The News from Isle Royale

Dreams of a wild island

I have a habit of daydreaming over maps.

When I open my Rand McNally to pages 54 and 55, I see not just the enigmatic shape of Minnesota, but all of the places I've been and all of the places I've yet to explore.

My eyes have been drawn many times to the upper-right-hand corner of the page, where a sliver of land in Lake Superior edges into view. A dotted line crosses the blue ink of the lake, connecting the land to the town of Grand Portage: the ferry route to Isle Royale National Park.

Park's wolf population could melt away

ISLE ROYALE, MICH.

For six decades since they loped across frozen Lake Superior to reach this rocky island, wolves have roamed 45-mile-long Isle Royale, the nation's least-visited national park.

The wolves survived the extermination efforts by the island's few inhabitants, who in the 1950s and '60s saw them as mortal enemies. And they survived an outbreak of deadly canine parvovirus in the 1980s. Now, scientists tracking the wolves in the world's longest-running "single predator-single prey" study fear that the Isle Royale wolves could become extinct because of global warming.

Isle Royale: Wolves, moose and you

Summer vacation days typically aren't spent bushwhacking through rugged backcountry to collect and analyze the bones of dead moose. But then, Isle Royale isn't your typical destination.

The island off Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula in the western U.P. is home to four wolf packs, a fluctuating number of moose -- this year estimated at about 650 -- and one of the world's longest-running predator-prey studies.

For 50 years, population biologists from Michigan Technological University in Houghton have studied the delicate balance between the two species in one of the nation's least-traveled national parks. This Aug. 1-9, a few experienced backpackers with $1,000 to donate to Earthwatch Expeditions can participate in the study with lead researcher Rolf Peterson. As a group, they'll collect bones from moose that starved or were killed by wolves over the winter. From those, researchers will record the sizes, ages and health of the victims and learn more about the population at large.

Isle Royale National Park bans bait in Lake Superior

Isle Royale National Park announced an immediate ban Tuesday on all organic bait in the waters of Lake Superior near the big island.

The ban includes all live and dead minnows, fish parts, worms or other organic bait unless they were taken from the same water.

The ban makes it illegal to possess any fish or fish parts for bait that don’t come from the park waters of the lake. Organic bait already had been banned in waters on the island.

Watching wolves, moose, and heat on Michigan island

Ignoring our observation plane circling above the frozen Lake Superior wilderness, the eight gray wolves seemed as harmless as your beloved pooch cavorting with its pals in the yard. Trotting along Siskiwit Bay, they playfully nipped and pawed each other, pausing occasionally to roll in the snow.But then the alpha male and female moved purposefully away from the shore. They passed through a clearing and plunged into thick woods, the others strung out behind.They had eaten little for three days. Now they needed to hunt