Conservationists eager to see plan to save rare eastern wolf found in Quebec, Ontario

A female wolf, left, and male wolf roam the tundra near the Meadowbank Gold Mine located in the Nunavut Territory of Canada on Wednesday, March 25, 2009. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette)

Gisèle Benoit still gets goosebumps when she remembers the first time she saw a family of eastern wolves emerge from the forests of the Mauricie National Park, under the backdrop of a rising moon.

It was 1984 and Benoit, then in her early 20s, had been using a horn to try to call a bull moose when she instead heard a long howl, followed by an adult wolf stepping out to a rocky shore accompanied by a half-grown youth and four pups.

"I will never forget that," she said of the magical moment. "It's anchored in my heart forever."

It was only later that Benoit, an artist and documentary filmmaker, learned that the wolves she saw weren't grey wolves but rather rare eastern wolves.

The species, whose population is estimated at fewer than 1,000 mature adults, could soon be further protected by new measures that are raising hopes among conservationists that attitudes toward a once-feared and maligned animal are shifting.

In July, the federal government upgraded the eastern wolf's threat level from "status of special concern" to "threatened," based on a 2015 report by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. That report found the population count may be as low as 236 mature individuals in its central Ontario and southern Quebec habitat.

The eastern wolf is described as medium-sized canid with reddish-tawny fur that lives in family groups of a breeding pair and their offspring. Also known as the Algonquin wolf, it is largely restricted to existing protected areas, including Algonquin Park in Ontario.

The federal Environment Department said in an email that development of a recovery strategy is underway, adding it would be "written in collaboration with provincial governments, federal departments responsible for the federal lands where the eastern wolf is found as well as First Nations groups and Indigenous organizations."

The order triggers protection for the species on federal lands and forces Ottawa to prepare a recovery plan. However, the fight for protection could be an uphill battle in Quebec, which does not even recognize the eastern wolf as a distinct species.

A spokesperson for Quebec's Environment Department said Quebec considers the eastern wolf a "genetic group" rather than its own species.

"Recent study shows that the eastern wolf is a distinct entity, even if it comes from several crosses between the grey wolf and the coyote," Daniel Labonté wrote in an email. "However, scientific knowledge does not demonstrate that this genetic grouping constitutes a species in its own right."

Labonté added that this lack of recognition was not a barrier to protecting the animal, since the law also allows for protection of subspecies or wildlife populations.

In October, Quebec launched a program to collect samples to improve knowledge on the distribution of large canines, including the eastern wolf. The government said it is currently "impossible to assert that there is an established population" in Quebec due to low numbers — amounting to three per cent of analyzed samples — and the "strong hybridization that exists among large canids."

Véronique Armstrong, co-founder of a Quebec wildlife protection association, says she’s feeling positive about both the Canadian and Quebec governments’ attitudes. While wolves were once “stigmatized, even persecuted," she said, "we seem to be heading in the direction of more protection."

Her group, the Association québécoise pour la protection et l'observation de la faune, has submitted a proposal for a conservation area to protect southern Quebec wolves that has already received signs of support from three of the regional municipalities that would be covered, she said.

While it's far from settled, she’s hopeful that the battle to protect wolves might be easier than for some other species, such as caribou, because the wolves are adaptable and can tolerate some human activity, including forestry.

John Theberge, a retired professor of ecology and conservation biology from the University of Waterloo and a wolf researcher, spent several years along with his wife studying and radio-collaring eastern wolves around Algonquin Park.

Back in the 1990s and 2000s, they faced a "huge political battle" to try to expand wolf protection outside park boundaries after realizing that the far-ranging animals were being hunted and trapped in large numbers once they left the protected lands.

Conservationists, he said, faced resistance from powerful hunter and trapper lobbies opposed to protecting the animals but in the end succeeded in permanently closing the zones outside the park to hunting and trapping in 2004.

Theberge says people who want to save wolves today still face some of that same opposition — especially when governments including Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia kill wolves to protect endangered caribou. But he believes the public support for protecting wolves has increased from when his career began in the 1960s, when they were treated with fear and suspicion.

"Nobody wore T-shirts with wolves on them back then," he said.

Over the years, there have been questions about whether the eastern wolf may be a grey wolf subspecies or a coyote-wolf hybrid. But in the order protecting the wolves, the federal government says genetic analyses have resolved that debate, showing that it is a "distinct species."

Benoit, Theberge and Armstrong all believe that while it's important to protect the eastern wolf from a genetic diversity perspective, there is value in protecting all wolves, regardless of their DNA.

Wolves, they say, are an umbrella species, meaning that protecting them helps protect a variety of other species. They kill off weak and sick animals, ensuring strong populations. They're also "highly developed, sentient social species, with a division of labour, and strong family alliances," Theberge said.

Benoit agrees. After years spent watching wolves, she has developed great respect for how they live in close-knit families, with older offspring helping raise new pups.

"It's extraordinary to see how their way of life is a little like humans'," she said. 

-- This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 13, 2024.