GRAND MARAIS— LynnAnne Vesper’s backpack grew heavier with each passing day on Isle Royale, but not because she was carrying extra supplies. Instead, moose skulls and leg bones accumulated on her pack as she and her volunteer team bushwhacked across the remote Lake Superior island.
“On a canoe trip, your food pack gets lighter,” Vesper told members of the Tuesday Group as she recounted her experiences as a group leader for the Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Research Project. “On Moose Watch, your pack gets heavier,” added Vesper, who lives in Ely.
For more than seven decades, Isle Royale has served as nature’s laboratory for understanding predator-prey relationships. The 40-mile-long island is large enough to support its own ecosystem but small enough to study, a self-contained world where wolves and moose have played out their lives largely without interference from humans.
Until recently, that is.
A wilderness in crisis
By the time Vesper signed up to lead volunteer expeditions in 2021, the island ecosystem was in trouble.
The problem started with climate change. Ice bridges that once regularly connected Isle Royale to the mainland — forming every other year historically — had become increasingly rare. Without new wolves arriving to diversify the gene pool, the island’s wolf population crashed. By the time park officials approved a reintroduction in 2019, only two wolves remained.
With their primary predator nearly gone, the moose population exploded. But the island couldn’t support them all. Trapped on Isle Royale with nowhere to disperse, the moose began to starve.
“In 2021, my group was finding some moose (carcasses) just by smell,” Vesper said. “Usually they were less than 100 yards away.”

High-tech tracking and boots on the ground
The wolf reintroduction changed how researchers and their volunteers work. Each relocated wolf received a GPS collar that transmitted location data twice daily. When collars showed wolves returning repeatedly to the same spot, researchers created what they called “ping clusters” and sent volunteer teams to investigate.
About a third of the time, Vesper’s team found moose bones, clear evidence of a kill. Another third led them to high ridges with sweeping views of Lake Superior.
“We thought, ‘Well, maybe wolves have an appreciation of beauty,’” Vesper joked. “Then we thought, ‘No, there has to be another reason.’”
The answer: Wolves position themselves on high ground where they can spot prey and run downhill for the kill, much easier than running uphill.
But the most surprising discovery came from the final third of ping clusters. Time and again, teams found beaver dams and lodges, evidence that wolves were preferentially hunting beavers over the abundant, weakened moose.
“The study had always known that beavers made up a small portion of the wolves’ diet,” Vesper said. “But what we didn’t know was that when they reintroduced the wolves, they pretty much made a beeline for any place where there was beaver activity.”
Beavers, it turns out, are a preferred food source, even when larger prey is available.
Citizen science in action
The Moose Watch program descended from EarthWatch but became independent when organizers refused to make the expeditions easier.
“The evaluations came back saying the hiking was too hard,” Vesper explained. “And they said, ‘No.’”
The work remains demanding. Teams bushwhack across ridge and swamp terrain, searching for bones before foliage obscures them. When someone spots a bone, they shout, and the group conducts a circular search pattern for more.
Each discovery becomes a data point. Volunteers measure, photograph, and record every find: skulls, vertebrae, metatarsus bones, even pathological abnormalities. The metatarsus — a lower leg bone — is particularly valuable because it grows only during a moose’s first year, providing a snapshot of environmental conditions at that time.
Skulls offer even more information. Researchers slice open teeth to count growth rings in the cementum, much like dating a tree, determining the moose’s age and correlating it with historical island conditions.
“What they’re doing with the data we collect is called population reconstruction,” Vesper said. “They can tell you pretty accurately what the population of moose was 10 years ago, whereas their current estimates are pretty much just estimates.”
An island transformed
One of Isle Royale’s most striking features is what’s missing. Unlike mainland forests thick with balsam fir, the island’s balsam has been browsed down to waist height by hungry moose. The volunteers GPS-mark any “escaped balsam” that grows taller — a rarity worth documenting.
Three fenced exclosures on the island demonstrate what the forest would look like without moose. Inside these protected areas, the vegetation resembles mainland forests.
The overbrowsing makes bushwhacking easier, Vesper said, though stream crossings remain challenging. Most volunteers have adopted a practical solution: They bring Crocs as a second pair of shoes, switching into them for water crossings.
One team member, Davy Gibbs, a former nuclear submarine builder from Kentucky, took this to an extreme. When his boots fell apart on day one, he completed 29 miles of bushwhacking in borrowed Crocs and neoprene socks, earning the nickname “Davy Crocin’it.”
Questions remaining
As the session ended, audience members raised thoughtful questions about the project’s future. Without ice bridges, how sustainable are the island’s populations? How does this isolated ecosystem compare to mainland predator-prey dynamics?
Vesper acknowledged the uncertainty.
“That probably remains to be seen,” she said. “The fascinating thing about being involved with the study is they have questions they haven’t answered yet.”
For those interested in participating, Vesper said, you need to be prepared to shoulder a 50-pound pack and slip moose skulls onto it. But for citizen scientists willing to make the effort, Isle Royale offers something rare: The chance to contribute to groundbreaking research while experiencing one of North America’s most isolated ecosystems.