. You have more wolves in Alberta because fewer are being taken out of the gene pool. Roads have little to do with it. My youngest daughter and her husband live in Alberta. Last winter they took 21 wolves. Most trappers won't do that anymore because they are a lot of work, and not worth much.
I don't know, but we have a lot of wolves, and your right they haven't been trapped and shot like they used to be, though they are pretty much shot on sight by most hunters nowadays. I think they have adapted in that they now don't fear people, vehicles, oil patch development, logging and such like they used to. Wolf populations are much higher in those areas than they ever were before the industrial development of these areas. They use roads mostly at night, they definitely have learned to use them as a primary method of hunting here. In the area I'm familiar with there are thousands of square miles of area where there are roads, cutlines, pipelines, gas plants, frac plants, pumpjacks, cutblocks, flarestacks, storage facilities, processing plants, etc, which are scattered everywhere, there is nowhere where your can get farther than a kilometer from any of this, it is far from a wilderness, more like a giant industrial park spread over hundreds of miles among the forest and swamps. Wolf populations are still growing, they are over capacity in this industrial habitat and it's dwindling ungulate food supply. They are spreading out of the foothills, colonizing and now not uncommon in the parkland farming areas.
If given a window wolves are very adaptable and becoming quite comfortable living around our backyards.
