In the Field

Hungry Anticipation - Coastal Gray Wolves. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 24, 2024.

As a life-long dog lover and as a perpetual student of animal behaviour I found the August encounter with coastal Gray Wolves shown here to be absolutely fascinating. To set the scene, just moments before I captured this image we saw a single adult wolf (the one shown here with his head up) traveling on a rocky beach. It then when into the forest and promptly returned to the beach with four pups-of-the-year chasing after him. The pups surrounded the adult wolf (which was a male) and soon began their tongue-out begging behaviour, presumably hoping "Dad" would regurgitate some food for them to wolf down (pardon the pun). I didn't see the adult male disgorge any food, but with one other wolf (an adult female and presumably "mom") on the beach and outside the field of view of this shot, my attention was split and I may well have missed seeing the male feed the pups. When this image was captured the half-grown pups would have been about 6 months old.

Most experts in wolf behaviour refer to the tongue-out action displayed here by these pups as "licking up", and it serves a role which changes as the wolves age. At this point it's all about hunger and triggering the adult to regurgitate food for the hungry pups. When the pups age and the adults quit feeding them via regurgitation, the "licking up" becomes a ritualized display that signals submission by the licker (and helps keep peace in the pack).

Much of wolf behaviour is poorly understood or flat-out misunderstood, including their social behaviour. Over past decades much has been written about wolf "packs" and the concept of a rigid linear dominance hierarchy among the wolves in a pack. The reality is that the vast majority of wolf packs are simply families that contain a breeding pair and their offspring. Those offspring commonly delay dispersing and heading out on their own until they are up to 3 years old, so a pack can contain two or three liters of offspring, and thus can grow to around 10 or so members. In very rare circumstances and rare environmental conditions (such as having solely large prey to feed on) young wolves will stay with their family even longer and the packs will grow even larger. And, very, very occasionally unrelated wolves will be permitted to join the family group, and those packs can grow even larger. But these situations are far from the norm - those reports of 35 or more wolves in a single pack get a lot of press, they are the very rare exception and not the rule.

What about the concepts the "alpha male" and "alpha female" and the much-discussed dominance hierarchy? Well...the "alpha" concept is pretty much on the useless side (or - at best - inappropriate and misleading terminology). I suppose if you consider ANY breeding male of ANY monogamous species as the alpha male then feel free to use the "alpha" terminology. But it adds virtually no information beyond the term "dad". While some kids listen to their dad and respect their authority (at least we hope) many certainly don't! Similarly few folks think of their mom as the "alpha female". Simply put the "alpha" terminology adds nothing to the discussion and tends to imply there's more going on than their actually is! At the end of the day, the breeding male in a wolf family is just a dad who has kids that tend to defer to him.

What about the popular notion of a linear dominance hierarchy concept (characterized by dominant alphas, slightly less dominant betas, and all the way down to the lowly omegas)? Pretty much a pile of crap and outright wrong (at least as an explanation of the behaviour of wild wolves). That belief came from studies where a bunch of unrelated captive wolves were thrown together in artificial "packs" and then observed. This condition of a whole bunch of unrelated wolves living together just doesn't happen in nature - wolf packs are family groups! In the few long-term behavioural studies of natural wolf packs there was no indication of linear dominance hierarchies. So the whole concept of strict dominance hierarchies is an epiphenomenon created by an artificially created social situation (i.e., a purely invalid methodology), and not reflective of what goes on in the natural world.

Here's a larger version (4800 pixel) of this currently happy family of wolves:

• Hungry Anticipation - Coastal Gray Wolves: Download 4800 pixel image (JPEG: 4.9 MB)

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

1. These images - in all resolutions - are protected by copyright. I'm fine with personal uses of them (including use as desktop backgrounds or screensavers on your own computer), but unauthorized commercial use of the image is prohibited by law. Thanks in advance for respecting my copyright!

2. Like all photographs on this website, these images were captured following the strict ethical guidelines described in The Wildlife FIRST! Principles of Photographer Conduct. As such, no baiting or any form of attractant was used and, as always, we attempted to minimize our impact on the ongoing behaviour of the subjects. I strongly encourage all wildlife photographers to always put the welfare of their subjects above the value of their photographs.

3. This image was captured during my Summer in the Southern Great Bear Exploratory Photo Adventure in late August of 2024. Each year I offer trips into the Great Bear Rainforest as well as tours into the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary (to photograph grizzlies, of course!). Details about these trips can be found on the Photo Tours page of this website.

Behind the Camera

Hungry Anticipation - Coastal Gray Wolves. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 24, 2024.

High Efficiency* Compressed RAW (NEF) format; ISO 4500.

Nikon Z9 paired with Z Nikkor 800mm f6.3S. Hand-held from a floating Zodiac inflatable boat. VR on in Sport mode. Wide-area (L) AF area mode with subject detection on "Birds" mode.

1/1250s @ f6.3; no compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.

At the Computer

Hungry Anticipation - Coastal Gray Wolves. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 24, 2024.

Initial noise reduction and capture sharpening on the .nef (raw) file using the DeepPRIME XD2S algorithm of DXO PhotoLab 8.1 Elite (using the appropriate lens/camera optical module).

Subsequent adjustments to the adjusted linear DNG file (exported from PhotoLab) and conversion to 16-bit TIFF file (and JPEG files for web use) - including all global and selective adjustments - made using Phase One's Capture One Pro (build 16.4.6). In the case of this image the only global adjustment was slight tweak to overall contrast (using the Levels tool). Selective local adjustments performed using Capture One Pro's layers and masking tools. In this case numerous small adjustments and minor tweaks were made on 2 separate layers, with the tweaks being associated with "exposure balancing" and contrast adjustments (such as adjustments to brightness, clarity, highlights, shadows, etc.).

Photoshop modifications included insertion of the watermark and/or text.

Conservation

Hungry Anticipation - Coastal Gray Wolves. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 24, 2024.

Species Status in Canada*: Only Eastern Wolf listed as species of "Special Concern" in May, 2001. Other populations not listed as Endangered or Threatened.

Probably no species alive today has suffered as much direct persecution from humans as has the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus). Once extremely widespread in North America, the Gray Wolf was virtually extirpated from the contiguous 48 states of America and now is regularly found within only a fraction of its historical range in Canada. While the Gray Wolf is currently listed as endangered in most of the 48 lower states of the United States and enjoys the privileges associated with such status (if lack of persecution and abuse can be thought of as a privilege), it is still official policy in much of Canada to rid the countryside of this magnificent keystone predator. As an example, in British Columbia, there is NO closed season on the wolf in most hunting jurisdictions and opportunistic slaughter is encouraged by policy (it is the ONLY fur-bearing species for which NO species hunting tag is required in British Columbia!). Conservation of wolves presents a puzzling paradox. Reduced to the most basic principles, wolf conservation is simplistic: we need only to stop persecuting this species in order for it to survive. Yet accomplishing this invariably proves incredibly difficult - it's as though wolf persecution has been institutionalized directly into government (and societal) bureaucracy.

*as determined by COSEWIC: The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada