Monty's Trip to Great Britain

     Yes, of course there are more wolf photos - lots and lots of wolf photos....
      The UK Wolf Conservation Trust, www.ukwolf.org has a total of 7 wolves. A pack of 5, four females and one male, and a pair. It is not a breeding facility though they have had litters in the past, it is currently just for education and the promotion of conservation. Though the UK has not had wild wolves for centuries, captive wolves have been common in zoos for decades. However I found it interesting that most zoos have North American wolves. European wolves, Canis lupus lupus, is relatively rare in the UK captive populations and the UKWCT is the first facility in the UK to ever even have a litter.
     All the wolves here are hand raised and the wolves in the pack are quite handleable. This is fortunately since due to all the legal restrictions pertaining to having such a facility in the UK, they can not be open to the general public. However, they can have organized programs off property with the animals. So, what they do is load up the pack in a specially converted vehicle and take them down the road a bit for a walk in the woods.

On my second day at the Trust, that is exactly what we did. There was an adventure tour. You know, the kind where you can sign up to fall out of an airplane, or walk in the woods with a pack of wolves, that kind of thing. Anyway, that got to be the first experience I have had with European wolves.

Actually, the pack consists of just three European wolves and two North American wolves, but I found I preferred the Europeans. They are not all that much smaller than our wolves, and in fact Marion is quite a bit smaller than these animals. However overall European wolves are a bit shorter and stockier than our wolves, and I would say generally more intense. They reminded me a lot of Marion in some respects in terms of their intensity, but on top of that they were much more solidly built. Kind of like the pitbulls of the wolf world (that's a compliment, not a criticism -- I love up-front wolves with attitude :-)

Anyway, here are just a few of the hundreds of photos I took on the walk. I of course will not bore you with all the photos with people in them...
The wolves favorite place, and mine too for photos, was this pond, about the size of the pond in our wolf enclosure, which everybody walked around. Well, the people walked around, the wolves walked in the pond. I got some fun photos of them playing with sticks and splashing about. I of course digitally 'erased' the leashes they were on. The wolves are not free here, but on chain leashes for obvious reasons - this is a public park without any fences! The wolves of course do not mind being out on a leash in the least - just like our Wolf Park wolves, going out on a walk with their human friends is a fun thing they look forward to just like your dog at home.

After the walk, which lasted a couple hours, the wolves were walked back to the vehicle, loaded up and taken back to the Trust. The wolves go out like this at least once a week, sometimes more and it's not that their enclosure is small and they need the exercise, not at all - their enclosure is quite spacious covering several acres. However any outing is fun for a wolf so all this is quite nice for them.

When we got back, I got the opportunity to photograph the wolves in a much nicer setting. Actually, the woods would have been nice except for all the people and the leashes and, well, the fact that woods are really dark for photos even when the leaves are off the trees... However, the Trust has this nice photo pen. It is not very large, but consists of high mounds of grass covered earth. Absolutely beautiful for taking photos. I took lots of photos in the diminishing light. I even got a nice one of the setting sun through the trees in the distance. The European wolves really obliged, running about, wrestling, howling and having a great time. A near perfect setup for photos, if only it had not been so late in the day. I ended up just setting my D1x Digital camera to and ISO of 800 which resulted in grainy photos, but as it was, many were blurry from both camera shake, even with a monopod, and the wolves running about... However, it was a great day all the same.

Day 4