. The Canadian field-naturalist. 150 The Canadian Field-Naturalist Vol. 90. Miles Kilometres • Eureka o Wolf den X Garbage dump I. Studv area near Eureka, Ellesmere Island. because it was too dark, or they were too distant, or because they were discerned only from tracks or howls. Although these records may suffer bias in that non-aggressive encounters were less likely to be recorded than aggressive ones, they clearly il- lustrate the predominant human response to wolves during these years, made explicit in a journal entry for 10 December 1947 stating that instructions were given to tr
. The Canadian field-naturalist. 150 The Canadian Field-Naturalist Vol. 90. Miles Kilometres • Eureka o Wolf den X Garbage dump I. Studv area near Eureka, Ellesmere Island. because it was too dark, or they were too distant, or because they were discerned only from tracks or howls. Although these records may suffer bias in that non-aggressive encounters were less likely to be recorded than aggressive ones, they clearly il- lustrate the predominant human response to wolves during these years, made explicit in a journal entry for 10 December 1947 stating that instructions were given to treat wolves as "dangerous ; There were no records of wolves chasing or attacking the men. From 1954 to the present no records of the number of wolves killed at Eureka are available; however, a single wolf was shot in March 1973 on suspicion of being rabid (R. Heartz, personal communication). We can conclude from these early records that wolves were common visitors to the weather station from the moment it was founded, and that their visits were not discouraged by the frequent use of firearms against them. Direct en- counters with men were generally inimical to wolves. Response of Wolves to Observer Are wolves, as was believed, a danger to humans? The absence of hostility to men by wolves has been described by a number of re- searchers, in anecdotal form (, Parmelee 1964; Mech and Frenzel 1969). in an attempt to quantify wolves' responses to man I noted their behavior and mine on each encounter. I observed wolves on 42 (45%) of 94 days in the summer and on 11 (44%) of 25 days in the winter. On 27 occasions in summer and seven in winter the wolves also saw and responded to me. On seven encounters in summer and two in winter I was within 20 ft (6 m) of a wolf; the maximum distance for recorded encounters was about 440 yd ( km). The number of wolves per encounter ranged from one to seven, but. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page
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