Rare footage of wolf ambushing beaver in northern Minnesota
An extremely lucky capture of a wolf stumbling upon a beaver, waiting-in-ambush, and then attacking the beaver. As we have said before, capturing footage like this is like winning the lottery (at least for us).
To our knowledge, there are only a handful of videos of wolves hunting and killing beavers—our project has captured 3 of those instances…this is the fourth!
For instance, we have documented 747 beavers killed by wolves over the past decade by following GPS-collared wolves. Yet, we have never observed a wolf hunting and/or killing a beaver in person, and have only captured 4 instances of wolves hunting beavers on trail cameras.
As we have said before, wolves killing beavers is not a rare event…it happens all the time throughout the boreal forest. However, documenting/observing this behavior is extremely difficult, which is why so few observations exist.
This video clearly illustrates how wolves will crouch down and wait-in-ambush for beavers, even if only for a short while, to find the perfect moment to launch an attack.
The beaver appeared to be in the water when the wolf attacked as you can hear loud splashing on the audio before the fight had moved onto land where you can hear crashing brush.
It is a bummer we did not capture the whole sequence on camera but hopefully someday we will get that lucky. Even still, small glimpses of this behavior are insightful and fascinating to watch.
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