The aftermath of a wolf kill

We often hear that wolves are being “wasteful” if they do not consume most or all of a kill they make. Yet, nothing could be further from reality as wolf kills are a buffet for a rich and diverse community of scavengers, and anything wolves do not eat, scavengers will quickly take care.

Indeed, even at kills where wolves consume virtually everything, like this deer kill from February, there are still small morsels that attract various scavengers for days after the kill.

In particular, wolf kills provide substantial sustenance for birds such as ravens, eagles, gray jays, blue jays, magpies, and others. The other day we visited a freshly kill deer and there were over a dozen eagles and over 20 ravens at the kill.

It would be very interested to know what percent of eagle and raven diets during the winter in northern Minnesota come from wolf-killed prey. We would suspect a very high percentage.

Then there are the mammalian scavengers such as foxes, fishers, martens, others weasels, raccoons, coyotes and so on. And this list of mammalian scavengers also includes other wolves.

This deer was killed by the Thuja Pack on February 13 but the large wolf that visited the carcass on February 16, which had a very distinctive appearance, was a lone wolf that was not part of the pack.

It is not uncommon for wolves to scavenge kills made by other wolves. We have seen many instances where a GPS-collared wolf will go spend time at the kill made by another GPS-collared wolf. Sometimes this can be wolves from one pack scavenging the kill of a neighboring pack, and other times it is a lone wolf scavenging a pack’s kill, like this instance.

And notably, wolves do almost entirely consume their kills for much of the year. But there are some instances, such as in severe winters, when wolves will consume less of carcasses because they are able to more readily kill deer.

That said, even if wolves do not eat most of the carcass initially, they will return to the carcass come spring when deer are no longer easy for wolves to catch and kill. Check out some of our recent posts on scavenging by wolves for more information on this topic!

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Written by Voyageurs Wolf Project