I live in the Eastern UP and I hike basically everyday. And everyday I see wolf tracks. I have seen wolves close enough to where I don't hike without a firearm. They use the Trans Canada and Enbridge pipelines as a "Super Highway" to travel across the UP. I have even seen an over abundance of wolf tracks on the Lake Michigan beach one mile from my house. I have stood in my yard and heard three wolf packs howling at one time, from the north, east and west. If there are only 600 wolves in the UP then I have seen evidence of all of them. There are definitely thousands of wolves in the UP.
You know it! I live in the central U.P. and travel for work here. Everyone I talk to says there are thousands. I run across them constantly and see numerous wolves a year. I'm a coyote hunter so I spent lots of time in the woods and on the ice most of the winter. It's LOADED with wolves. We're being lied to 100% and the DNR know it. The U.P. is totally screwed at this point.
In the 1990s they where callers so they could track them and bust poachers. They forgot about bragging about busting people when tracking devices were moving 70 miles per hour on the raod.
I don’t understand why they don’t talk about the predator, prey relationship. Eventually there will be a balance of deer and wolves. Wolf populations will crash when they can’t find the food/deer they need to carry on the species. Only time will tell the outcome. Great segment Jimmy. Pure Michigan ❤️
Neither wolf nor deer populations have to crash if people can manage both populations. Letting nature play out is a long and painful process for both species.
It would help to delist if they quit lieing about the true numbers it's closer to 6000 than 600, if you don't believe that you haven't spent enough time in the u.p. woods, and this is why deer hunting in the u.p. Isn't coming back any time soon. It's like alcoholism the first step is admitting you have a problem
I'm a New York state resident and hunter. Our DEC posted that wolves are illegal to hunt or trap because they said wolves are starting to come back. I agree that the biologists needs to spend more time in the field. I'm startled what they say when I report, Moose, Fisher, and other things I find. I'm know they don't spend the time out there, but I am glad we can report information to them.
I like to know why we spend so much of are money the sportsman that is , it sounds like it alot of money , if we cant hunt them then who cares about how many there are , the DNR would rather spend time and money on are wolf population then on are deer populations. When it comes to figuring out numbers of animals the DNR sucks , they have no idea what the numbers are.........
Man, you are so right if we can’t hunt them who cares but the DNR is having a good old time driving around spending our money that one guy is driving around for hours and miles looking for Wolf Tracks lol but deer tags go up every year and now you gotta jump through a bunch of hoops to tag a deer on the Phone DNR socks right now
I'm fine with this DNR survey. We will never have another wolf season if we can't have an accurate population count. I own property in baraga co and have fortunate that wolf numbers are low and have not impacted the deer herd as yet. I do get a trail cam wolf pic now & then but not often. I cam across two DNR trail cams last fall on public land. The more information the better. These cams also give us a better understanding of the cougar situation.
@@jonstafford2691 No matter what the count is there will never be a wolf season , the count they are doing as nothing to do with managing them just how many there are so they can get more money to increase thier numbers......
@robertpeet3781 if the state and federal governments do not allow hunting to keep numbers in check, hunters, trappers, and land owners will do the job. Oops, I thought it was a coyote.
It was 1988 and the dnr said the moose needed a predator because they released the moose in 1986 and 1987. Both moose and wolves wore filmed on buck lavassors discovering show. Funny this is all wolves releases have been deleted? Funny how the dnr forgot they let them go near fire tower road in Dickinson County about 6 to 8 miles from where this is being filmed? The dnr planted them not naturally migration.
The part i get a kick out of what the dnr says their are something else making the deer disappear besides the wolfs. But the dnr doesn't say what is is?
I have been hunting eastern UP 40 plus years it gets worse every year. You don't see 8to10 deer a day most days you don't see any. I want to know what is causing the decline in deer? DNR is to well funded not to have answers. I have heard everything from winters to its to warm in season and deer weren't moving. We had better numbers when winters were harsh. This is a problem that should have been addressed by now. Soon we might not have a hunt able deer heard.
They need to talk to the trappers in the UPS. We have to fill paperwork out on every species that we trap except incidentals on wolves. That’s the only thing we don’t fill paperwork out on.
Yes the DNR is great at managing pheasants and whitetails, just look at their results, but as far as taking responsibility for their failure's, they just make excuses, the fact they blame the delisting is silly, weed is still illegal according to the federal government, the state had no problem breaking with the federal government on that, My question is to the DNR, when there is no wild game left, what do we need the DNR for
View from 18:24 for 30 seconds then picture the following..... It has been said as fact from biologist including the state dnr themselves a single wolf consume 30-35 deer per year. For sake of argument lets just say a single wolf kills consumes 25 deer a year. So with that in mind in that 30 second clip, those wolves consumed 275 deer in one year every year. Let assume of those 275 deer 1/3rd were does that would of given birth to a single fawn in the spring. Now we lost 366 deer in one year to 11 wolves. Now lets use the minimum wolf count of 631 as provided by the DNR, now that number of loss to the deer population is 20,823 deer in a one year period. Its not rocket science. At 17:24 the DNR's Jeff Lukowski stated he didn't think wolves were the sole problem to low deer numbers, wolves ARE the number 1 problem as to low deer numbers. The DNR will continue to deny the real problem, the truth. They are directed from the top, pressured from the top to avoid inflaming this political hot potato. The top is the DNR director which is hand selected and appointed by the Governor.
I agree. At my place in the central u.p. I have multiple migration trails that cross through the property. Once the snow hits about 14" the deer from the north pass through plus local deer also start moving out towards the south. In those trails are also wolf tracks following the deer to the yards for the winter. Some wolves will walk the trail down the center while also at the same time other wolves will walk down wind in parallel to the migration trails. I see this every year once snows hit which is typically during December late bow season. (not this year) They definitely got it figured out. Once at the yards the wolves pick at them 24/7/365 all winter. This puts an enormous strain on the deer when they really should be left alone to conserve energy for the winter. This is the secondary kill effect. Prior to wolves, deer never had this stress. It's just yet another factor causing mortality and I've never heard the DNR mention this either. @@Ufishinfeathiesp
You also have to think about how many fawns are making it to breeding age as well. If you have year after year of fawns being killed then hunting season with old age the deer have no chance of recovery . The fawns are a easy kill and meal.
My brother inlaw lives out in Montana and the wolfs have destroyed the hunting for white tail elk moose. He said he has witnessed wolfs killing just to kill. We need to manage them weather the DNR takes them or the open a hunt..
In New York state Wolves are starting to come back in the North Adirondacks by themselves. From this video i am very concerned now that the population with now be culled as needed if federal restrictions are in place. I don't have a problem if the DEC is allowed to let us be proactive in population control. However, if we are not, the fragile moose population could become even more endangered.
Jimmy, you need to share the stat on how many deer eaten per wolf over the course a year. Then this becomes a math equations. A Minnesota study found 27/deer per wolf per year. Using the winter low number the officer mentioned of 641 puts the total deer kill for wolves at 17,307. With cars, bears, coyotes, hunting and winter kill can the deer population sustain wolf kills. Michigan residents understand math....it might be time to ban hunting for a year or two to recover the population if wolfs go unmanaged. The math on population recover of deer can be done in spreadsheet for each year hunting his banned.
Thanks for this report. Great work by the wildlife biologists and interesting to learn about their methods of understanding the wolf population. I read Never Cry Wolf as a kid and was fascinated by the story of the biologist Farley Mowat who was using science to actually understand wolves and the environment in the face of people who without evidence wanted to eradicate them because they saw decline in caribou populations.
Never Cry Wolf is a great book and helps understand predator prey relations and why managing wolves can be very tricky due to pack dynamics. People have been blaming big, bad wolves forever because they're an easy scapegoat. The haters choose not to believe scientists who actually know what they're doing, and that's the hardest problem to fix. Maybe if we didn't ruin our moose population and fragment habitats some pressure would be taken off the deer because there would be more of another great prey source. People also fail to understand that wolves prey on the weak, old, sick, etc. which can actually be beneficial to the health of the herd. I'm rambling, but that book is a great read for anyone who wants to begin to actually understand this issue.
That is the biggest load of crap Brian. The wolves they put in were not even fully “wild” wolves they had to of been penned up somewhere prior. You could pull up to them in a vehicle and they’d sit 20 yards off the side of the road and just look at you. So you’re going to try and convince people they migrated in from Ontario where you could hunt and trap them? Wild coyotes and wolves don’t behave like that. They avoid vehicles, machinery and humans 95+% of the time. They did the same thing with turkeys in the UP. They all of a sudden showed up. We called the DNR and asked if we could shoot them long before there was a season. We asked if they were escaped from someone’s farm, etc. the response we got was. “I guess you can” 5-6 years later you’re selling us turkey tags. Hmmmm.
My small property in baraga co ( western u.p. ) is surrounded by thousands of acres of paper company land. Some of which is gated & foot traffic only for public access. Last fall I found 2 DNR camera's set up along logging roads on paper co land which is private property. With 1200 cameras set out across the U.P. the DNR should have an accurate count in a year or two at most. Yes, we sportsmen & women need to push hard to control wolf numbers.
Hunting management needs to be scientific based and not voting or politics. Scientific based only to a sustainable population can be reach or not with hunting such a number or not.
Are you sure you guys even know what a wolf is I've been hunting for 40 years and it's like seeing Bigfoot coyotes yes but a wolf no if it's true then take videos of your multiple encounters of wolves l don't see a lot of RU-vid videos in Michigan of wolves stop it it's like those feral pigs that are just running everywhere LOL
