Thursday, May 17, 2018

Mammoth Campground, Yellowstone

We had a wolf adventure this morning. Apparently, we watched an adult wolf kill one of the pups.

It isn't clear if it was intentional or not – the experts disagree.

Most of the pack was gone from the area, leaving one adult – 996M - as a baby-sitter. At one point, he went up to the den and 9 pups came pouring out and swarmed all over him. It seems he didn't like that. He'd move to one side and they would swarm him, so he'd quickly move to the other side of the den and they would follow.

Finally, he snatched one up and carried it, squirming, down the hill. We could just see the top of his back over the grass and small hill. About 10 minutes later, he got up and carried the limp pup away. At that point, somebody said “Is anybody videoing this?” I said I would try and about 45 seconds, but after editing out the parts where I couldn't find the wolf and uploading to Youtube, it's unusable. Each stage lost detail and the wolf is pretty small in the frame to the point you can't even see it. I'll try again later with other videos.

The rest of the morning, the wolf would carry the pup to someplace we couldn't see, stay for about ½ hour and then move, still with the pup, to another place.

The disagreement among the experts is why he killed it. One thinks he was taking the pup to play and accidently squeezed too hard. The other thinks he was snapping at it because of all the pups swarming him and was too aggressive. We'll never really know for sure.

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