Spooky season is officially upon us, and new trail camera footage shows that the wolves of Minnesota are giving local beavers something to be extra spooked about: the possibility of a beaver beheading.
The unfortunate (for the beaver) beheading took place last week in Voyageurs National Park in northeastern Minnesota. The incident was all caught on trail camera by the Voyageurs Wolf Project, which studies wolf packs in the area.
"The absolute trail camera jackpot," Voyageurs Wolf Project stated on the YouTube video. "We just captured the second known video ever, as far as we are aware, of a wolf attacking and killing a beaver."
Filmed in black and white, the chaotic video looks like footage from a horror film. The video shows a massive beaver cautiously creeping out of the water and venturing on shore to forage. Just four minutes later, a collared wolf pounces out of nowhere onto the beaver.
The pair wrestle about on and off screen, with the wolf thrashing its head with the beaver in its jaws.
The beaver appears to attempt to make several breaks for the safety of the water, with the wolf dragging it back off screen each time. Eventually, the wolf grabs the beaver by the back and carries it off-camera.
Nineteen hours later, the wolf trots by with its prize in its jaws: the beaver's head.
A few days later, a research crew found what was left of the headless beaver nearby.
Monitoring the Wolves of Voyageurs National Park
Voyageurs Wolf Project is a University of Minnesota research project that monitors wolf packs in and around the national park, which covers more than 200,000 forested acres in northern Minnesota. The project monitors over 60 wolves spread across 16 packs, a population that has stayed relatively constant since the late 1990s. The wolf who participated in the beaver body's desecration is a collared, breeding male known as V094, a member of Half-Moon pack.
The project's main goal is to fill one of the biggest knowledge gaps in wolf ecology— what do wolves do in the summer? Besides terrorize beavers, that is.
The first recorded observation of wolves hunting and killing beavers happened in Quebec in 2015, and there have been several instances since. A few weeks prior to the beheading, another of Voyageurs Wolf Project's cameras caught a video of a wolf lunging at a beaver in broad daylight, though that particular beaver got away.
Other species are being studied in the national park as well. In the trail camera footage, the beaver appears to step over a strand of barbwire when it gets out of the water. This is known as a hair snare, and it collects clumps of fur from animals. It's part of another University of Minnesota research project which is measuring stress levels in the hair sampled collected; if the wolves of the park continue to terrorize the beavers, their increased stress may show up in those very hair samples.
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