Wolf Crossing

Video: .wmv file for windows media.  7 meg. 19 minutes  Four Days Aspen Pack Carnage full video

Better Quality first half of video 9.5 meg. Adobe Nov 24-26 better quality

Better Quality second half of video 10 meg.  (This file is still a bit too large so I will have to edit it further, hopefully it will be up tomorrow. You can see it at the top video link.) 

The following report is based on a two day trip to the Adobe Ranch South of Magdalena New Mexico.  This video is necessary due to potential political fallout over the pending removal of the Aspen pack.  It is literally a carnage fest over there, carcasses of calves killed by wolves litter the area and there is simply no keeping up with it.  If a carcass is removed a fresh calf is killed.

We were late getting to the ranch headquarters because we witnessed a wolf on the side of the road stalking a bunch of heifers with a very small calf that she was apparently after.   This wolf wasn’t too worried about us.  We were able to take video of the situation and stills from that video showed she, had a black collar.  There was also canine scat right where she was stalking the calf and it consisted of shiny black baby calf hair so she has been there before killing these calves along with the near constant depredations on the weaned calves on the deeded land weaning pasture. 

We managed to chase her off even though she tried to hide behind a tree and wait us out as seen in the video.  So we went on towards the HQ, where we found a three year old heifer freshly dead without a mark on her, right next to the road, she had been killed three or four hours earlier, probably just used as a wolf toy and run to death.  While it is slightly possible she just died of natural causes she had been licking herself which indicates good health and happiness and she looked good.  About 200 yards away from her and across the pasture another 30 or 40 heifers were mashed into a corner of the fenceline and all had their heads up and looking around.  The ranch manager went out to the scene and both adult female wolves were present. 

FWS and NMDG&F were nowhere to be found, Wildlife Services had just finished a necropsy and confirmed another dead 500 pound calf as a wolf kill and had managed to trap an 8 month old female wolf pup as well.  A very nice lady from AZ Game and Fish, came to pick it up while we were there.  We went out to video all the carcasses all over the deeded land.  It is a killing field over there and the bare minimum management is not helping these wolves at all.  

They seem to be getting into the weaned calves on the deeded land at the HQ and kill until a wolf is trapped then the rest of at least 5 wolves, move straight to the heifer pasture and go to work on the baby calves, there is wolf scat all along the road for about 5 miles with calf hair in it, of course most of those kills don’t count because they are just little babies and 6-7 wolves were and still are making short work of them.  I don’t know how the manager is functioning under the trememdous stress and the Wildlife Services agent was just exhausted.  There are more than three kills on the pups now even though they have killed at least 5 weaned calves and an untold number of baby calves.

The wolf trapped today was a female pup that they had tried to re-establish on a neighboring ranch without her mother, last month. 

The Arizona program employee humanely prepared her for the trip and took her to Alpine AZ.