Paul and I spent the night at Sue's house. Sue is one of the Animal Ark Volunteers and she has been working with the wolves for years. Sue also has two dogs which are really fun. Whisper, a wild born dog she took in years ago and Otter, who is a 90 pound puppy :-)

At Animal Ark I was given a list of animals that I needed to photograph. Basically, I'm their staff photographer. Of course I only come out one a year for a couple of days, but that is usually enough to get everybody. This year I had a bunch of new animals to photograph and yesterday I got a good start with the white tiger and one of the Arctic wolves, but I had many more.

Starting early in the morning, well, early for me - about 9:30 or so, we started with an ex-pet bobcat. Very friendly, but we stayed outside the pen. Micah is his name. Lots of purring and rubbing on the fence did not make for good photos so one of the keepers put some treats on one of his logs and I was able to get some photos. He then went over to his 'nest' box and began cleaning his paws. I was able to get some great photos of that. Of course the background was not all that great with a cat in a box....

I then photographed their two new Red Foxes, both males, one red and one black. Unfortunately, I did not get any digital photographs of them, only 'real' ones.

Krystal was next. She's a tiny little Kestrel. To get her to pose she was handled on a glove and given a mouse to eat. She kept getting mouse guts on her beak and needed to be cleaned. I got some really gross 'real' photos of her and mouse intestines, but you are spared here for I only got pretty pictures with the digital camera :-)

Raven, was next. He is from Wolf Park (he's Apollo's litter brother) who nearly six years old, acted more like he was six months old. The Arctics were better behaved than Raven was! He was rowdy enough that I decided to just take in my more durable 'real' camera so I do not have any digital pix for this site. I guess You will have to check out www.animalark.org to see Raven pictures.

We then had a real treat. Mace Loftus, who lives just up the road, came by with a couple of his wolves. He has trained wolves for movie and photo work and brought an arctic male, Axel & Atalla, a gray female. We loaded up the two Arctic pups and then went out to take fun photos. With four wolves, two quite young, photo opportunities were limited, but all and all the outing was quite a lot of fun. At one point we heard some voices. We looked down the hill we hiked up and there were two people on horseback at the bottom of the hill. People on horses are fine, but they also had two hounds looking dogs and a boarder collie. We quickly headed up the hill with the wolves in the fear that the dogs might run up the hill to investigate the wolves. We were not very close at all, but all and all we quickly moved up the hill with the wolves all the same. It was quite beautiful up there and I'm hoping some of my 'real' photos come out well. As for digital, all I managed were a few scenic photos and a few fun pix of people with the wolves.