Mowat Discovers the Wolves Feed on Rodents

Farley Mowat’s discovery that the Wolf House Bay wolf family fed largely on Mice changed an apparent mystery into a direct challenge to the familiar image of wolves as hunters dependent on large game. With the Caribou gone for summer, the adults still returned from nightly hunts in apparently healthy condition and raised their pups. The explanation came not from a dramatic kill but from watching Angeline forage, then recognizing that the small prey abundant around the den could sustain a family of wolves.

The Summer Food Puzzle

Toward the end of June, the last migrating Caribou passed Wolf House Bay on their way to summer range in the high Barrens, roughly two or three hundred miles to the north. Their departure left the Wolf House Bay wolf family with hungry pups and no access to the large herds that had been passing nearby. Farley Mowat could not see what would replace them. The other possible prey he considered seemed inadequate: Arctic hares were scarce and difficult to catch, birds could fly beyond the wolves’ reach, and fish in the lakes and rivers seemed unlikely to offer a practical meal.

The puzzlement deepened because the wolves did not look as though they were going hungry. The two males left to hunt every night and returned each morning, but Mowat never saw them bring anything back. He could not reconcile their apparent condition with the absence of visible prey, and briefly considered whether his own presence might be the only available food source. In an attempt to help, he baked five loaves of bread and left them beside a hunting path. The wolves did not eat them; Mowat could only speculate that Uncle Albert might have treated the loaves as boundary markers rather than food.

At the same time, the surroundings were becoming crowded with small rodents. As June gave way to July, Mice, including lemmings, red-backed mice, and meadow mice, became conspicuous in the boggy country. Their numbers were evident even around the human camp: meadow mice entered Mike’s cabin and got into Mowat’s food and bedding. This abundance supplied a possible answer to the wolves’ food shortage, but it did not immediately occur to him that a large predator could live on such small prey.

Angeline’s Foraging

The decisive clue came when Angeline left the den while the male wolves rested before their next hunt. She had previously left Uncle Albert, and occasionally George, to watch the pups while she went out; Mowat had assumed that such excursions were for a drink or a walk. This time he followed her movements through his telescope. She went into the bay to drink, then returned to shore as a small group of Old Squaw ducks settled nearby.

Angeline’s behaviour appeared at first to be a performance unrelated to hunting. She rolled, moved about, and repeatedly changed position while the ducks watched and came closer. When one approached within a short distance of shore, she leapt toward it. The ducks escaped, and she missed the chance to catch one. Although the attempt failed, it showed Mowat that her foraging could include opportunistic efforts beyond the prey he had expected wolves to pursue.

After drying herself, Angeline crossed the grassy ground differently. She moved slowly upwind, with her body extended and her attention directed toward sounds and scents. She then pounced, lowered her head, and swallowed something Mowat could not initially see. She repeated the movement six times in ten minutes. On the seventh attempt she missed, and Mowat could identify a mouse in her jaws before she swallowed it. The sequence made clear that the earlier pounces had also been successful catches.

Mowat initially treated the mouse-eating as incidental, assuming Angeline was merely taking small snacks. The number of prey changed his interpretation: by his count, she had eaten about twenty-three Mice. Taken together, those catches amounted to a substantial meal. The observation was a turning point because it joined a specific, visible feeding behaviour to the unexplained fact that the adult wolves and pups remained in good condition after the Caribou had left.

From Observation to Explanation

The discovery did not rest on one moment alone. Mowat had watched the adults return from night hunts without visible food, seen them go directly to the den, and observed that the family seemed well fed despite the absence of large prey. Angeline’s repeated catches supplied an explanation for the adults’ condition; the abundance of small rodents supplied a plausible source. Mowat concluded that the Wolf House Bay wolf family, and probably other Keewatin Barren Lands wolves raising families outside the summer Caribou range, lived largely, perhaps almost entirely, on Mice during that season.

A further question remained: how could the hunters bring such small prey back to the pups? Mowat had noticed George and Uncle Albert return from hunting and enter the den, but had not understood what happened there. Ootek, whom Mowat later met among Mike’s relations and came to know as a close friend and knowledgeable naturalist, explained that the wolves carried their catch in their stomachs. At the den, the adults regurgitated meals that had already been partly digested. Mowat later saw an adult wolf feed the pups in this way after they had left the esker den. The behaviour gave a practical answer to the problem of transporting many small prey items, which could not be carried home externally.

Mowat’s account distinguishes what he observed from what he inferred and what Ootek explained. He saw Angeline catch and eat Mice; he inferred that this food supported the family through the summer; and he learned from Ootek how the adults delivered food to their pups. The distinction matters because the original puzzle arose partly from the limits of watching at a distance: returning hunters appeared to bring nothing home, although their meals were carried internally and shared at the den.

Corroboration and Dietary Range

The conclusion that rodents mattered to the wolves’ diet was later supported by scat analysis. In one sample, about 48 percent of the droppings contained rodent remains, chiefly fur and incisor teeth. Other identifiable material included Caribou bones and hair and a few bird feathers. This evidence did not establish that every wolf or every season depended on the same food, but it confirmed that rodents were a substantial part of the food recorded around the study area.

Ootek also broadened Mowat’s understanding of what wolves could eat. He reported that wolves consumed many Ground squirrels and sometimes seemed to prefer them to Caribou. He also described wolves fishing for Northern pike in narrow channels during the spring spawning season; he had once watched a wolf catch seven large pike in less than an hour. These additional examples place the Mice discovery within a wider pattern of flexible feeding rather than reducing the family’s diet to a single prey species.

The discovery’s significance lies in the reversal it makes possible. Mowat had approached the question under the influence of a conventional picture of wolves as large-game hunters, yet the summer observations showed that the Wolf House Bay wolf family could rely on small prey when the migrating Caribou were far away. The explanation also connects feeding to family life: adult hunting, food carried back in the body, and meals shared with the pups form one continuous process. What first looked like a wolf family living without an adequate food supply proved to be evidence of a diet and a method of provisioning that Mowat had not known to look for.