shadow – Jan 26, 2004 12:00 AM

Curator's note: Often Vermilion Community College volunteers assist the wolf care staff with day-to-day duties. During the Saturday feeding programs, students help open remote gates and hold off wolves so wolf care staff can wheel in food without the wolves in the pen. For whatever reason, wolves pick and choose which students they accept outside the enclosure. They can even change their minds, once students spend some time in the program. This appears to have happened to Shadow. Student Omar Spandel has been a regular volunteer for the center helping with a variety of projects including interpretive programs in the exhibit, helping with roadkill, checking the perimeter fence for trees over the fence or snow damage and operating remote gates to move wolves between holding pens. Today, Omar posted the following log: "Today, Shadow seemed very apprehensive with me. I approached the fence this afternoon and he growled a bit. I walked the perimeter fence; all was fine until the end of the trail where the fence gets close to the trail. He growled quite intensely, and seemed pretty agitated, so I backed off and kept walking down the trail. During the feeding program, Wolf care staff member, Nancy Jo Tubbs approached the wolves first. Shadow stayed back and just stared at me. He cruised the fence once and then just watched me, so I didn't approach. I don't know what's up or what I did to bother him. We decided it was best for Nancy Jo to do the gates."