{"id":2208670,"date":"2026-10-25T05:30:50","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T04:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?p=2208670"},"modified":"2026-10-25T05:32:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T04:32:23","slug":"canadas-wolves-may-be-using-fire-to-hunt-moose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/canadas-wolves-may-be-using-fire-to-hunt-moose\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada’s wolves may be using fire to hunt moose"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a practice that goes back hundreds of thousands of years,\u00a0hunter-gatherer groups\u00a0today light fires at night to keep wild animals, and predators especially, at bay \u2013 animals are afraid of fire, the reasoning goes, and a campfire will keep you safe while you sleep.<\/p>\n

But not all predators, it seems. A new paper published in the\u00a0Journal of Animal Ecology<\/em>\u00a0has found that wolves in north-east British Columbia are actively drawn to wildfires.<\/p>\n

The scientists from the ecological consultancy SwampDonkey Solutions speculate the wolves may sense hunting opportunities presented by the fires as their prey, such as moose (or elk in Europe), caribou and beavers flee for their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWolves are either stalking around the edges of the fires and seeing if they can make a go of picking stuff off as they\u2019re running away,\u201d says Jesse Tigner, an applied ecologist who set up SwampDonkey. \u201cOr they are coming back to unburned inclusions in the recently burned areas to suss out prey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolves are trading off potential risks and benefits of getting closer, not further away, from fires, the paper explains. \u201cWolves selected habitats near active fires, especially longer-lasting ones, while avoiding hazardous fronts and moving faster through smokier areas,\u201d it says.<\/p>\n

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The study was based on grey wolves. Credit: Thorsten Spoerlein\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Wildfires are common in boreal ecosystems, which are cold northern habitats with extensive conifer forests. \u201cThere have been fires in the boreal since the boreal became an ecosystem,\u201d says Tigner.<\/p>\n

Recent years have shown a massive increase in the extent of these wildfires. In the more than 6 million hectares of the study area, nearly 1.4 million hectares were affected by wildfires in 2023 and more than 650,000 hectares in 2024.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn those two years combined, more burned across this area than in its entirety since BC started keeping records in 1911,\u201d Tigner says.<\/p>\n

The paper says more research should be carried out to assess how wildfires affect the wolves hunting success and prey behaviour and also wolf survival \u2013\u00a0though no fire-related deaths of wolves were recorded during the course of this study.<\/p>\n

There are very few other examples of animals exploiting wildfires for predation opportunities \u2013\u00a0one other is raptors such as black kites\u00a0intentionally transporting smouldering sticks to areas of unburned grasslands to flush out prey.<\/p>\n

This research did not look at whether other predators in the area \u2013\u00a0which include black and grizzly bears and wolverines \u2013\u00a0also potentially take advantage of the fires in the way the wolves do. Tigner will only say that wolves do stand out from these other carnivores.<\/p>\n

\u201cWolves are very smart,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re pack animals and I suspect there\u2019s a lot of information gathering and then communication back to the pack, and that is very different behaviour to those other species.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This article<\/a> by James Fair was first published by Discover Wildlife on 13 October 2026.
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