Nova Scotia army reserves behind fake letter of released wolf pack

The source of a mysterious fake letter warning people about grey wolves wandering in Nova Scotia has been found — and it's the Canadian military.

The letter appeared in a number of mailboxes, and it looked like an official note from the Department of Lands and Forestry. It claimed that eight grey wolves had been reintroduced to Kings County in August.

But earlier this week the department said the letter was fake.

It turns out the letter was actually created by a reserve army unit at Camp Aldershot in Kentville, N.S.

"It definitely wasn't for public consumption," said Lt. Lance Wade, a public affairs officer with an army reserve unit in Halifax. "It was purely for training purposes."

Wade said he does not know why the unit chose wolves as a topic in their training.

"It potentially seemed quite innocuous at the time, but anyway, seems to have grown some legs," he said.

The army deeply regrets any worry it caused Nova Scotians, Wade said, and the inconvenience to Lands and Forestry staff.

Bob Petrie, director of wildlife with the department, has said the fake letter did indeed become a bit of a headache. His department started getting calls about it, leading them to issue a warning on Twitter last Wednesday.

"It hasn't been a terribly big deal, but we have spent some time dealing with it when we could have been dealing with, well, actual, real issues," he told CBC's Information Morning.

As far as he knows, Wade said he's never heard of anything like this happening in the province before.

An internal investigation is now underway to figure out how the letter was released, and make sure incidents like this don't happen again.