Wolf pack in a northern Minnesota winter

Описание: This footage might not seem like anything unique but it is pretty fascinating to us given the events that transpired with these wolves and their neighboring packs after this video.

This footage is of three wolves from the Half-Moon Pack in early April 2024. The first wolf in the video is a 2 year old female wolf, the second wolf with striking fur coloration is her 2 year old brother (Wolf O6C), and the third wolf at the end of the video is their old grizzled father, Wolf V094.

Just 4 months after this video was taken, the female got together with a male wolf and ousted her father, the breeding male of the pack since 2019, and her brother (her mother had disappeared early in the spring so we are not sure what happened to her).

By removing her father and brother, she became the dominant/breeding female of the Half-Moon Pack. This caused her father and brother to wander around the area together looking for a new place to settle down (we captured the two together on trail cams often in Fall 2024).

By late Fall 2024, the duo settled down in the Lightfoot Pack territory and were traveling around with a 4 year-old female (Wolf B3S) from the Lightfoot pack who, around the same time, had ousted her mother and her mother’s mate.

It is possible that these two Half-Moon wolves assisted in this ousting but we do not know for sure. We know the mother was ousted, though because we saw her on camera last winter.

These three wolves were the “new” Lightfoot Pack and occupied the territory, which is easterly adjacent to the Half-Moon territory, together for 3 months. Except the new wrinkle was that Wolf O6C was clearly the dominant male now, not his father (V094).

As a result, by mid-winter, Wolf V094 either voluntarily left or was forcibly removed from the pack. He became a lone wolf and wandered about for several months.

But during this past June, V094 finally found a new pack: the Peatlands Pack, which is the western neighbor of the Half-Moon Pack. Since June, V094 has been in the Peatlands Pack and we have footage of him traveling with the pups of that pack this summer.

Interestingly, those pups are not his pups. We are not sure if V094 ousted the breeding male and took over the dominant position, if the breeding male died and V094 took over the vacancy, or if V094 is simply a subordinate male in the pack. Camera footage over the coming months should be informative.

To bring this all together, the three wolves in this video are now all members of three different packs that border each other. At least two of the three wolves are the dominant/breeding wolves of their pack, and it is very possible all three wolves are the breeding wolves.

We think watching how these pack dynamics unfold through time is fascinating and informative. Further it highlights why studying the packs in our area intensively over many years is invaluable—i.e., we get detailed insights like this that we would never observe if we only studied them for a few years or less intensively.

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