Fieldwork among wolves

Bott’s family lived in the northern Rocky Mountains since the 1840s. Teenage Aaron grew up with a “solid misunderstanding” of wolves, but thrilled by his first sighting of one.

“I lived in a remarkable environment with grizzly bears, and bison, and moose. And wolves were reintroduced into this ecosystem when I was 5 years old, and my family had very mixed opinions about wolf reintroduction,” Bott said.

“A lot of that anxiety was founded on misinformation and a misunderstanding of wolf recovery and the biology of the animal. And as I became invested in wolf ecology and wolf management, I began to understand that some of those anxieties were misplaced, and I came to develop a really fond respect and appreciation of wolves on the landscape,” Bott said. “... I love hunting and fishing, and have grown up with livestock my whole life. I like rural communities that have wild ecosystems on their doorstep, and wolves kind of are the cherry on top of wildness.”

So he became the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife wolf biologist for central and northwestern Oregon.

Coexistence in Wasco

“All large carnivores are challenging to coexist with. That’s a fact,” Bott acknowledged. “It’s difficult to coexist with large animals that eat meat. Nevertheless ... They fulfill an important ecological role, and they also add the complexity of an intact ecosystem, which is so important in a world that is quickly losing its wild places and its wild things.”

Wolves returned to Wasco County in 2016. The White River pack dens on the Warm Springs Reservation, where most of Wasco’s permanent wolf residents spend most (but not all) of their time.

Meanwhile, young dispersing wolves move throughout the county. “Wasco County has had, and will continue to have, transient wolves using its landscape as wolves recover along the eastern front of the Cascades and the Columbia plateau,” he said.

In some other counties, an Oregon Department of Agriculture compensation program is available to help reimburse livestock producers for any damage, and fund proactive management and conflict mitigation, like for range riders or special fencing. Sometimes it compensates producers for extra time and effort shepherding, defending and fortifying ranches in ways that haven’t been necessary for a generation.

“We want to be proactive rather than reactive. So, a lot of my time is spent doing proactive work with producers in order to help them adjust to having a new carnivore on the landscape, one which hasn’t been here for the last 70 or 80 years,” Bott said.

How wolves live

Bott explained the wolf lifestyle, which shapes their return to Wasco.

They live in packs: family units with two parents, which den once a year. Their pups mature around two years of age, after leaving home. “They go off on their own to look for a mate to start a family of their own,” Bott said. “So wolves can travel a huge distance in a very short period of time, 30 to 40 miles a day. And yeah, it’s not uncommon for us to have sightings of wolves in Wasco County.”

Wolves “co-evolved with this part of the world, on the Columbia plateau and the Cascades in the Mount Hood area; it co-evolved with the deer and the elk populations, and as large carnivores, they play an important role in interacting and engaging with that ecosystem,” he said.

But even where wolves have recovered, they are “fewer in number than lions and bears and coyotes; they’re always going to be fewer in number. That’s just due to the behavioral ecology of the animal.”

Bott’s job follows the wolf life cycle: Their breeding in February, counting pups that are born mid-April, seeing them travel with the pack when winter comes. “I spend a lot of time monitoring pup survival rates. Pup mortality is really high. A lot of pups die in their first few months of life,” he said.

Each winter, ODFW censuses Oregon’s wolves, flying helicopters and planes get a “conservative” count.

“Wolves were systematically eradicated from Oregon in the early 1900s and after that time, the population was essentially absent from this part of the world,” Bott said. After the reintroduction of wolves into the northern Rocky Mount states in the mid-1990s, their population grew and dispersing youngsters recolonized Oregon, starting the first pack in 2008. “Since then, wolves have continually expanded westward and still have a lot of vacant places on the Oregonian landscape,” Bott said.

Here, “deer and elk begin to engage with a novel predator,” changing their behavior. “In some cases, they tend to move more regularly,” Bott said, frustrating human hunters who may no longer find them in the usual spots.

“As deer and elk encounter wolves, they not only can be directly impacted by wolves through predation, but more often than not, they’re indirectly impacted, meaning they have to move around more regularly in order to avoid predation. This ultimately is healthier for the landscape as deer and elk move and use different types of foraging habitats, but it can be frustrating for hunters who are familiar with seeing deer and elk in specific locations for decades, and now they don’t see them as regularly or as predictably in certain locations,” Bott explained. “So that is something that I grew up with experiencing.”

By “ultimately healthier,” he meant the wolves are performing a sort of rotational grazing: They keep the ungulates moving, instead of settled down to munch one particular habitat to the nubbins.

Wolves’ hunting behavior is different from cougars’. The big cats are ambush predators with a high success rate; the wolves rely on chasing their prey down in long-distance runs. “They have to ... try and capture their prey with their teeth, which is a challenging effort on their part,” Bott said. “ ... They’re testing large herds and hoping that someone in the herd will be having a bad day.”

Elk are apparently better for this, since they move in big herds and one elk is a large, juicy return on wolves’ investment in the chase.

“When wolves chase deer, typically, they’re in smaller groups, and they scatter like buckshot — and so they’re challenging to hunt ... it’s a lot of effort for a smaller prize. So wherever elk and wolves coexist, wolves generally prefer to prey upon elk,” Bott explained. Wolves still manage to kill less than 10% of what they chase.

Predation can be the immediate cause of a reduction population. But, “the ultimate cause for any deer elk population declines usually are much larger. They’re more habitat-related, or nutritionally related, or disease related,” Bott said.

Oregon already hosts many carnivores, he noted, with a large cougar population and thousands of black bears. “As wolves are recovering in the hundreds, wolves are just one of the many large carnivores that we have on the landscape.”

Fieldwork among wolves

“My job is to primarily monitor and study wolf populations and their behavior. Most of my job involves field tracking,” Bott said. He follows tracks, samples scat, checks “hundreds and hundreds” of trail cameras. He also traps wolves in foothold traps to fit with radio collars, taking blood samples and biopsies for genetic studies and checks of population health. It all takes time. “I’m not complaining about that,” said Bott, who spends just a few hours in the office every month.

“Conveniently, wolves live in packs, so they’re not solitary or as elusive as mountain lions or even bears,” he noted. “... A pack is usually around six individuals, but they howl, for Pete’s sake! So they’re loud and they’re noisy. A lot of people think that they’re supposed to be nocturnal, but they’re actually not nocturnal.”

A lot of his work involves livestock protection. “I work a lot with ranchers and producers all over the state of Oregon, one on one, trying to help mitigate any conflicts and prevent any conflicts; we like to be as proactive as possible with educating producers who have anxiety about having a large carnivore on the landscape,” he said. “We do a lot of education and tool deployment.”

When a producer reports wolf activity, Bott drives out to see. “We look to determine if livestock were injured or killed by wolves, and we do that by collecting evidence from the scene,” he said. “Wolf predation patterns on animals that they attack are really obvious. It’s very different from mountain lions and bears and coyotes, and so it’s 90% of the time pretty apparent that a wolf was, or was not involved.”

He said most ranchers are on board with this, though communicating with a whole community can be slow. “I have to say that the vast majority of ranchers that I work with are wonderful and hard-working people, and even if they’re not thrilled to have another thing on their plate — another carnivore on the landscape — most of them pretty much get on board without creating a lot of fuss or complaint or self pity,” Bott said. “I really admire these hard-working people who are spending so much time out in the field already.”

Often, he noted, it’s the few people with stronger opinions who get heard.

“I have so many positive things to say about a lot of the ranchers that I do work with, but of course, you’ve got people who are getting a lot of misinformation from social media or from other unreliable sources. And probably the hardest part of my job, or maybe the most grinding part of my job, the most frustrating part of my job is just how slow that communication process can be,” Bott noted.

That means going from producer to producer to “shake hands and build relationships and help people out one-on-one,” then see it all break down. “There’s always someone who missed the memo, someone who hasn’t been a part of the conversation, and then suddenly has a negative experience or a concern ... and you’re starting back over at square one.”

Bott remembers ranches from his childhood Rocky Mountains where 30 years of wolf residence has left some ranches “better than they’ve ever been, due to various factors ... it’s just getting people ahead of the learning curve ... There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. You can raise livestock with large carnivores.”

For himself, Bott wants to help keep Oregon wild.

“I have children of my own, and I want them to have the same kind of experiences that I had, growing up with a deep appreciation of the natural world. I want them to grow up hunting. I want them to grow up fishing. I want them to grow up and hear wolf howls in the forest. I want them to be able to see the stars at night. I want them to go swimming in the rivers. And that is a precious thing for me, to spend my career trying to trying conserve that kind of life,” he said.

“... I remember the first wolf encounter I ever had as a teenager. I was out backpacking in this very remote wilderness area, and I encountered a wolf, and I saw it loping through a meadow. And at that point in time, I had a very solid misunderstanding of wolves. And yet, despite my misunderstanding and apprehension of having wolves on the landscape, I saw that animal, and I just felt tingles go down my spine.

“And now, as a wolf biologist and a father, I’ve had the privilege of bringing my 6-year-old son out in the woods with me to trap and radio collar wolves; and to have my 6-year-old boy sit next to me while we have a live, healthy wolf in our hands, and to look into their yellow eyes, and just have that sense of wildness electrify you, and then to watch the wolf get up and walk away and go back out into the wild. And have my son get to experience that with me is pretty special. That’s something that I’ll treasure,” he said.