673;
Top of the morning my friend, I see your light is on so I'm guessing the stove is lit up there and the coffee on as it is here.
We're warm again with the snow melting down in the valley, but of course that makes for crusty snow and will mean the ungulates are going to take a beating from the dog family big and small in both our back yards.
While I've told these tales/tails previously perhaps there's new folks who've not read them or old readers who like me won't remember them.
Back before they gave us a wolf season down here in the south, only First Nations hunters could shoot them and so it was that a local chap from Osoyoos Indian Band brought a bruiser of a wolf into my friends' taxidermy shop. They'd done northern wolves before but this one had a couple features new to them, which were an ear tag and radio collar!
The taxidermist father and son duo suggested that the FN chap might want to take at least the radio collar into the local MOE in Penticton "just because" and they pulled the ear tag as well for added entertainment.
It turned out that the MOE, in the fullness of time of course just like in biblical times, were able to ascertain that it was an Alberta wolf, captured on the western slopes of the Rockies, then released in Yellowstone where it was picked for the radio collar and then let loose to wander. Well wander it did 673!
For the curious and sciencey minded amongst us, here's a link to a reasonably close landmark to where wolfie bought the farm.
https://baldyresort.com/If one takes a quick look at a map then of where Baldy is as compared to say anywhere in Yellowstone, one will begin to grasp how far they can travel.
We talked to a bio down here where they said they've got a female wolf collared. The bio said it was no big deal for her to go from my backyard - again we'll say Baldy as that's just south of the mountain behind the house - way up to nearly as far north as your part of the world, where it'll cross north of Okanagan Lake and come back down into the Similkameen.
Like you, I've missed every wolf I've seen in the flesh - exactly one. Shot high, yet again.
We've tried and tried to call them here. Had smoking fresh tracks in the snow and called with rabbit distress, fawn distress, coyote howls and wolf howls with nobody showing up to see what the fuss was.
For the rest of the readers here, just north of 673 there's no bag limit, no closed season for wolves and there's still an over abundance.
As you said 673, I do not believe either that enough can be shot to control the population. Aerial gunning excepted and likely not that down here in the timber, but maybe with the right pilot and an auto shotgun? Maybe...
Anyways all the best to you all 673, I hope we can do coffee sometime this year.
Dwayne
