By Elise Stolte, Edmonton JournalSeptember 5, 2009
EDMONTON — A University of Alberta researcher was surrounded by wolves, had to cancel her research season and be evacuated from the high Arctic earlier this summer after a pilot with an ecotourism agency left cardboard boxes of bacon and sausage on the tundra near their camp.
The wolves ripped open the boxes of meat and gorged themselves.
Catherine La Farge, who studies the colonies of moss exposed by retreating glaciers, was not attacked during the incident on Ellesmere Island, but she and her field assistant spent three hours cleaning up food and debris strewn across the landscape. Then they were confined to their kitchen tent to guard the leftovers and garbage.
Even banging pots and pans didn’t frighten the wolves off.
“They kept circling,” said La Farge. “It was just so unlike their previous behaviour.
“They were basically having diarrhea all over the place. I was just really shocked,” she added. “The food is a hazard to the animals, that’s my primary concern. We’re just seasonal visitors.
“All they had to do was buy a $50 bear barrel.”
La Farge had to be evacuated several days early, and had to leave equipment behind near the glacier three kilometres away because she feared the wolves get into the tent the minute they walked away.
La Farge complained to conservation officers with the Nunavut government. A conservation officer said the department is investigating and reviewing the permits required for tourist groups in the high Arctic.
The group, Whitney & Smith Legendary Expeditions, normally hikes through Sverdrup Pass, the main east-west corridor on Ellesmere Island and was scheduled to pass near La Farge’s camp more than a week after their food was dropped off.
“It’s obviously very unfortunate. It’s certainly not something we’re happy with,” said Dave Weir, a guide on the trip. The owner is currently on a trip in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest.
Weir said the food was supposed to be placed in an underground cache. The organizers were hoping to do it themselves, but their travel plans changed at the last minute and the task was left to the Twin Otter pilot who landed and left the food on the ground.
“In terms of remedying the situation, we can’t rely on the pilots to do what isn’t really their job,” said Weir.
He said the organizers will be flying in a bear barrel to leave on location in case they ever have to ask another pilot to drop off food for them.
La Farge and her field assistant, master’s degree student David Wilkie, were flown into the pass on June 28 for 18-day season. For the next 14 days, they saw three wolves pass through their camp periodically, sometimes with the remains of an Arctic hare in their mouths and often heading to a freshly killed muskox nearby. But they never stayed long or seemed to pay any attention to their tents, said La Farge.
On July 11, a Twin Otter showed up, and the pilot left two cardboard boxes of food and three plastic bags of stove fuel beside two fuel drums about 100 metres from the research camp.
Three days later, La Farge woke up at 4 a.m. to a wolf howling. Outside her tent, the three wolves had torn into the boxes and strewn food and debris across the tundra. She and Wilkie scared them off, and spent an hour and half picking up the mess and storing the garbage bags in their kitchen tent — but by 8 a.m. the wolves were back.
Again they scared the wolves away, but they hunkered down within sight of the camp. By 11:30 a.m. the wolves returned to the campsite and came within 10 metres of the kitchen tent where both the researchers were standing.
One walked between the kitchen tent and a sleeping tent, then laid down in the sun. The two others kept searching the ground for food scraps, finding a bag of sausage.
La Farge called emergency operators at the Polar Continental Shelf Program, packed up quickly and was gone by 4 p.m.
“The danger of course is for everyone else who follows,” said La Farge, wondering if she will ever be able to go back to the spot with only a two-person team. “If you feed the wolves you will destroy them.”
http://www.canada.com/news/Arctic+researcher+flees+after+wolves+gorge+bacon/1964535/story.html
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