Sketching Wolves!

Turkeys gobbling in the distance, wolves howling right next to me– I had a fabulous morning today! A few days ago I registered for “Coffee with Wolves” at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for Saturday morning to come, so that I could go see the wolves. I usually sleep like a log, but last night I kept waking up to see if it was morning yet. Finally it was 5:30, so I leaped up and bundled up, since it was supposed to be a chilly morning. It turned out to be warmer than predicted and sunny, but still cool enough that the wolves were quite active (active enough to make a good sketching challenge).

There are four “ambassador wolves,” who are there to educate and interact with the public, and then quite a few endangered red wolves and Mexican gray wolves. The red wolves and Mexican gray wolves are not on exhibit, so that they will not become habituated to people, in case they can someday be released into the wild. They are also used for breeding to build up their populations, and this wolf center is in a network of about fifty such centers that cooperate and exchange wolves to maintain genetic diversity.

I sketched the four ambassador gray wolves (canis lupus); three of them Zephyr, Alawa, and Nikai, in one enclosure; and Atka in a separate enclosure. Atka is an arctic gray wolf (canis lupus arctos), almost 14 years old and looking great. Zephyr and Alawa are Canadian/Rocky Mountain gray wolf five-year-old littermates, and two-year-old Nikai is their brother from a subsequent litter.

My sketches are simple and mostly unfinished, since the wolves were active, requiring me to move from sketch to sketch and then back to a previous sketch when a wolf would momentarily return to a previous position. Atka was lying down most of the time, so was easier to sketch than the others, but even so he was alert and shifting position almost constantly.

(Click on an image to view it larger.)

Here’s a watercolor and ink painting I did of Alawa from a photo I took when I was last at the wolf center.