Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - Over the past few years there have been increasing reports of wolves preying on black bears. There have been no reports of this on Cortes Island, and a lot of residents first heard about it at the 2024 Wildlife Coexistence Gathering, at Linnaea Farm.Todd Windle of Wild About Wolves explained that the evidences of wolves preying upon bears in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve go back to the reappearance of wolf population in the area. “We were finding  bear claws in scat. So that was like, ‘well, maybe they're just scavenging in them, or maybe they're finding a bear that got hit by a car,’” he explained.“Then we started accumulating observations of wolves hunting bears. Bob Hansen actually captured a whole scene of two wolves killing a bear, ripping it apart and eating it. Dennis Hetu has documented multiple bear kills by wolves. So we did the analysis and sat down over MS Teams with a professor from UC Davis, our monitoring ecologist.”“He went through all the results, and we had a list of questions beforehand.” The professor did not report any evidence of bear meat in their diet.“We said, ‘This doesn't make sense. We were expecting to find bear remains.  We're actually hoping to finally quantify how much bear meat is in their diet, but there's no bears here. Why do you think that might be?’” “And he said, ‘Oh, I just thought that was an error. I thought it was cross contamination that the wolves and the bears were preying on the same carcasses or something on the beach. So I took all the bear and I threw it out. (Woman laughs)  Let me rerun the data and I'll get back to you.’”  “So he reran the data, and bears are actually the number four item in the wolf diet, at least currently. So, there's four species that make up 60%, 64% or 65% of a wolf's diet. Raccoon is still number one, then black tailed deer, river otters, and black bears.”