REGIONAL— There’s no shortage of opinions when it comes to the relationship between wolves and deer in northeastern Minnesota. But for a small handful of biologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, that relationship has been the focus of more than forty-five years of objective data collection and analysis rather than speculation or myth.

Led by Dr. L. David Mech, it’s part of the longest-running predator-prey study anywhere in the world, with the sole exception of the ongoing moose-wolf study on nearby Isle Royale.

Dr. Shannon Barber-Meyer, who is based in Ely, lives with the nitty-gritty of wildlife research day in and day out as the field manager for Mech’s study. She’s taken over for Mech’s longtime field researcher Mike Nelson and she spoke about her work during a presentation to the Lake Vermilion Sportsmen’s Club last Friday.

Working in the field means that Barber-Meyer gets up close and personal with the subjects of her study— by trapping, collaring, and collecting blood samples and other vital data from both wolves and deer in order to learn more about their habits, their health, and their complex interrelationships with their forest environment.

For Barber-Meyer, it is clearly exciting work, which was obvious as she described the trapping methods for both deer and wolves.

It’s the wolf-capturing season right now, and the team captures its target animals through the use of padded leg hold traps. Come winter, they’ll shift their focus to trapping deer, for which they use wire cages with a trip-wired trap door. Over the decades, the researchers have captured hundreds of wolves, over 700 whitetail deer, and have examined over 1,000 wolf-kills, of both deer and moose, in the study area.

For most of their subjects, the study team still uses traditional radio collars, which are more reliable and far more durable than the high tech GPS units now being used on many wildlife studies.

According to Barber-Meyer, such a long-term study provides many additional opportunities to observe trends over time, or the effect of changes in an animal’s environment, that often aren’t going to be apparent in shorter term research. One change that Barber-Meyer is now eager to study is the impact of the new hunting season on Minnesota’s wolves, which she said has already made wolves warier of traps. So far, ten of the study’s collared wolves have been killed as a result of the hunting seasons begun in 2012. Hunters shot four of them in both 2012 and 2013, while trappers caught one each in those two years. Of the four shot each year by hunters, three were reported to the Department of Natural Resources (as required by law), and one was not.

But beyond the numbers taken by hunters, the study will give researchers a better understanding of how hunting might impact wolf dispersal, pack formation, and the shape and size of pack territories— all choice grist for a biologist’s mill.

Barber-Meyer said she’s already seen the effects of the past winter on the area’s wolves. “Most of the wolves we’re capturing right now are just bony thin, right on the margin of survival,” she said. While wolves had a brief period of good hunting conditions in early April, when the deep snowpack formed a hard enough crust for them to run on top, she said the rest of the winter was as tough on wolves as on many other species of wildlife. “It was only in the final two weeks of the winter that they went on a killing spree,” she said.

She added, however, that wolves in northeastern Minnesota tend to be leaner than wolves in other places, such as Yellowstone, with greater prey abundance and less competition from other wolves. Here in northeastern Minnesota, “it’s a tough life living as a wild wolf,” she said.

According to Barber-Meyer, a wolf can survive on about two and a half pounds of meat a day, but needs about five pounds to be healthy enough to reproduce. That translates into about 15-20 deer per year to maintain a healthy wolf, although wolves do rely on other prey, such as beaver and moose, to meet their food requirements.

Assuming 15 deer per year, the state’s estimated population of 2,450 wolves would consume approximately 37,000 deer annually, or about one-fifth the number of deer taken by Minnesota hunters in recent years.