What happens after wolves abandon a den…

Shortly after wolves abandon a den, we often observe many other animals checking out the den or spending time around it. This footage shows a few examples from this past spring.

In our area, wolves regularly move their pups to new dens, and we have had several packs use 4-5 dens during the denning period (early April to end of May), which means these packs are moving pups every 10-14 days or so.

Naturally, other forest-dwelling creatures, other carnivores in particular, eventually travel past these abandon dens as they are going about their daily business. When they come across such areas, they seem curious likely because the area has a strong wolf odor around it.

Porcupines commonly visit these abandoned dens likely because wolf dens are in the very spots porcupines like to den themselves. The “dirt” in many wolf dens is literally just porcupine pellets (scat).

And then there are the smaller creatures like snowshoe hares, red squirrels, grouse, and so forth. These animals are common and ubiquitous in our area so not surprising that some inevitably live in areas where wolves decide to have dens.

We had dozens of videos of snowshoe hares at this den but only included a few in this video because otherwise the video would have been ten minutes of snowshoe hares just doing snowshoe hare stuff.

The den in the video is the second den used by the Stub-tail Pack. The den was a dug out cavity under the base of a large clump of old gnarled cedars.

The area around the den had been clear cut ~10-15 years ago but when doing so, the loggers left this clump of cedar trees. Turns out, these cedars were a nice place for a den!

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Written by Voyageurs Wolf Project