Much like seeing a gray wolf in the wild, a chance to speak with wolf researcher Dave Mech is a rare and inspiring opportunity.

Dave’s list of positions include being a Senior Research Scientist with the Biological Resources Division of the USGS, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, and Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. He has studied wolves since 1958 and founded the International Wolf Center.

A gander at Dave’s publication reveals the depths of his investigations. You might start with his books, such as The Wolves of Isle Royale, from 1966, and read right through ten more before getting to Wolves on the Hunt, from 2015. In looking through his list of scholarly publications, I lost count on the 20th page because I kept making notes about interesting biology from the references. 

Suffice it to say Dave knows more about wolves than anyone else you or I will ever meet.

Given that Dave is our guest, our featured dog for this episode is the gray wolf, Canis lupus, which is of course the ur dog, the ancestral dog.

The gray wolf once had one of the largest distributions of any terrestrial mammal, which consisted of the majority of the entire northern hemisphere, and two-thirds of North America. This was massively reduced by humans, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, although it had been ongoing since the Middle Ages. Only recently, around the time Dave began working on wolves in the 60’s, have they started to recover.

Along with what we learn from Dave today, a trove of additional information about wolves can be found on the International Wolf Center website.