#2213 - Diane K. Boyd

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

Diane Boyd (0:06)

Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

What's up?

SPEAKER_3 (0:12)

How are you?

Diane Boyd (0:13)

I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great. Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Well, it's very nice to meet you. And I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinell's podcast as well.

Diane Boyd (0:21)

Oh, good. You got to watch it.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Yeah. Steve, well, Steve made the introduction. He told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves. So I'm really excited to talk to you.

Diane Boyd (0:32)

Thanks. And I'm excited too because I thought, well, we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you got an interest in wolves. It's all good.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?

Diane Boyd (0:43)

Well, I grew up in Minnesota and probably tell from the Fargo accent. But I grew up in Minnesota and back in the 60s and 70s, when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in IORL, a couple here or there in Wisconsin. So I was interested from the beginning with that. Then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meach, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus. So I just stopped by and kept bugging him. I wouldn't go away like a good parasite, persist, persist, persist.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you?

Diane Boyd (1:22)

You know, I'm just, I'm kind of a wild life person. They're the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal. They're carnivore. They're social like people. And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life going up till I was about 15 So I had this, this passion for canines in general. I love dogs.

Joe Rogan (1:44)

I do too. I love them. And I love wolves. I'm so fascinated by them. And I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the western states and the reintroduction of them. So you were there for all of it, right? So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out, except as you said, in Minnesota. You said Idaho is that was the only other place that had them?

Diane Boyd (2:08)

No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan. They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late like 1949, 50s early, and they stayed, and they got seated there, and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that.

Joe Rogan (2:29)

And is it still like that there?

Diane Boyd (2:31)

Yes, and the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because you know in nature nothing is here. We always want it to be here, but it's always doing this. And yeah, they're doing there. And then interestingly, when they arrived, they migrated on their own power, there was very little immigration. There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently genetically there was no influx of new genes. So the wolves that came and went didn't breed. And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies. And eventually just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father, daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over. And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally. So they just did a reintroduction to IORL too. That's been relatively new, just a handful of years. So they had to re-boost the population if they wanted to keep them going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.

Joe Rogan (3:33)

So when they reintroduced them, this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction to Yellowstone. A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced a different size wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada.

Diane Boyd (3:48)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:48)

Is that true? Sort of?

Diane Boyd (3:50)

No. So in my book, I've got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf. And so people call these wolves super wolves because they say that they're they're not native, they're Canadian super wolves and they weigh 170 pounds and it goes on and on and on. But I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, Wolf 8551, and we just had VHF collars. We didn't have satellite collars in those days. And she hung around for a while and then she just disappeared. And seven months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry Game Warden called me. Says, we got we got one of your wolves killed. Do you want to call her? Yes, please. Where is it? Puskupe. I said, oh, where is that? Well, it turns out that is 540 miles north of Glacier Park in seven months. So we didn't know if the guy, a farmer shot it in July. If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her. But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park. So clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia. And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were. So this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone, almost to the Yukon. It's connected because it's a walkabout for a wolf. It's not a big deal. We just didn't back to back then. We didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals. But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently. And it was from the Midwest. Think about that, to Colorado.