Park rangers at Algonquin howl into the night air to connect with a wolf pack in the park....then get the public involved in the wild conversation.
Photograph by: Handout photo , Ontario Parks
He’s armed only with his voice.
He plants his feet, turns his face to the star-filled sky, cups his hands around his mouth and let’s out a blood-curdling howl. He waits in silence.
About 15 seconds later a dozen adult wolves answer his call with their own chilling howls. Plus, there are the sharp, cute chirps from the three-month-old wolf cubs staying up late with their parents.
Stronks marks the spot on his topographical map. The next night he’ll bring 1,600 city folk out into this pitch blackness with a billion stars above, so they too can experience the thrill of wolves howling in the wilderness.
Algonquin’s wolves have been talking to humans for nearly 50 years. Hundreds of thousands of visitors have ventured each August into the 1.8 million-acre wilderness park in Northern Ontario, 300 kilometres north of Toronto, to exchange howls with the park’s estimated 350 wolves.
Each Thursday night until Labour Day, people staying in the park’s eight different camp grounds, plus wolf enthusiasts who drive hundreds of kilometres just for the event, gather at the park’s outdoor amphitheater to hear about wolves from Algonquin Park naturalists, or Stronks, the park’s chief naturalist.
The big bad wolf that ate your grandma in one big gulp is not part of the story. Algonquin’s wolf howl was started in 1963 when the Ontario Government decided that wolves in the wilderness were an asset and not vermin with a bounty on their head.
To ban wolf hunting and trapping in the huge park and later in counties adjacent to the park, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources had to persuade the public that wolves are not the devil incarnate. Plus, they needed a survey to estimate how many wolves live in the park. The public wolf howls – preceded by wolf education lectures – helped both campaigns.
Wolves today are the Prince Charmings among Ontario’s wilderness fauna.
It’s mostly Eastern Wolves – also known as Eastern Canadian Red Wolves – that dominate Algonquin today, but it used to be the kingdom of the bigger Gray Wolf. But the anti-wolf campaigns in the first half of the last century eventually drove the Gray Wolves further north. That in turn persuaded white tail deer to emigrate from the north U.S. into Algonquin and region because their fiercest predator had left the neighbourhood.
The smaller Red Wolf then followed the deer north from the U.S. and took over Algonquin. The different life styles of different breads of wolves are explained by Stronk and other park naturalists at the amphitheatre’s wolf seminars.
Algonquin’s wolves caused a NORAD security alert one August.
Satellites notified military staff in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain - where NORAD monitors all air traffic entering North America from the north watching for unwelcomed missiles or bombers – that a slow moving unidentified flying object was moving across Northern Ontario towards Michigan.
Security personnel stared at their computer screens wondering what on earth they were looking at. They called Canadian Defense headquarters in Ottawa. Everyone breathed easier when they learned it was a cavalcade of 500 cars moving bumper-to-bumper through Algonquin Park on a wolf howl.
Not all wolf howls are successful. The pack sometimes moves on from its gather spot the night before.
This year offers an added bonus to the wolf howls. The Perseids meteor shower is at its peak this year in mid August.
More information about the wolf howl is available at www.algonquinpark.on.ca or at 613-637-2828.
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