New documentary focuses on the wolves of Isle Royale National Park/NPLSF

How Isle Royale National Park's wolves form new packs, how researchers capture individual wolves for research, and what they learn from that research, is laid out in a documentary film released by the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation.

The nearly 40-minute film follows researchers as they develop the science to expand understanding of the predator/prey relationship between wolves and moose on Isle Royale and how it affects the ecosystem. The park has been home to the longest running predator/prey study in the world, with more than 60 years of data collected, but there are still many unanswered questions.

Accompanying the film are corresponding educational lesson plans for classrooms, distance learners, and homeschooled students.

“Knowing how wolves fascinate people, and that teachers are dealing with constantly changing demands, we developed lesson plans for all student age groups,” said Tom Irvine, executive director of the foundation.

Efforts to bring the park's prey-predator relationship back into balance involved two countries, two states, two Indigenous tribes, and a province, all working together to capture wolves for the new population. The documentary is the culmination of filming and chronicling the first four years of the restoration of the predator/prey relationship at the park. It is an expansion of Curiosity Stream’s original short documentary, Breakthrough: Return of the Wolves that was released in 2020. Curiosity Stream also provided additional production support to the making of Return of the wolves: Lesson from the Wilderness.

The film was a collaboration between personnel at Isle Royale; the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota; Michigan Technological University; State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; and the Cane-Bridge Foundation of Bogota, Columbia.

In the film, park personnel explain the complexities of the decision to restore wolves and logistical support for the restoration, while the IWC helped fund the transfer of wolves and distribution of the film. Researchers from MTU and SUNY described past and future studies of the predator/prey relationship. Funding for the Spanish translation of the film and lesson plans was provided by the Cane-Bridge Foundation of Bogota, Colombia. The Spanish version will be released via the foundation’s website with accompanying Spanish lesson plans on February 14.

Students participating in the educational lessons will have a chance to tap into the biology and population dynamics of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale National Park. At the time of translocation, the wolf population had dwindled down to two inbred animals, and the moose population was expanding rapidly with no significant check from a predator.

After the park decided to restore the wolves to function as the top predator on an island populated with a large prey base of more than 1,800 moose, the foundation started to document the difficulties in restoring the population, and the science and activities related to how ecosystems function and the role of a dynamic predator in impacting a large prey, and its impacts on the ecosystem.

To learn more about the documentary and educational lesson plans, visit this page on the foundation website.