Wolf Park

This month we had the opportunity to visit Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Indiana with a group of friends. Who could turn down the opportunity to photograph wolves in person! Despite the two layers of fence separating us from the wolves (not that I'm complaining), we got some decent shots of these beautiful creatures, as well as Coyotes and Foxes they had as well!

The guided tour turned out to be quite informative as well. Wolf Park started out with just a couple wolves and since then has kept breeding and training them to trust humans so we can, in turn, better understand them. Wolves in the wild will typically stay nearly a mile away from anything they are not familiar with, so studying wolves in the wild can prove to be difficult.

Because of this, they have to familiarize the wolves with literally EVERYTHING they might encounter at Wolf Park shortly after birth. Beyond that, anything new will scare them. They learned this the hard way when they forgot to familiarize them with winter items during summer training, and so the wolves first winter they were scared of scarves and coats because they were new to them (now all winter apparel is incorporated in their training even though training might be in the summer).

And you all know the typical wolf howl from the movies? That was most likely a Coyote sound effect they used as wolves do not howl like that at all. It turns out, Coyotes are the ones that have a wider range of vocalizations in their howls. Wolves, on the other hand, have a single noted howl. Pretty cool, huh? Speaking of howls, we did get the chance to start our own howl with the Coyotes! When a big group of people start howling, it got the Coyotes howling along with us pretty quickly.

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