Tag: wolves

kellyclowers:

sixth-extinction:

I recently visited the Japanese wolf memorial in rural Higashiyoshino, Nara.

A life size bronze statue was built in 1987 to commemorate the location
where the last Japanese wolf, a young male, was killed by hunters in
1905. The memorial statue is located on the banks of
the Takami River, about a 45-minute bus ride away
from the closest subway station.**

The inscription below the statue is ニホンオオカミの像 – “statue of a Japanese wolf.” In
Japan this subspecies is known simply as “nihon ookami,” literally
‘Japanese wolf.’ In English we call it the Honshū wolf (Canis lupus
hodophilax) to differentiate it from the also extinct, but larger
Hokkaidō wolf (Canis lupus hattai). In Japanese the Hokkaidō wolf is
called Ezo wolf.

A stone at the site bears the haiku:
狼は亡び 木霊ハ存ふる (reading: オオカミはほろび、こだまはながらふる)

– I believe this translates to
“The wolf has perished, the spirit trembles.”

I
wanted to leave a flower, but there were none for sale at the nearest
station. Instead I happened to find some red spider lilies (higanbana)
growing by the side of the road. From a symbolic point of view, it couldn’t have been a more perfect flower:

“They are associated with final goodbyes, and legend has it that these
flowers grow wherever people part ways for good. In old Buddhist
writings, the red spider lily is said to guide the dead through samsara,
the cycle of rebirth.” [x]

It was a beautiful and serene place, and truly a moving experience.

**Side note: If you want to visit the statue (which I recommend!), the closest station is Haibara Station (in Uda, Nara on the
Kintetsu Osaka Line). From the bus terminal there, you can take a bus to Higashiyoshino village, but please note that the bus doesn’t operate on weekends or holidays.

There was just an article about how genetic testing indicates that the Japanese wolves where more closely related to a branch that existed 20,000 years ago, than to any of the other modern populations

out-there-on-the-maroon:

wolveswolves:

The wolves at Wolf Park Indiana were given paint as a form of enrichment and as a
fundraiser to make “original wolf art”. Most of the wolves were happy
to step in the paint for a piece of hot dog and make nice paw prints on a
page, but this guy decided rolling in it was way more fun.

Picture by C. Love

Reblog the Rebel Artist Punk Wolf to achieve glorious turquoise sideburns.  

Wolves Are Losing Ground to Industrial Logging in Southeast Alaska

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

For 12,000 years, wolves have roamed Southeast Alaska’s rugged Alexander Archipelago—a 300-mile stretch of more than 1,000 islands mostly within the Tongass National Forest. Now, their old-growth forest habitat is rapidly disappearing, putting the wolves at risk. As the region’s logging policies garner controversy, a new study examines what the wolves need in order to survive.

Largely isolated from mainland wolves by water barriers and the Coast Mountains, the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) is widely considered to be a subspecies of gray wolf genetically distinct from other North American populations. In the 1990s and again in 2011, conservationists sought to protect the island wolves under the Endangered Species Act, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied these petitions—most recently, in January 2016.

Despite their decision not to list the subspecies, in their analysis, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service highlighted Prince of Wales Island as the area of greatest concern for the archipelago wolves, due primarily to impacts of logging and trapping. Bigger than the state of Delaware, Prince of Wales is the largest island in Southeast Alaska and the fourth-largest island in the U.S., after Hawaii, Kodiak Island and Puerto Rico. The island’s lowland hills are blanketed with temperate rainforests of spruce and hemlock and strewn with winding rivers and fjords.

Today, logging roads etch elaborate curlicues into the island’s topography. The extensive road system provides hunters and trappers with easy access to the wolves, which are simultaneously prized for their pelts and regarded as competitors that steal hunters’ deer. According to Roffler, 60 wolves were hunted or trapped last year, 2 illegally. The total number of wolves killed without permits is, of course, impossible to obtain. Roffler said that ADF&G estimated that 231 wolves inhabited Prince of Wales and surrounding smaller islands in the fall of 2017.

Although hunting and trapping have the potential to eradicate wolves in the short-term, habitat loss from logging poses an even greater long-term challenge for wolf survival, said Roffler, whose study of wolves on Prince of Wales was recently published in Forest Ecology and Management. Logging primarily affects wolves by reducing habitat for deer, their primary source of prey. To learn more about which pieces of the fragmented landscape the wolves tend to frequent, Roffler and her team distributed radio collars among 13 wolves in 7 packs. The radio collars transmitted wolf locations for up to two years per animal, allowing unprecedented insight into their movements.

Wolves Are Losing Ground to Industrial Logging in Southeast Alaska