Wolf Habitat
Some Important Facts About the Wolf Habitat
Wolf habitat can be just about anywhere. That’s because wolves can adapt to a wide variety of environments--the only places wolves cannot successfully inhabit are the rainforest and true deserts. Otherwise, the most significant factor in determining wolf habitat is the presence of humans and their tolerance for wolves.
Wolf habitat changes because of human predation. In the 1800s, wolves in the United States were pretty much wiped out by bounties given for every wolf carcass. Before this, wolves existed throughout the United States and across North America, Asia, and Europe. While the reintroduction of wolves to certain areas has been successful, the key to their survival has been federal protection, not adequate or inadequate wolf habitat.
Wolves can thrive in all kinds of habitat from the relative warmth of the southern United States to Alaska and Canada’s Arctic tundra. Wolf habitat must consist of water, a place for a den for shelter and breeding pups and a population of prey that will provide enough food. This usually means deer, caribou, and elk. Wolves also like trees, brush or shrubbery in which they can hide themselves.
In the United States, because of the reintroduction of captive-bred wolves, there are now about 3,000 wolves in the north woods of Minnesota, around 30 on Isle Royale on Lake Superior, 120 or so in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Pennsylvania, and approximately 300 in the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. In Alaska, mostly in the extreme cold of the far north live between six and eight thousand Arctic Wolves. Arizona and New Mexico currently have ongoing projects that are reintroducing Mexican wolves into their states and 75 red wolves can be found in the wildest parts of North Carolina.
While it is believed that there are a few Mexican wolves in Mexico itself, none have been seen in many decades. Mexican wolf habitat consists of pine, oak and juniper woodlands, and forests. Wolves prefer to live at levels of above 4,000 feet in Mexico. As in other countries, the problem is not finding adequate wolf habitat but in educating people so they know the facts about wolf behavior and can live with a tolerance for the wolf.
The majority of wolves that die each year do so because they are killed by humans, sometimes being mistaken for a coyote, or they wander too far south where human communities with roads and motor vehicles play a large part in their demise. Since it is lawful to kill coyotes in just about every state, education is needed so that people can identify the differences between coyotes and wolves.
For the most part today, wolves are finding suitable habitat through programs designed to increase their numbers. Every year though, there are increased attempts to downgrade current legislation that makes wolves an endangered and protected species. The growth of the wolf population in Alaska has increased numbers sufficiently that the wolf is above the numbers needed to be considered endangered. Already, the Alaskan government has started to take unwarranted steps to decrease wolf populations by legalizing the killing of wolves, with the governor going as far as to put a bounty on wolves. It seems that the greatest danger to wolf habitat, intolerance, is still alive and well.