Hey, I Know that Talking Head!
One of the nice things about having some contact with popular media again is that every once in a while I recognize someone on a program. This evening I was pleasantly surprised to see Professor Jane Packard take a turn as the wolf behavior expert on an episode of “Hunter and Hunted”:
Dr. Packard is on the faculty of the Wildlife and Fisheries Department at Texas A&M University. She was one of Diane’s dissertation committee members, and for a while both Diane and I had some study space in her lab. We took her animal behavior course during our resident year at TAMU.
Anybody who spent any amount of time there would realize that Prof. Packard was very serious about studying wolf behavior. She has collaborated for years with David Mech on observational studies of wild and captive wolves, writing the chapter on wolf behavior in the Mech and Boitani edited volume on wolves.
In the epsiode, Dr. Packard was asked to comment on various bits of evidence concerning the death of a man who had hiked out into the woods. There were two sets of wolf tracks intersecting with his. Complicating things, there were also apparent bear tracks in the area, so it was unclear as to whether the wolves killed the hiker and had a bear interrupt their feeding or vice versa, though the remains clearly displayed signs of a bear having had at them, and did not clearly indicate that a wolf had had a part.
