Wolves at Voyageurs National Park have learned how to fish for their meals/Tom Gable

There's a Chinese proverb that goes like this: Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. At Voyageurs National Park, the wolves have taken it upon themselves to learn how to fish for some of their meals.

While it's been documented that wolves in the Northwest routinely pluck spawning salmon from streams, the angling going at Voyageurs is believed to be the first confirmed practice of the predators turning to freshwater streams for meals, according to Tom Gable, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota who has been leading the Voyageurs Wolf Project in and around the national park in far northern Minnesota.

"I actually observed one wolf doing this, which is how I learned about this behavior," Gable told the Traveler in an email. "This past spring we set out to get video evidence of wolves doing this, given how rare of a behavior it is."

You can watch the video here.

Gable said one wolf they found fishing was a yearling that probably had not yet learned the finer points of hunting on land.

"Fish likely provided much needed food for V046, a 22-kilogram at capture yearling wolf that was likely inexperienced at hunting," he wrote in a paper (attached below) for Mammalian Biology earlier this year. "Indeed, prior to the fishing period, V046 had not killed anything for 17 days and had been relying on scavenging. Northern pike and other freshwater fish that routinely spawn in small creeks in early spring can often be at peak body size and fat content in spring, and thus especially nutritious."

The biologist explained that in spring, when snow is melting away and vegetation begins to renew, moose and deer can be more difficult for wolves to catch. As a result, they'll turn to smaller prey such as beavers.

"In April–May 2017, we documented two wolves from the same pack in northern Minnesota responding to an abundant spring fish run," Gable wrote in the paper. "To our knowledge, this is the first description of wolves outside of a coastal marine environment using fish as a seasonal food source."

The researchers calculated that VO46 spent nearly half of its time on plucking fish from streams.