups and 33 wolves heard or seen across 850 square kilometres (328 square miles). Of these packs, five were heard repeatedly, allowing the team to begin to understand their habitat use and home range.
Though the results are very preliminary, Campbell says she thinks there are 15 or 16 packs in the area. “We found fewer wolves than I was expecting,” she wrote after analysing the data this spring.
Shepherd’s tales
While golden wolves have appeared in and disappeared from the taxonomic classification, they remained an ever-present threat in the minds of Moroccan shepherds.
“Everyone knows there are a lot of wolves here, especially the shepherds. It’s not something new,” says Driss Siyas. Like his friend Hammou, Siyas also recently lost two sheep.
The sun is just rising over the steep ridge behind Siyas’s home. The air is still cold as he wades into his sheep pen, a ramshackle enclosure of stacked rocks, crooked sticks, and wire abutting the side of his house. The packed animals are eager to charge up the mountain for a day of foraging for acorns and grass. His wife opens the gate and Siyas, who has shepherded since he was a boy, drives the flock out in a thunder of tiny hooves.
The air is filled with short, sharp whistles, the bleating of sheep, and the baying of the half dozen dogs Siyas keeps to protect his flock.
For her research, Campbell interviewed more than 200 locals to better understand their attitudes towards wolves.
Shepherds share extraordinary stories about how dangerous wolves are. In one of these, always having befallen a distant uncle, a wolf kills a hundred sheep and then lies down and dies next to the last one. Shepherds also say that wolves kill their sheep to teach them to be better shepherds or to embarrass them.
Interestingly, alongside these pastoral legends, Campbell has found that when shepherds actually witnessed an attack, roughly half the time it was by feral dogs living in the forest.
Tellingly, she says wolves are blamed for any livestock attacks that are not witnessed. She also found that only 15 % of shepherds she interviewed had lost livestock to predators in the past year, and far more sheep are lost to disease or cold weather.
“But even if livestock losses from predators are uncommon, most shepherds perceive conflict with wolves to be severe,” she says. This fear means they feel they must maintain shepherd dogs, build secure pens, and spend the whole day anxiously looking after their flock.
They say eliminating the wolves would make their work easier. “Sometimes [losses are] minor, sometimes they’re absent,” Hammou says, “but sometimes they’re severe, because [the wolf] will not attack your sheep for a whole year, but when he does, he will make very, very huge damages.”
This belief is a problem, says Sillero. He says golden wolves are resilient and easily able to adapt to human encroachment, but he does worry about shepherds like Hammou.
“Poison is the great concern I have. Because that shepherd you talked with — with a stick and maybe an old rifle he can occasionally get one of these wolves,” he says. “But if he gets hold of some cheap poison from a general store and laces a carcass, he can kill a whole pack in no time at all. So, I think the ready availability of poison, particularly in Africa, but elsewhere as well, is throwing that balance off.”
Poison was used in predator control efforts in the 1960s, but when it was discovered that this killed other predators and birds of prey, the practice was stopped. Today, it is legal to use poison against wolves in Morocco if they are doing damage on one’s property, but Campbell says her interviews show that most shepherds do not know this. Combined with a belief that wolves are too smart to fall for poisoned carcasses and a fear that sheep dogs will be poisoned accidentally, this means that the practice is not widespread.
“Usually, when we find a wolf that was killed, it is too late to determine how,” Campbell says, “but I know of cases of trapping, beating, shooting, and poisoning of wolves.”
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Howling in the dark: Shining a light on a newly remembered wolf - Mongabay.com
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