Courtesy David MoskowitzA wolf photographed by David Moskowitz, who tracked the canids across the Northwest and beyond.

Photographer and wildlife tracker David Moskowitz may not have danced with wolves for his 2013 book “Wolves in the Land of Salmon,” but he did see them up close as he documented the ways in which they live, hunt and communicate.

In 2013, Timber Press published the book, which is loaded with photographs from about 16 months of tracking wolves from Northern California to central British Columbia and from the Pacific coast to the Rockies. On Wednesday, Moskowitz will visit Paulina Springs Books in Sisters to present a slideshow and talk about wolves (see “If you go”).

“I’ll share some stories from my time in the field and really try to open up a window into the fascinating lives of wolves and then tie that back again into how we as humans interact with the landscape, and the parallels between our lives and theirs,” he said.

When Moskowitz speaks about wolves, he resists sound bites and black-and-white stances on the often polarizing predators.

“My agenda for writing the book was to provide something engaging and educational to help move forward a conversation … about wolves, wild lands and conservation in our society — not so much to push one direction or another. You won’t hear me up on a pulpit sermonizing about what’s right or wrong.”

Observing wolf packs gave Moskowitz a new way of looking at human society.

“The biggest insights that I had weren’t so much about wolves but … more about people,” he said.

“There are a lot of ways we research wildlife (and) we don’t necessarily use the same lens on ourselves. But when we start thinking about the parallels between what wolves do and how they interact with their neighbors and (turn) that lens back on ourselves, we can really see that a lot of the issues we struggle with in terms of managing wolves are actually in large part issues we struggle with in managing ourselves.”

Further, wolves “are an animal on the landscape just like every other animal. They have the same kind of basic needs and requirements that all wildlife has to survive, and actually … there’s a whole lot of similarities between that and our needs as people,” Moskowitz said. “We’re all just trying to feed our families and have a healthy and safe place to raise young members of our species. We all need to feed each other, and wolves have a particular way of doing that, and it has impacts on the other wildlife and the landscape that they live in, and it’s the same with humans.”

The parallels of wolves and humans can also be seen in their adaptation to the various ecosystems in which they live, Moskowitz said.

“We are both species that have a tremendous ability to adapt to local situations,” he said. “You go to the interior of the Northwest, and people and wolves both have an economy based around large mammals, around ungulates, whether that’s cattle in case of humans, or deer or elk or moose in the case of wolves. You go to the coast, and they have an economy based around fish. Humans and wolves spend a lot of time around fish-bearing streams and eat a whole lot of salmon.”

Moskowitz isn’t done following wolves. Those who attend his reading Wednesday are likely to hear about his upcoming trip, a monthlong hike and mountain bike ride tracing the route of wolf OR-7, which separated from the Imnaha pack in 2011 and made its way from Northeast Oregon into California. Though Moskowitz didn’t track OR-7 for his book project, he did field work in the home range of the Imnaha pack.

The goal of the upcoming trip is to get a firsthand sense of what the world is like for a contemporary wolf in the modern Pacific Northwest, Moskowitz said.

He and a handful of others depart a few days after the presentation.

“We’re going to be retracing the dispersal route of that wolf, so I’ll probably share a little bit about that, and that upcoming expedition,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com