An extensive camera trap survey of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior has revealed a great diversity of carnivorans, including gray wolves and American martens. These islands, located just off Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula, are among the few places left in the Eastern and Midwestern US that still retain an intact predator guild, and because all but one of the islands is protected as a national lakeshore, these islands will be protected from most exploitative development.
I love living in a country that still has room for wolves and wild places. Our natural heritage is every bit as important to us as a nation as our constitution and rule of law, and it should be protected with the same ferocity that we use to protect our republicanism.
Also of importance is the Great Lakes wolf in the trail camera capture that was part of the survey. This wolf looks to be one of wolves with some amount of coyote introgression. Great Lakes wolves can have quite a high amount of coyote ancestry, and the earliest estimated introgression of coyote genes into gray wolves that has been documented is from these Great Lakes wolves. This introgression happened as early as 963 years ago.
Coyotes and gray wolves are found on the islands now, and one wonders if they still occasionally interbreed. The Great Lakes are also the region that experienced the beginnings of the hybrid swarm we call the Eastern coyotes.
So these islands could be a new Isle Royale from which to study the new and evolving wolf and coyote of North America.
The video above (“le petit pont des bêtes” = the small bridge for animals) shows pictures from a camera trap placed somewhere in the region of Champagne (France). The cats you can see on the video are european wild cats (Felis silvestris), not feral domestic cats.
Last spring I brought an abandonned stone marten kit I found in a shed in the backyard to an older lady who works for a wildlife rescue centre. At that time, she was already taking care of another stone marten and two fox kits. She also had a subadult female wild cat living together with domestic cats and a dog. I was very impressed by the size of this cat, I first thought it was a male, but in fact, it was an 8 month old female. The lady told me that she was found on a path in a forest when she was a very young kitten. Despite this, the cat would barely let the lady touch her, would only eat raw meat and remained extremely shy with strangers. There had already been one failed attempt to release her back to the wild and the lady told me that if it was not possible to find a place in a breeding programme in a zoo, the cat would be neutered (to avoid hybrids with domestic cats) and stay with her. I know of two other cases where people picked up wildcat kittens (at young age, they look very much like tabby domestic cats). In one of these cases, the cat got perfectly tame and at first, the people who adopted it didn’t even know that it was a wild cat.
There are also two invasive aliens on the video: racoons (North America) were introduced on purpose (!) in 1934 in Germany near Kassel, from where they started spreading everywhere. Coypu’s (South America) escaped or were set free from fur farms.