ANTIGO — On April 1, Gus Ullman was collecting sap for maple syrup on his hunting land north of the Ackley Wildlife Area. His wife was following behind in a truck and maybe 100 yards away, out of sight but still in earshot, Ullman could hear their one-and-a-half year old springer spaniel, Rosco, happily bounding through the woods.
The next moment, Ullman realized Rosco was barking. Then he heard him yelp. Guessing he might have just run into a porcupine, he started calling him. He had been training Rosco to bird hunt for months, and so when he didn’t return, Ullman knew something was wrong, and went back to the vehicle to grab a pistol.
“It was a time we didn’t have any snow, but the ground was wet enough that I could tell which way they went, and he let out a couple of little whimpers as I was calling for him. I heard a couple more whimpers out of him yet, and I just kept going that way where I heard the sound, and calling and calling and calling,” Ullman said.
He estimates that he followed Rosco’s cries for the next 20 minutes, over something like 40 acres. Finally, in what he described as luck, he stumbled upon a kind of clearing. Leaves were all ripped up — it looked like something had been digging. A moment later, he glanced up and saw a wolf disappear into the woods — and then what it had left behind: Rosco, dead.
“His whole stomach and everything was ripped right out. Intestines were hanging out. He was just ripped to pieces,” Ullman said. “People asked me if my dog provoked them. My wife does daycare at home. This dog was a friend to those little kids, to the little children. He would harm nothing. We were devastated, and my kids were too. It was just terrible — it’s like losing a child.”
The next day, an investigator from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) came to Ullman’s home and examined the body. His report confirmed Ullman’s story.
On June 7, around six miles away, the USDA confirmed another wolf depredation, this time of a calf, in the Town of Pine River, just past Langlade County’s western border.
“The ribs were heavily chewed and basically all muscle tissue was consumed along with the viscera. The ears and the end of the tongue were also consumed. I found wolf tracks on a private logging road that enters the pasture about 250 yards from the kill site,” reads a section of the report, which went on to detail severe injuries a full-grown cow in the pasture sustained that the investigator predicted it would likely succumb to as well.
Potential depredation areas
Though the aforementioned wolf depredation cases were the only ones confirmed in or near the Ackley Wildlife Area this year, last year, two hunting dogs were killed in the Town of Merrill about 10 miles away.
Adrian Wydeven, a wildlife biologist that headed up the DNR’s state wolf recovery and management program from 1990 through 2013, said while he doubts the wolf population in the county or in specific areas of the county has increased drastically in recent years, the Ackley Wildlife Area is the type of place where “depredations occur more readily.”
“Ackley itself…is not that big of a wild area and it is surrounded by farming areas there, and when you have a high interspersion of farmland with some wild areas where wolves are occupying where they encounter livestock and domestic animals on a more regular basis, there’s a greater chance there might be a depredation,” Wydeven said, comparing it to land surrounding the Menominee Reservation. “The Menominee Reservation…is large tracts of very wild land, but then along the edges of it you’ve got farmland in Langlade and Shawano County and Oconto County that kind of come right up to the reservation, and there’s almost a straight line sometimes of solid timber in the reservation and more farmland to the edge of it. So I think in those kind of circumstances where you’ve got farms coming up right to the edge of a big wild area there and the packs overlapping somewhat, that probably presents a case where there’s greater chance that there might be depredations.”
According to a map with which the DNR tracks wolf conflicts in the state relatively meticulously, many recent depredations have occurred in areas where farmland and forests abut, and one or two cases per year in the county is something like the average.
In 2023, for instance, there was just one confirmed livestock depredation case, this one along the Wolf River on the border of Menominee County. In 2022, two livestock were killed in the county along the Menominee border, along with a hunting dog near Lily. In 2021, no depredations were reported, and in 2020, just one.
Rare but impactful incidents
In those two latter years during which virtually no depredations occurred within the county, however, some residents may have heard of others in the vicinity, like in 2021, when wolves killed two livestock near Wabeno and three hunting dogs in the Crandon area, or last year, when two hunting dogs were killed in the Town of Merrill.
Nevertheless, DNR Large Carnivore Specialist Randy Johnson said that while DNR officials have always been well-aware of these wolf conflicts, statistically, they are still relatively rare.
“Anybody that loses a pet, anybody that loses a hunting dog, anybody that loses livestock, it can be a pretty traumatic event, so I never try to gloss over that reality that each one’s really important to the individuals that are affected,” Johnson said. “But at the same time, it’s still a rare event when you think about the distribution of wolves across the state, how many locations wolves overlap with livestock production, that overlap with obviously just residences and people. If you think about how many hunting dogs are in the woods throughout the course of the summer and fall and the hunting seasons, and how many occasions there are for conflict to occur, there’s probably hundreds, if not thousands, of occasions. And throughout the course of the year [in the state], we get a couple of dozen. So on the big scale, it’s not a significant number, but again, each one is very significant to the folks that it happens to.”
Even sightings of wolves have seemingly become significant to hunters, including Ullman. He said that even before what happened to his dog, he had grown sick of wolves because of what he believes they have done to the area’s deer population.
“I never saw one deer this hunting season, and this was on my hunting land. I saw one glimpse of a little small one in the dark, and after, I thought, ‘Was it a deer or was it a wolf?’ And then I got a survey from the State of Wisconsin asking me about how many days I hunted and all this, how many shots. Well, there were no shots fired — there was nothing to shoot at. I put a note on the bottom of it saying, ‘If you don’t do something about these wolves, we will not have any deer. There will be nothing left.’ These wolves, the population is just out of control. There’s just way too many of them.”
Another local hunter named Jamie Packard said last fall, he saw a total of 21 wolves near his hunting cabin in the Gleason area — a pack of 11 that walked past his treestand during bow hunting season, and then 10 more a week later in the first week of gun hunting.
“Whether it was the same group, I’m not 100 percent positive, but how many of them didn’t I see? That’s what makes me nervous. Previously, we also had a guy that was bear hunting on our property, and he had wolves that were chasing bears off the bait and eating the baits,” Packard said. “The DNR has got to start looking to people that are actually out there hunting and seeing these wolves and telling them about it. People are going to be like, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do anything about it, we’re going to quit buying tags, go hunt somewhere else in a different state, and not give you any more money.’”
Johnson said that while it is generally true that wolf numbers have increased while deer numbers have decreased in northern Wisconsin in the last 20 years, actual research has consistently indicated that “winter weather and habitat quality are the primary drivers of the deer population.”
“Predation plays a role, but there is little to no scientific support for the idea that wolves have destroyed the deer herd in northern Wisconsin, or really anywhere that the species overlap. What is clear are ongoing changes in habitat quality for deer in the north, specifically less cutting of forest to create high quality young forest and continued loss of quality cover for deer in the winter time, that are probably reducing how many deer the landscape can support,” Johnson said. “The reality is that there are many other factors beyond predation and deer abundance which affect deer harvest. These include fewer and fewer deer hunters each year, changes in license numbers and season types and hunters becoming more selective towards only wanting to shoot large bucks. In the end, wolves certainly have an impact on the deer herd and deer hunting, but it is a drastic oversimplification to pin any and all deer hunting concerns on wolves.”
Federally-protected species
In the DNR’s 2023 Wolf Management plan that Johnson helped write (after receiving extensive input from the public and hunting and farming organizations alike), Wisconsin’s current wolf population is estimated to be at approximately 1,000 wolves, a number that is considered stable for their survival in the state.
According to the plan, if that number fell to under 800 animals, the DNR officials would seek to increase their population, while if it grew above 1,200, they would aim to reduce it. But because of a ruling made in 2022 by a federal judge from California to relist gray wolves as a federally-protected endangered species, the Wisconsin DNR currently has no authority to authorize a wolf hunt anyways.
Contrary to what some might assume, however, Wydeven, who helped grow the wolf population more than perhaps anyone else in the state, said he believes wolves should be delisted.
“I think having some level of wolf hunting and trapping season would be appropriate to allow local people to get involved more in wolf managing, including the opportunity to harvest a wolf if they wanted to,” Wydeven said. “Probably the most important part to me about delisting is less of whether they should be hunted or not but the flexibility it gives us as far as dealing with depredation problems. Currently, if there’s a wolf that becomes a depredator and readily feeds on livestock, there’s no authority for the DNR to remove that animal lethally…if it’s just a livestock or pet depredation, the DNR doesn’t have the authority to remove them.
“Also if they’re delisted, land owners can get permits, which I think gives land owners the feeling that they can protect their property, protect their land, and I think that is part of the frustration they have is there’s a feeling of frustration that there’s this government animal that they can’t do anything about. We found in 2012 when wolves were delisted and we issued permits to land owners who had had previous depredations or a neighborhood with previous depredations, we had like 130 people that applied for these permits to shoot wolves, and yet only 18 wolves by about a dozen people were actually killed, but I think land owners having these permits made them feel like they were able to protect their property. So a lot of time, rather than actually wanting to kill off a lot of wolves, it’s more of those kinds of issues of feeling secure and being able to protect your property and feeling you can manage a situation yourself.”
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