Wolves 2000 - Wolf Park

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Every year, some extremely nice people descend on Wolf Park, offering that most valuable of resources — their time. Volunteers visit for as little as a few hours a week to every day; practicums spend a month; and interns, the Park’s most important resource, generously donate three months of their time. In return, the Park provides them all with an unparalleled opportunity for both research and fun, as they interact with the Park wolves, give tours, do landscaping and repair, exhaust the Park library and talk with the staff. ! ""! # Paul Hebert came to us from Silicon Valley for a very short practicum in early March, bringing with him computer parts, memory, monitors, and a great talent for web editing. He helped Monty set up the Park’s new online gift shop and even helped do some of the less glamorous chores around the Park. Christine Casby did an internship from January to the end of March. She graduated from Jefferson College in 1979 and is a former chemical lab technician in the nuclear industry. She enjoys reading, listening to music, writing, and is interested in cultures of all nations, especially North and South American Indian origins. She also makes crafts of all sorts. She was of inestimable value as our sole intern for almost the whole end of March! Regen Ton graduated in 1997 from DePauw University. She came for the breeding season internship in January and February. She has studied in the Australian rainforest and observed wolves in Vermillion Community College in Ely, Minnesota. Her hobbies include walking, hiking, and photography. Emilienne Parente, from Rio de Janiero, Brazil, did a breeding season internship in January and February. Her hobbies include sports, such as soccer, swimming, and kickboxing. She is studying veterinary medicine at Universidade Estacio De Sa’. Thanks also to Joanna Greene, Marla Borth, and Lisa Cavanaugh, who have been mentioned in previous newsletters but deserve mention again — and to Andrew and Mary Petroski, who should have been mentioned in a previous newsletter for being the nice volunteer people that they are. Special thanks to all the volunteers (Megan, Jenny….) who persist in showing up for Saturday cleanup, rain or shine. We couldn’t keep this place running without you! Jerry Cook from Midwest Trenching (Brookston, IN), volunteered his time to do construction work in the bison pasture. 4 Photo by Dave Hummel Wolf Park News Spring 2000 ()( The persons named below have been kind enough to donate something to WOLF PARK — be it time, computer parts, wolf treats, or, yes, money. We thank them for their efforts and appreciate all that they have given us. Myrta Baldini Ronald and Jackie Beck Marla Borth Bartlett Tree Service Malinda Carlson Martina Contreras Kevin Cote Phil DePoy Harriet Doolittle Crystal Eilenberg Bryon Elliott Nancy Engstrom Laurel Galaszewski Helene Grimaud Danielle Hamm Donna Hays Marie Herring Sherry Hinshaw Harold Hodges Bill Karn Marie Kirkus Jason Koempel Mary Kozalak Tim & Karen Kunkelman Jacoba Line Patricia Manning Bob & Gail McGaughey Theresa Miller Brook Miller $% "&' The following community-minded businesses match your contribution, making your gift worth two or three times as much. To find out if your company matches donations, see your personnel office. American Express Arthur Anderson & Co. Atlantic Richfield AT&T Automatic Data Processing Beatrice Foods Caterpillar, Inc. The Chubb Group, Inc. Cigna Citicorp Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Connecticut General Ins. Co. The Continental Group CPC International Cummins Engine Fdn. Deluxe Check Printers, Inc. Digital Equipment Corp. Emhard Corp. Equitable Life Assurance Federal Mogul Fireman's Fund Ins. Co. General Cinema Corp. General Electric Co. B.F. Goodrich Co. Cas & Lorrie Morris Dave Opstad Toni Parker Carol Perkins Nick Prentoff Phyllis Price Ellen Reintjes Patti Reynolds Dr. Jane Richardson Rita Rozhon Joseph & Bette Rubinstein W.J. & Gaile Russ Kai & Junko Sato Madeleine Savary Stanley A. Sawyer Ruth Schneider Heather Small Tim Smiar Douglas Smith Ms Richie Tankersley Joseph Urbano Lisa Warner Bob Weiss Froehlich Werner Bill Weston Les & Wynn Wickliff Joy Witkowski Jacquelyn Zehring Ellen Zirkelbach Special thanks to Paul Hebert for all his help and for his generous donations of monitors, hard drives, and memory — and thanks also to Bob Fritz, for Peak Glow Coat, and Pierre Madur, for Becozym. John A. Hartford Fdn. IBM IDS Corp. IKON Indiana Bell Interlake J & J Snack Foods Corp. Johnson Controls K-Mart McDonald's Corp. McGraw-Edison Fdn. McGraw-Hill Mobil Oil Corp. National Starch and Chemical Northwest Industries Fdn. Norton Co. J.C. Penney, Inc. Pepsi-Cola Bottling, Inc. PPG Industries Quaker Oats Co. Radio Shack/Tandy Corp. Charles Schwab Smith Barney Square D Co.
(Continued from page 1) The Wolfwood Ranch wolves are larger and fluffier than Wolf Park wolves. Though big and imposing, they have an endearing habit of greeting face to face. Luckily for O.J., we had no room in the car to steal them. About an hour out of Duluth, Holly put on a Celtic music CD. Monty passed me a piece of bubble wrap to play with and I discovered that Irish jigs can be enhanced by waving bubble wrap and popping the bubbles in time to the music. When I gave the wrap back to Monty he tried it too and rubbed it against itself for a sort of washboard band effect. Eat your heart out, RiverDance! There was a big storm passing through at the time but we saw mostly rain and slushy snow. Some people could not get to the conference until Friday because air traffic could not land due to fog. In fact one of the speakers at the opening address welcomed us to “Foggy Seattle.” Until Saturday the weather was in the thirties and quite foggy. This was supposed to be February. It was also supposed to be Minnesota. The winter coats stayed in the car trunk. Once we arrived at the hotel and dumped personal belongings, we took the rest of the stuff over to the convention center and marked our territory, er, table. The banner was hung, the TV and VCR set up, the literature deployed and we were lucky enough to be in very close to a large pillar which served as added display space for some of our laminated photos. We kept running into familiar people and sometimes putting faces to those who had been formerly known only by e-mail. One of the things we did was collect taped birthday greetings to Dr. Klinghammer from various researchers, former interns, volunteers and members. Monty attended sessions with his laptop, madly typing in notes to e-mail to friends. We often tried to attend different sessions because, to schedule as many speakers as possible, such symposia usually have concurrent sessions with very short breaks in between speakers. A lot of the audience was lined up along the back wall and there was a tendency for the aisle chairs to fill up first. That way more people were closer to the door when it was time to dash to the next talk. Here is an excerpt from Monty’s email: “In the morning was a plenary session (everybody went to those) but in the afternoon there were 5 concurrent sessions, so you could only see 1/5 of the talks. Sigh. “They have an auction [as a fund raiser] with Jesse Ventura's book “No time to Bleed” [being auctioned off] and Dave Mech was talking about its title. He said he could write a book about this conference and call it “No Time to Pee”. No time was allotted between 20 minute sessions that each speaker had, yes only 20 minutes to give their talk and with 4 to 5 consecutive talks.... Lots of running about, but no time to pee ;-)” The IWC was showing various films and videos. This included The Return of the Wolf from National Geographic. It was primarily footage of the Druid Pack in Yellowstone. This film was shot by Bob Landis and narrated by Doug Smith. It will be shown as a National Geographic special in the autumn of 2000. It was probably the best film on wolves I have ever seen. Cuts from Landis’ footage were also analyzed by Daniel McNulty for his presentation. He found that Staff member Jessica Willard at Wolf Park’s Duluth conference table. elk have displays which discourage predators. When wolves come close, the elk engage in a showy elevated trot, neck upright and face horizontal or slightly above horizontal. The motor pattern is the same one elk use to display at each other and is also an indicator of a level of energy and stamina that make them too hard for wolves to catch. (I was pleased to have another instance of one motor pattern being used in different contexts.) These displays benefit both elk and wolves in that it saves them both the energy costs of long chases. We also got to see the wolf movie – called WOLVES, oddly enough – that has been in IMAX theaters. It is a nice movie and got lots of compliments, but compared to Bob Landis’ it was just “Wolves Lite”. I found the IMAX format annoying – at least for this particular movie. IMAX is wonderful for blurry peripheries and vertigo, but loses its effect on more earthbound subjects. The lines in the screen were distracting – I kept noticing them and for a split second trying to The Yellowstone male (#46) at WSC. figure out why the sky had cracks or power lines in wilderness area. But the wolves were pretty and overall the movie was nice. I might have enjoyed the format more if I had not been in the front row. We also got to see some footage by Christoph Promberger from Romania. He and his crew tracked wolves that live around the city of Timmisch. The star of the video was an alpha female they named Timmisch after the city. There was an area just outside the city where farmers grazed sheep. Timmisch and her pack caught sheep occasionally, but if sheep were absent or well guarded the wolves foraged in the city dump. Much of their activity was at night but thanks to night scopes Christoph’s video showed them plainly. They scrounged food and hunted rats and cats who were also scavenging in the dump. Christoph could probably make a living doing comedy were he not so attached to research. Not only did he do a very entertaining job of narration, he got some inadvertently comical footage of Timmisch making her way out of the city after a profitable night at the dump. Her stomach was as round and tight as if she had swallowed a whole watermelon; she had plenty of food to take back to her Photo by Monty Sloan pups. She trotted calmly down the streets. Though she avoided humans, she looked as if they were no more alarming to her than the occasional car or train. When they blocked her route she just waited for them to pass. There were some scenes reminding me of Mack Sennet sight gags where Timmisch and a human would cross the same road several yards apart. When this happened we viewers burst out laughing. All that several Romanians would have had to do to see a real wolf was look up or slightly to the side, but they went on, oblivious to the wolf and a lot of their other surroundings too, I’d guess. Fred Harrington was one of those who arrived late due to weather, and did his talk right after mine in another room. Here is Monty’s description: “Finally, Fred Harrington gave his talk, ‘Proximate and ultimate causation in wolf behavior.’ He used some excerpts from R.D. Lawrence’s In Praise of Wolves and a paper by Dave Mech on howling to exemplify the general misunderstanding and confusion in describing behavior and generally mixing up proximate and ultimate causation when describing behavior. He used this technique and really made howling behavior make sense.” My talk went okay, though I had one of those Mr. Murphy moments when I found the order of my slides did not completely follow that of the talk. Also I didn’t have enough time (practically nobody did) but, bless his heart, Tim Cook, who moderated that session, let me use my question/answer time to gallop through the last slides. I got compliments afterward, and a number of people visited our table to be “gosh-wowed” by the work Jess had done on the CD Ethogram. On Sunday, after overnighting again at O.J.’s and spending more time with the arctics, we went on to the Wildlife Science Center. We were shown around Photo by Monty Sloan by John Weller, an outreach biologist there. He gave us a brief history of the facility, including how, when the original researchers were done with the wolves, Peggy Callahan, now WSC’s director, refused to have the wolves euthanized and used her own savings to enlarge and improve the enclosures. They have some lovely animals and some have interesting stories. There is a gorgeous three legged male wolf from Yellowstone, who lost his leg to a trap and was taken into captivity. There was also a depredating wolf from the Ely, MN area. She lost part of a hind paw to a leg hold trap and after that took to visiting musher Will Steger’s dog yard and eating his sled dogs. Because of her notoriety she was put on display when caught instead of being euthanized. We tore ourselves away a little after noon and started the long drive back to Battle Ground. This time Jess rode with her significant other, Tim, in his car, leaving us some more elbow room. We caravanned and carried two way radios, since Tim’s car sometimes does not want to work. There were no incidents — our brains were beginning to glaze over with all the information. It was around midnight when we got into Battle Ground, road buzzed but happy. It was good to hear “our” wolves howling again! Wolf Park News Spring 2000 5
Page 1 and 2: The Quarterly Newsletter of The No
Page 3: y Pat Goodmann I have some sad news
Page 7 and 8: $ - # AURORA continues to soak up

Wolves 2000 - Wolf Park

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?