Students hike, howl and collect DNA in Idaho wolf study

At the edge of a mist-shrouded meadow near central Idaho’s Salmon River five student researchers stand knee deep in larkspur and Indian paintbrush as one of them uses a funnel to project a mock wolf howl into the silence around them.

After a few tries, a wild wolf returns a howl from a forested mountain slope on the other side of the clearing.

U of I wolf researcher and doctoral student Peter Rebholz gives the students a thumbs up. The return howl confirms Rebholz’s hunch that wolves are nearby.

“Howling is kind of our ace in the hole,” Rebholz said. “It is our best method to locate wolves.”

Hearing the howl of a wild wolf in Idaho’s wilderness areas is one of the rewards students get after days of 10- to 20-mile hikes in the backcountry to collect wolf droppings, locate dens and document wolf gathering and home sites — called rendezvous sites — as part of an ongoing study of wolves in Idaho led by the College of Natural Resources and its USGS Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.

Rebholz, a former carpenter who came to the West to study big wild animals, and earn his master’s degree at University of Idaho studying Idaho wolves, has been leading U of I student researchers into Idaho’s backcountry for several years as he collects DNA from wolf scat to precisely document the family trees of 20 wolf groups in the state.

“We’re out here for nine days at a time hiking, camping, setting up trail cameras and looking for wolves and their rendezvous sites,” Rebholz said. “What we want from the rendezvous sites are genetic samples from scat.”

From the wolf feces, Rebholz and the students scrape a few flakes off the top layer that contains the animals' epithelial cells. The flakes harbor the DNA from the individual that dropped the scat. The samples are bagged, marked and later used to identify the specific animals via its DNA.

“We can get a genetic sample from each individual in that pack,” Rebholz said. “From that sample we can create pedigrees — large family trees of these wolf packs, and we’ve been doing this for the same packs for the past 20 years.”

From the pedigrees of 20 wolf packs in four main study areas across the state of Idaho — the Coeur d’Alene National Forest, Boise National Forest, Salmon-Challis, and Island Park west of Yellowstone — researchers document the evolution of each wolf pack and annually learn about the pack’s structure. They learn which are the dominant wolves, which are parents, whether any wolves have died and which individuals replaced them.

The research helps biologists at Idaho Department of Fish and Game and other agencies learn what effect hunting and trapping has on wolf packs and helps game departments make decisions about wolf management.

Studying Idaho’s wolves to provide managers with up-to-date information on the animals is rewarding and the reason for Rebholz’s field work, but there are additional perks, he said.

“One of the best parts of my job is that I get to live in the national forest for five months every year,” he said. “I get to see places people haven’t visited in years, or maybe at all. There are all these special little corners of the map we get to go in looking for these hard-to-find species.”