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Admissions at Northland

The Wolves of Isle Royale National Park

While Isle Royale is physically closer to the North Shore of Lake Superior, near Minnesota and Ontario, it is part of the State of Michigan. After the Revolutionary War, when a boundary was being drawn dividing British Canada and the United States, it is said that Benjamin Franklin finagled the Island out of British hands. The International Boundary was drawn north of the Island! Native Americans call Isle Royale, minong, meaning "place of blueberries" or "a nice place to be."

Spanning some 210 square miles, Isle Royale is the largest island in Lake Superior. Located 15 miles from the nearest landfall on the Canadian mainland, Isle Royale is the most remote national park in the lower 48 states. This natural isolation makes the island a perfect natural history laboratory for researchers and because of this, researchers have run a 35-year-plus study on the dynamics between wolves and moose, the longest-running study in the world of any wild mammal.

Wolves occupied the island sometime between 1948-1950 and biologists speculate these animals traveled there by way of a 15-mile natural ice bridge from either Minnesota or Ontario. Since that time, the island's wolf-moose populations have fluctuated, in part, due to the animals' inability to migrate when food is scarce.

In 2002, the island was home to 17 wolves, a population decline of two animals from the previous year. All three of the island's wolf packs gave birth to pups during the 2001 spring, but by the winter, only two packs had pups surviving. This was the second year the island's wolf population had experienced a high mortality (death) in pups and researchers believed it was possibly related to a shortage of old moose (animals that are easy for wolves to catch.) However, the overall moose population had been steadily increasing since the catastrophic 1996 winter when roughly 80 percent of the moose population died. In 2002, an estimate of 1,100 moose inhabited the island. (Ecological Studies of Wolves on Isle Royale, 2001-2002)

Presently, Isle Royale's wolf population has increased to 29 animals;the moose population has declined slightly to 750
animals.