Wolf almost catches and kills beaver on beaver dam
A super-duper, amazingly lucky trail camera capture: we finally caught a wolf hunting a beaver on video!!! Check it out! We cannot overstate how rare such observations are. Of course, you might think we are exaggerating here so let us explain…
In 2015, Dr. Dave Mech—one of the world’s foremost wolf experts—and colleagues published a book which was a comprehensive overview on how wolves hunt various prey. The section on beavers was 4 paragraphs long and the author’s concluded: “We found no actual descriptions of wolves hunting beavers”.
Then, through some amazing stroke of luck, someone in Quebec in Fall 2015 observed and recorded a wolf hunting and killing a beaver on a logging road! The first recorded observation of a wolf killing a beaver we are aware of.
Given how rare this was, we worked with the person who recorded the video and wrote a scientific paper on the observation trying to glean as much insight as we could from it (you can read that paper in the link below).
And we have yet to see any videos of a wolf killing a beaver since this 2015 observation in Quebec.
Since 2015, we have had a few folks send us trail camera photos they got of a wolf attacking a beaver but they are usually just an image or two, and it is hard to get any unique insights from those observations.
What is amazing is that wolves regularly hunt and kill beavers across a wide swath of the North America, Europe, and Asia and yet so few people have ever actually seen this happen. In sum, a super common event that is rarely observed.
As a result, the mechanics and nuances of how wolves hunt and kill beavers remains largely a mystery…one we are slowly trying to unravel using indirect evidence from kills, GPS-collar movements, etc. However, direct observations such as this provide rare insight.
Although we have had many cameras on beaver dams, we have never captured anything remotely like this before. So you can imagine our excitement when we saw this.
And what are some of the insights we can glean from this video? A few initial thoughts/observations from us but would be curious to hear what others think as well!
1.) The wolf was barreling toward the beaver and yet the beaver did not move until the wolf was super close. Could possibly be related to the beaver’s poor eyesight and inability to determine what was coming at it until the wolf was right there. Or the dam blocked the beaver from seeing the wolf.
2.) The wolf got within a few inches or less of the beaver and tried to bite the beaver’s tail yet the beaver escaped. Wow! A near miss! Makes us wonder how often beavers “encounter” wolves throughout the year and how many of them escape once chase.
3.) We have long thought that beavers on the downslope of dams are vulnerable to wolves because they would have little time to get back over the dam into the pond should they encounter a wolf.
In this instance, the beaver was able to escape into deep water in a small pond below the dam. But if there wasn’t that pond, the beaver would have been in trouble. And given wolves propensity to travel across beaver dams, seems like the downslope of dams could be a risky place for a beaver.
We could continue going on and on here because this kinda stuff really gets us jazzed but this post is getting long and is much longer than we initially expected. But hope you enjoyed seeing this!
You can read the scientific paper we wrote on the 2015 observation of a wolf killing a beaver in Quebec here:
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2159
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