A Quest to Find Canada’s Elusive Coastal Wolf | Nat Geo Live

I'd like to start by telling you about this place. This is the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. I was lucky enough to first visit this place back in 2011, and whilst I was there, I fell in love with this animal. She is a female Coastal gry wolf.

[Applause]

I don't know about you, but when I think of wolves, I think of snow-covered mountains. I think of Yellowstone National Park, of Ronan Donovan, a legendary wolf photographer. But these guys are completely different. They live off the ocean; up to 90% of their diet comes from the ocean. They eat fish, barnacles, mussels, clams, even washed-up whales. They live this incredible existence.

This particular day will stay with me forever because it was the first time I'd ever got close to a coastal wolf. Up to this point, every time I'd tried to sneak up on them or get close in my little rubber boat, they'd slink off into the forest. They really were the ghosts of this coast. But for some reason, on this particular day, she was confident enough to hang out with me. Because it was the first time I'd got close to her, I was shaking with adrenaline.

It wasn't because I was scared; there’s no reason to be scared of wolves. It was because I was so excited. Luckily, she was very relaxed. She relaxed, she yawned, she stuck her tongue out, and it meant I could stop taking blurry shaky pictures. Now I could take sharp pictures. The only problem was towards the end of her yawn, she did this, and my blood got pumping again. I went back to taking blurry pictures.

Now, this female is the leader of her pack; she's the alpha female. Here she is with the alpha male, and you can see the coastal home that they live in. In this pack, there were nine individuals, including four very cute pups. Three of them are pictured here with the alpha female. They're just beautifully camouflaged.

Now, it was such an honor, you know, so special to have this secret window into the hidden lives of coastal wolves, something that very few people on the planet have experienced. So I felt incredibly grateful that that happened. Now, about six months after I returned home, I received one of the most horrible messages I've ever received. Attached to that message was this picture: that wolf and one of her pups had been shot and thrown in a local fishing village dumpster.

Now, if she'd been called Cecil, if she'd been a lion, there would have been an outcry across the world. But because she's a coastal wolf, not many people know about coastal wolves, so who cares? And so absolutely nothing happened, and this happens far too often with wildlife. We've got to find more ways to live alongside it, particularly with these big predators. I think the first step towards doing that is valuing them more.

So ever since then, ever since I got that message, I knew I had to return to Vancouver Island. Firstly, to show how awesome these coastal wolves are, but also to use them as flagships to celebrate the amazing West Coast ecosystem within which they live. So I had a grant from the Scientific Exploration Society in the UK, and I had a Young Explorers Grant from the National Geographic Society here. I pitched to National Geographic a series, and this now has become Nat Geo's first digital series.

So, where is Vancouver Island? Let's zoom in. It's just off mainland Canada, near the US border, and I was about halfway up on the west coast. It's an amazing, amazing ecosystem. In the winter, it's absolutely hammered by waves. It's one of the best places in the world for storm watching, and you can see you've got this wave-battered Pacific West Coast, and then there's rainforest-coated mountains that drop straight down to the shoreline. It's not tropical rainforest; it's temperate rainforest, and, you know, it's incredibly green, incredibly luscious.

Behind that wave-battered front line is this never-ending network of sheltered sea inlets, and that's one of the best places to find animals. Now, crazy landscape by itself, but to then be packed full of big, sexy, charismatic animals from gray whales to humpback whales. These are 45 tons, 50 ft long; they're absolute giants. To bald eagles, and these guys are master fishermen. They're also huge—they've got a massive wingspan, six feet wingspan.

And then there's the cutest stuff. Now, I think of sea otters as like the Derek Zoolanders of the animal kingdom. They're always pulling a pose. This guy hasn't quite mastered blue steel, but he's getting there; it's a bit of a pout. This guy, I think of him as stretching out a bit of a calf cramp.

Yeah, they're awesome, but if you think sea otters are cute, oh, raccoons: the bandits, the masked bandits. They're on another level. Now, I have a bit of a crazy theory about raccoons. I believe they are the end of the world, and they were pretty shocked to hear that I discovered their plan. The only thing they could really do after they discovered I'd foiled their plan was to go and get a drink at the bar.

So, as I said, it's temperate rainforest in this place, so it's pretty much impenetrable to go walking, especially with, you know, big cameras and tripods. I was searching for the wolves in my little 12T Zodiac that was called Striker. I was filming mainly from the boat, from the water, but where possible, I did get out on land and spent a lot of time in blinds. Having had those amazing experiences with coastal wolves in the past, I went into this pretty confident that I could find coastal wolves.

But they were just giving me the runaround; I was getting absolutely nothing. They were, you know, ghosts. Now, this coast receives a huge amount of rainfall, and often it's difficult to stay out when the weather's miserable. But I had this idea that I needed to stay out in all conditions because, you know, that could be when you get lucky.

So this is myself in a little hailstorm. This is really nice; it wasn't. It was miserable. Now, this particular area of shoreline is really cool because it's a sanctuary for about eight females, and of course, females mean cubs. The best part about these particular bears was that the only thing they're scared of is a bigger bear or a pack of wolves, and the only place that comes from is the forest.

So if you're on a boat on the water, they completely ignore you, and that's awesome because you can get really, really close and film natural behavior. You can get really, really close. This is a juvenile bear that actually got a little bit curious and came over to check me out. Where possible, I did get out on land to walk with the bears.

Now, when a bear comes really close, it's important to stay calm. This is with black bears, I should say, and just have a chat with it. Because if you have a chat with it, it's relaxed, you're relaxed, and everyone's safe. "Okay, we're here, we're here. Okay, that's a good bear. Go around. Okay, go around, go around. Goodbye!" And then everyone's happy.

When I first went to Vancouver Island, I wanted to get my camera even closer than this. So whilst I was in high school, I built this—it's called Bearbox—and it's basically an indestructible housing for my camera. This is me and my design and technology teacher, Mr. Sullivan, and this was the first shot taken inside Bearbox. We didn't really know how the bears were going to react; it turns out they kind of liked it.

But it did mean that I could get the camera really, really close to them with a wide-angle lens, so they're big in the frame with their habitat behind. You can see here that they're walking on the shoreline. Like clockwork, these bears would come out of the forest every day at low tide when the water in the inlets goes out to forage. They were foraging in a pretty cool way, so I'm just going to let a little clip from episode two explain what they were doing.

"Come out nice and early this morning to look for bears. It's nice and clear, so I can see a long, long way. Yeah, we got a bear on the shoreline just there. Awesome! Right, we're going to approach slowly, and hopefully, it hangs out. I'm really excited!"

[Music]

You might be wondering why a bear would hang out on the shoreline or why it's flipping rocks. So, I just found out this is a young male bear 'cause he has a big set of balls. Well, he's on the hunt for his next meal: crabs, lots and lots of crabs.

So I was having great luck with the bears—filming them on the rocky shore—but still, the wolves were giving me the runaround. Wildlife is weird when you try and film or photograph it because, had I said, "Oh, I want to make a film about black bears," well, I would have seen no black bears and loads of coastal wolves. That's just how it works, and all the other animals were putting on an amazing show.

I had loads of really cool encounters with orca killer whales. The orca in this particular area are transient, and one of their favorite foods are these guys, Steller sea lions. Now, these sea lions are pretty formidable predators in their own right. The males are not very pretty; they can be 2,000 pounds, 11 ft long. They're absolute monsters, and when they're on land, they're pretty ugly. They're just these big fat blobs of blubber.

And I wanted to make an episode about them, but I didn't think it was fair to only film them when they were hauled out on the rocky shore, so I decided to get in the water with them. I wasn't really sure how they were going to react to the camera and the lights and everything. Turns out they kind of liked me.

Now, this doesn't look like a brilliant situation to be in, so I'm going to let a little clip explain what exactly is going on.

[Music]

That was amazing! We sat right down on the bottom on the sand, and there must have had, I don't know, 15, 20 of them all around us. At one point, I had one over either shoulder, and then one gripped me on the head and squeezed and squeezed. I was like, "Okay, that's a little bit hard!"

But the whole time, it doesn't feel like they're being aggressive; it feels like, I mean, they don't have arms. If they want to know what a new funky object feels like, they can't use their hands—they don't have any. They've got to just have a little bite, and so it's very much a loving, tender bite rather than an aggressive "I want to eat you" bite.

Now, ironically, it was actually one of the smallest sea lions on this rocky haul-out that came closest to killing me. I was suspicious of this particular sea lion because all the others went around in groups, whereas this one always went by itself. It learned that grabbing on my regulator hose, my breathing hose, and pulling it out of my mouth was really fun because it made bubbles that it could then play in.

Now, of course, this was scary the first time, but once I kind of worked out what he was doing, I flipped the camera around so I could see him coming in the reflection of my underwater housing. I could see him coming over my shoulder. And, yeah, I tried to catch him in the act—little rascals.

So I wasn't having much luck with the wolves, so I decided to mix things up and traveled further up the coast, going to this really remote island. The only way of getting in there at this time of year was by float plane. This was my badass pilot, Doug, and he could basically get us into anywhere. He dropped us off on this incredibly beautiful section of coastline, this great bit of beach.

So we set up camp, and we were miles and miles from civilization. Often we left the tent doors open at night so that we could, you know, see the Milky Way. Yeah, it was really, really cool. This is a time-lapse, and this isn't actually the sun rising; that's the moon rising in the middle of the night, which was kind of cool—a nice surprise.

So, I set up a blind. The weather wasn't great to start with. I set up a blind basically to break up my human outline. Animals, including wolves, are evolutionarily programmed to be scared of our head and shoulder shape. So you set up a blind to break up that outline, and the idea is they don't know that you're there.

So this was in the hide; everything was lovely. Well, 12 days later, things weren't going great. I saw absolutely nothing. I saw many beautiful sunrises, beautiful sunsets, bald eagles flying past, black bears, kingfishers—everything apart from coastal wolves.

We decided to pull the plug and move to a new location. Just as we were doing so, we realized why we might not have seen any coastal wolves. Now, if you look up in the top of that picture, it's a big section of logging. Now, I knew that there was logging on Vancouver Island, but I didn't really expect to see it.

To actually be waiting for wolves and to be able to put your fingers in your ears and look out over this beautiful coast, you take your fingers out of your ears, and you can hear chainsaws and trees and machinery. So we walked up to see what the logging was like, and I don't want to point the finger at, you know, loggers. I guess that the one thing I, you know, we're all part of this problem. We all use paper; we all use wood.

I guess the one thing I would say is that when I was in high school, we were taught that, you know, the cutting down of rainforests happened in the Amazon, you know, in a faraway place, and it was a problem that was difficult to deal with. Well, you know, this is the logging of temperate rainforest. That tree that I'm sitting on was cut down maybe that day, a few days earlier. It could be 500 years old; other trees, a thousand years old.

I think in the 21st century, there's got to be an alternative to cutting down, you know, these old-growth temperate rainforests on this, you know, this coastline. This is on the developed world's doorstep. If we can't look after this place, what hope does anywhere else have?

So this was pretty upsetting. So I went back to my tent, I got in my happy place, I snuggled with my cameras, and regrouped. And two days later, this happened.

Now, I'm not actually allowed to tell you what happened next. If you'd like to find out, you're going to have to follow the rest of the series. I'd just like to thank you all for coming. That's all I've got to say. I hope you have a great rest of your evening.

There, a wolf! Oh my!