Retired biologist now writing a book about wolves

It’s not unusual for a wildlife biologist to be intimately familiar with the species they study and Diane Boyd certainly is familiar with wolves.

But familiar to the point of eating wolf meat?

For Boyd, the answer was yes.

Boyd, who retired at the end of 2019 after a decades-long career studying wolves for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, has had a taste of wolf.

She was still a student at the University of Minnesota in its wildlife management program. The program had a road-killed wolf and someone suggested seeing how it tasted.

“It was a roast of a hind quarter. It was very tough,” Boyd said during a recent interview.

While that experience did little to enrich her knowledge of one of the world’s apex predators, thousands of other experiences followed that have left many calling her the “Jane Goodall of Wolves.” Goodall, a renowned primatologist and anthropologist, of course, is considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees.

Boyd is a Minnesota native who lived in the Twin Cities area. Her dad hunted and loved the outdoors and he passed along that love of nature. Boyd’s forays into a nearby marsh only stoked her imagination of the natural world. Her interest in wolves began with a love of dogs and the fact she thought the wild canines were interesting.

“In Minnesota, they were a wild animal that no one saw. But they were a big predator in the state, especially in Northeast Minnesota,” Boyd said.

While at the University of Minnesota, Boyd got a summer job studying wolves. After graduation, she worked in Alaska before returning to Minnesota to take a trapping job with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Rumors of wolves in Montana had started coming in during the 1960s and 1970s. Wolves had been shot, trapped and poisoned to the point where few remained after the 1930s.

But those sporadic sightings led University of Montana professor Bob Ream to start the Wolf Ecology Project in 1973.

Six years later, a researcher trapped a female wolf up the North Fork, adjacent to Glacier National Park.

Those factors led Boyd to enroll at the University of Montana’s wildlife biology graduate program in 1979.

Ream supplied Boyd with the equipment she needed to study wolves and she was on her way to the North Fork area. She lived in a small cabin in an old settlement called Moose City, near the Canadian border. It didn’t have running water or electricity.

Trapping was a method used to catch wolves so they could be measured and fitted with tracking collars.

Boyd said the early day of trapping wolves presented challenges that today’s biologists are more familiar with now.

“In the early days, we’d set the trap, a No. 4 or 114 Newhouse, with a hair-trigger,” Boyd said. “We’d catch all kinds of animals, even as small as a weasel or a marten.

“Now, we set the trap so that it takes 10 pounds of pressure,” Boyd said.

Boyd said of the 100 or so wolves she’s trapped, they rarely caused any trouble.

“Typically, you’d find them curled up, just relaxing,” she said.

But there was one mountain lion that did give Boyd and fellow researcher Wendy Arjo a few heart-pumping moments.

“The lion looked small in the trap,” Boyd said. “We used drags and they’d become entangled in the brush. It was partially hidden and when I got closer, I realized it wasn’t that small.”

She stumbled back before Arjo and Boyd made a plan to successfully tranquilize the lion with a jab stick, which has a syringe attached to the end of the stick and is filled with drugs that will temporarily put the animal to sleep.

The plan Boyd and Arjo came up with wasn’t the most scientific, though.

“You have to poke them in the rump,” Boyd said. “I was holding the jab stick and Wendy whacked it on the face with a stick and it lunged at us.

“That’s when I jabbed it,” Boyd said.

Boyd has also trapped lions for Idaho researcher Toni Ruth.

Canines, felines and small mammals aren’t the only critters that have turned up in Boyd’s traps.

Bears, mostly blacks, have been caught by Boyd. But there was one grizzly she caught, too, and a wolverine.

“I released all the black bears, but the grizzly was inside Glacier (National Park) and I called the park people on that one,” Boyd recalled. “The wolverine is like a tornado on a chain. They are a very impressive animal.”

Boyd knows the animal she has dedicated her life’s studies to is one of the most controversial animals on the planet.

“The wolf has always been known as a bad character,” Boyd said. “I’m not puzzled why people react to wolves, a lot of it is the same old misrepresentations. They kill game, usually larger than they are, but they are also a big-time scavenger and very opportunistic. A study in the Bitterroots showed lions kill three times as many elk as wolves.

“I had one friend in the North Fork tell me that on one occasion wolves surrounded her and her dog while they walked,” Boyd said. “She cried, it was so upsetting to her, but they didn’t do anything to her.”

She also made reference to the Aug. 8, 2019, wolf attack in Banff National Park in Canada that involved a family from New Jersey. They were tent camping when the wolf bit a man. He fended off the wolf, which was later killed by Parks Canada officials. Tests determined the animal was in poor condition.

Jon Stuart-Smith, a wildlife specialist from Parks Canada, said the wolf was older and quite emaciated. It didn’t have rabies, but he said he believed the wolf was struggling to feed itself without the support of a pack.

Boyd treasures her time studying wolves and is pleased to see how their numbers have grown.

“Socio-politically, it’s not, but biologically, it’s been the greatest success stories of an endangered species,” she said. “There are 2,000 wolves in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and Oregon and one in northern California.”

There are efforts underway in Colorado to move wolves to the state, but Boyd said she doesn’t support federal efforts to transplant wolves to other places.

“They moved into Montana from Canada, they’ve done a good job of expanding their population without help and we should let it happen naturally.”

Now that she’s retired, Boyd hasn’t let that slow her down.

She’s working on a book about wolf recovery and her experiences.

Other interests she plans to do more of include cross-country skiing, painting, hunting quail with her German short-haired pointer, traveling the Alcan Highway and teaching.

Reporter Scott Shindledecker may be reached at 758-4441 or sshindledecker@dailyinterlake.com