Wolf pups wrestling at rendezvous site in Minnesota

By sheer chance, we happened to have a camera where the Half-Moon Pack decided to have a rendezvous site last summer! As a result, we got tons of footage of the pups and a bit of the adults…most footage is of pups slowly meandering around or sleeping. Not the most exciting stuff necessarily! Granted, the footage below of the pups playing is pretty neat! BUT, the footage was excellent data! Particularly valuable were multiple observations of 7 pups running around together, indicating that 7 of the 8 pups born into the pack had survived until mid-August. However, sometime between mid-August and mid-December, something happened because by mid-December, the Half-Moon Pack was three wolves, only one of which was a pup. In other words, 6 of the 7 pups that were alive in August likely didn’t make it. We don’t know what happened and probably never will at this point. Nonetheless, an intriguing pattern: most pups survived the first few months of life and then survival plummeted during late summer and fall. This pattern is one we have seen several times now over the past 3 years, and we suspect it is because many pups end up starving to death in late summer or fall.