In late February, a pack of nine timber wolves were observed feeding on a road kill deer at Ontario, Canada's highly acclaimed Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve. This unique feeding frenzy was captured on film by a visiting video-grapher and can be viewed on the popular You Tube website.
The wolves, which are approaching the annual mating season, displayed all the typical behaviours of a wild wolf pack, when they started engaging in tearing the deer's body cavity. As is typical in wolf packs, the alphas, the breeding pair in the pack, feed first and will commonly secure the best, nutritionally most valuable remains. The alpha wolves ate the organs such as heart, liver, lungs and spleen. The remaining animals can be observed feeding on the body of the deer, which had been hit and killed on a road by a truck.
After the hide is ripped aside, the raw flesh is exposed and torn off. When wolves encounter bones, these get cracked, which can be heard clearly throughout the entire feeding. Within a period of several minutes, the deer's body is dismembered, where individual wolves are walking off with entire quarters, to be consumed in private, without the competition of the remaining pack.
A feeding clearly exposes the structure of a wolf pack's hierarchy, the alphas, the "omegas" or lowest ranking animals, and all pack members in between. Interactions between wolves at close quarters, such as a kill site, involve growling and biting, body postures and tail position within the pack.
Towards the end of the feeding, only the least interesting parts of the deer remain: the skull, hide and stomach. Everything else has been consumed. In the wild, a meal like this is hard to come by. Contrary to common belief, most deer pursued by wolves will escape and only a few will fall prey to North America's top predator.
In total, this pack of wolves consumed a deer exceeding 140 pounds in weight, or an average of over 15 pounds of meat per wolf, during the feeding. This volume shows when closely examining the individual pack members, with bellies bulging and motions slowing considerably, weighed down by the burden of the meal in their stomachs.
Within minutes of the wolves commencing the feeding, the first raven appears. A few moments later, a second and then soon after, a third can be witnesses near the kill site. By the time the wolves have finished their feast, an entire flock of ravens has emerged, picking up the small pieces left behind by the wolves. In the end, only a few items remain of the deer: pieces of the skull and jaw bones, rags of hide and the content of the deer's stomach with even the outer lining of the stomach having been consumed.
The entire feast lasts less than 45 minutes. Wolves cannot afford to waste neither food nor time in the wild. The only actors remaining at the scene are the ravens, picking up even the smallest morsels of meat, tufts of hair and fragments of bone. The wolves have retreated, lounging around or cleaning their muzzles in the freshly fallen snow. This feast will have to last for many days or weeks, until nature presents another casualty.
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