Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Wolves with GPS Collars

A lot of wolves get killed here but people don't talk about it.

They have spent Millions and Millions on the Mexican gray wolf reintroduction. At one point they had a person assigned to every single collared wolf. We found one in the bank of the irrigation ditch in Eagar one time. Feds came out, took a glance at it and saw that it had no collar and was obviously displaced from the original kill location. They didn't even take it. The guy who lived there asked them what they were going to do with it. They told him it wasn't their problem but that if he touched it, it was a felony. It got kicked back into the ditch to wash up somewhere further down the line!

C'mon Vern. Be nice.

Pick a Subaru. Preferably one with a PETA sticker.

I would just have to wait until I found a rig with a Hitlery sticker... But thanks for the idea!

You beat me to it...

Collars have a temperature sensor, once the temp starts going down they know the animal is deceased. If you take the collar off the temp goes down real quick.

My friend here trapped two wolves the first time around when it was legal for maybe a year or less, 2014 I think. Anyway, one had a collar. The morning he found the wolves in the traps there was already a plane in the air. On the way back home, about a 30 mile drive, he was pulled over by our game warden. Even though it was entirely legal to trap the wolves. Warden said he wanted to make sure they got the collar back. He legally had 10 days to even report that he'd taken a wolf.

I don't know if the plane was already in the air and happened to pick up the signal from the collar or if the plane went up because of a mortality signal that the collar was giving off. I think the collars send out a mortality signal after so many hours of not moving. Maybe being in a trap will set off that signal.

Anyway, just some food for thought.

I'm not sure with the collars they use here if there's actually a mortality signal that is different or if it's just a lack of motion on the GPS sensors ... I would suspect the latter because the former would take more complicated circuitry and more battery draw. Batteries going dead is a major problem for long term tracking and anything that reduces battery life is to be avoided. At least one of the wolves here has a collar that has gone silent and they can't catch him without it to refresh the batteries. Catch-22 .. or at least no-catch-wolf.

We have wolves here as well. They arn't appreciated by the folks running bear dogs and several dogs are lost each year to wolves. According to our DNR they can't be shot in the defense of your hunting dog. I'm an avid bird hunter and I hunt in wolf country. Luckily the only ones I've seen have been while in the truck and even a fast stomp of the gas pedal wasn't able to catch them. If it come to a choice between my bird dog and the wolf the wolf will get it every time. We have some collard ones as well as some that have a chip implanted into them.

Three guys here in New Jersey illegally shot a black bear, it had a collar. They took the collar and nailed to a board and put it in a river (The Paulinskill). The Fish & Game guys were confused that the collar was moving along the river but the temperature of the animal was showing some low temperature (it was November or December), remember, a bear is warm blooded and should show a high temperature. The F & G guys found the collar on the board, back tracked using the GPS data until they found the kill site and did some old fashion investigating and found the three violators (one was a convicted felon who squealed like a pig).

Radio collars give off a mortality signal only after the collar does not move for a period of 24 hrs. The vhf collars have a mercury switch in them. GPS collars may keep working, but if the coordinates cease to change for over a day or two then there is a fair chance the wolf is dead, or has shed the collar. Sometimes other wolves, particularly pups, will chew them off.

Burn everything.

Collars I used in the past had captive balls within capsules. Each end of the capsule supported an electrical contact. One capsule was sensitive to left/right movements, and the second fore/aft. When they ceased accumulating counts for at least a 24 hour period, the mortality signal would launch. One could just as easily write code to assess movements via GPS integrations, but that might issue a false positive if an animal was denned up and/or a unit was not getting signals.

Has some similar instruments in the past and recovered a couple that had been dropped to the ground. Looking at the data, one could tell that something came along every couple of days and knocked them around for a minute or two.

Similarly many years back a buddy had time lapse film cameras out to assess elk use across some extensive grassy mountain slopes. The elk spotted those and kicked a couple of them 4 to 500 yds down slope.

This is all kinds of F'ed up. So they will move heaven and earth for a flipping k9. But a killer or rapist, meh.

The best thing you can do is leave it alone and hope the wolves next dinner is a coyote or a coon. I dont care for the wolves , but only cause they are considered holy from the liberals. Also, if the conservatives would get off their ass and vote we would rid this problem. Here in Wisconsin we had a state supreme court vote today. The liberals were all fired up and the dumb ass conservatives sat home. Guess who's 16% up. If ya really have to shoot a wolf, make sure you are " threatened" by them. Feeling threatened is a judgement call. I felt threatened, it wouldn't run away . I was scared! It kept running at me so I shot it cause I thought it was going to hurt me . If I see a wolf in the woods and it is close, or seems dangerous or threatening, I think I could shoot it legally, but I just aint going to shoot it in the asssz when it's running away. Sure is a lot of big talk right on a public message board. Not the smartest to say you would SSS. on a public board. Go to trial and think they wont use this thread against you ?