#2213 - Diane K. Boyd
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The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
What's up? How are you? I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great. Thank you.
Well, it's very nice to meet you. And I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinell's podcast as well.
Oh, good. Oh, good. You got to watch it.
Yeah. Steve, well, Steve made the introduction. He told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves. So I'm really excited to talk to you.
Thanks, and I'm excited, too, because I thought, well, we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you've got an interest in wolves. It's all good.
How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?
Well, I grew up in Minnesota, and you can probably tell from the Fargo accent. But I grew up in Minnesota, and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in Wisconsin. And so I was interested from the beginning with that. And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meech, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus. So I just stopped by and kept bugging him. I wouldn't go away like a good parasite. Persist, persist, persist.
Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you?
You know, I'm kind of a wildlife person. They're the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal. They're a carnivore. They're social-like people. And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life growing up until I was about 15. So I had this passion for canines in general. I love dogs.
I do, too. I love them. And I love wolves. I'm so fascinated by them, and I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the western states and the reintroduction of them. So you were there for all of it, right? So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out, except, as you said, in Minnesota. You said Idaho was the only other place that had them?
No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan. They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like 1949, 50s, early, and they stayed and they got seated there and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that. And is it still like that there? Yes. And the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because, you know, in nature, nothing is here. We always wanted to be here, but it's always doing this. Right. And yeah, they're doing there. And then interestingly, when they when they arrived, they migrated on their own power. There was very little immigration there. There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently genetically there was no influx of new genes. So the wolves that came and went didn't breed. And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies.
And eventually, just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father-daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over. And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally. So they just did a reintroduction to Iowa oil, too. That's been relatively new, just a handful of years. So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep them going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.
So when they reintroduce them, this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction of Yellowstone. A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced a different size wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada.
Yeah.
Is that true? Sort of?
No. So in my book, I've got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf. And so people call these wolves super wolves because they say that they're not native. They're Canadian super wolves and they weigh 170 pounds and it goes on and on and on. But I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, Wolf 8551. And we just had VHF collars. We didn't have satellite collars in those days.
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