You don't have to be in a wilderness area to encounter the wild

By Cindy Gentz

My boyfriend is a forester in St. Louis County. He spends about half his work time out walking around in forest stands that no one may have traipsed through for 80 years. He's found evidence of old logging camps -- saws, ax heads, snuff jars. Once he found a fern growing inside a glass bottle. He also gets to see a lot of wildlife.

This winter alone, he's seen a black bear with her cub, a lynx, bobcats and wolves. Everything but the bears, he saw from his truck. Lynx are normally thought to inhabit only the very northern strip of the middle of the state, so it is really something for Bill to have seen one in the southern part of St. Louis County, in the vicinity of Duluth.

The other day he was walking through a part of the forest that was being logged when he heard footsteps behind him. Thinking it was one of the loggers he turned around to say hi. Instead of a person, though, he saw a wolf. It kept its distance but had clearly been following, trying to decide what he was.

Bill sees many deer in these recently logged areas, and figured the wolf was following the scent of the deer when it came across him. Wolves and deer both probably enjoy the opportunity to walk on cleared turf, instead of fighting their way through brush in deep snow.

The wolf ran off into the woods, but circled around and came out on the road again in time for Bill to snap a picture of it before it disappeared for good. He neither saw nor heard any other wolves, and assumed that it was probably alone, perhaps young and recently out of its pack. It was the first time he has ever seen one that close when he wasn't in a vehicle.

While I don't have many of these charismatic mega-fauna encounters myself, I enjoy hearing about them and living vicariously through Bill's experiences. It is also a pleasant reminder that while we may have mostly lost our caribou and our elk herds, and Minnesota is no longer a vast wilderness, there are still lots of opportunities to encounter elusive wildlife.

The forests Bill works in are less than an hour from Duluth, and there are even rumors of wolf sightings in town. To me, these stories make the forests and parks surrounding urban and suburban areas seem much more alive. They remind me that the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is not the only wilderness still thriving in Minnesota.

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Cindy Gentz of Grand Marais works in conservation of water resources. A version of this story appears on the Conservation Minnesota website.

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