Creeping Death
09-05-2009, 08:56 PM
Arctic researcher flees after wolves gorge on bacon (http://www.canada.com/news/national/Arctic+researcher+flees+after+wolves+gorge+bacon/1964535/story.html)
EDMONTON — A University of Alberta researcher was surrounded by wolves, had to cancel her research season and be evacuated from the high Arctic earlier this summer after a pilot with an ecotourism agency left cardboard boxes of bacon and sausage on the tundra near their camp.
The wolves ripped open the boxes of meat and gorged themselves.
Catherine La Farge, who studies the colonies of moss exposed by retreating glaciers, was not attacked during the incident on Ellesmere Island, but she and her field assistant spent three hours cleaning up food and debris strewn across the landscape. Then they were confined to their kitchen tent to guard the leftovers and garbage.
Even banging pots and pans didn’t frighten the wolves off.
“They kept circling,” said La Farge. “It was just so unlike their previous behaviour.
Weir said the food was supposed to be placed in an underground cache. The organizers were hoping to do it themselves, but their travel plans changed at the last minute and the task was left to the Twin Otter pilot who landed and left the food on the ground.
I can see the Canadian government now fining the researchers for feeding wildlife illegally and giving the wolves pancreatitis by letting them gorge on bacon.
EDMONTON — A University of Alberta researcher was surrounded by wolves, had to cancel her research season and be evacuated from the high Arctic earlier this summer after a pilot with an ecotourism agency left cardboard boxes of bacon and sausage on the tundra near their camp.
The wolves ripped open the boxes of meat and gorged themselves.
Catherine La Farge, who studies the colonies of moss exposed by retreating glaciers, was not attacked during the incident on Ellesmere Island, but she and her field assistant spent three hours cleaning up food and debris strewn across the landscape. Then they were confined to their kitchen tent to guard the leftovers and garbage.
Even banging pots and pans didn’t frighten the wolves off.
“They kept circling,” said La Farge. “It was just so unlike their previous behaviour.
Weir said the food was supposed to be placed in an underground cache. The organizers were hoping to do it themselves, but their travel plans changed at the last minute and the task was left to the Twin Otter pilot who landed and left the food on the ground.
I can see the Canadian government now fining the researchers for feeding wildlife illegally and giving the wolves pancreatitis by letting them gorge on bacon.