By CHASE PUTRICH Staff Reporter
Full of frolicsome wolf pups, foxes, coyotes and more on the edge of Battleground, Indiana, sits the natural and educational Wolf Park.
The wildlife park features 12 wolves, some young and others fully grown, but almost all bred and raised inside the park.
Attendees are welcome to visit during the day between 1 and 4 p.m. for guided tours of the park usually lasting between 45 minutes to an hour.
But the best time to see the wolves at their most active would be at one of the park’s “Howl Nights,” according to one Dariyenn Derooy, a head intern.
“There’s actually a strange word that we refer that to,” Derooy said of the wolf wake cycle. “It’s crepuscular. So you have diurnal, which is awake during the day, nocturnal at night, and crepuscular is during dusk and dawn.”
Howl Nights are Fridays and Saturdays throughout the summer and well into the fall. During each event, a crowd gathers in the bleachers next to one of the park’s many enclosures. Monty Sloan, the park’s photographer and one of many wolf handlers, describes personal stories and details on the lives of the wolves.
Throughout the event the crowd is instructed to howl in unison, which encourages the wolves to howl along because an unfamiliar howl incites wolves to howl back, according to Sloan. Many, if not all, of the park’s trainers, handlers and interns attend each night to help howl along with the crowd and answer questions.
Being a nonprofit park, every cent the park earns goes directly to the betterment of the animals that reside there, workers said. That includes ticket sales, souvenir sales and donations.
The park is often donated food from local farms or restaurants, but is more often sent road kill deer, with the storage unit containing the deer coining the name “Deer Mountain,” according to one of the interns responsible for the preparation of the food.
In the past, money has gone toward enclosure upgrades for the wolves and, more recently, the construction of an animal care center, which allows for dental checkups and basic surgery procedures to be done within the park rather than taking the animals off site. That allows the animals to remain comfortably at home, according to Kimber Hendrix, the fox curator.
“We’re actually raising money to make a new enclosure for the gray foxes, a taller one so we can research more of their natural behaviors of climbing up and down trees, because in the enclosure we have now we have limited height,” Derooy said. “The gray foxes are arboreal, they live in trees, so we’re trying to build a new enclosure to facilitate that and hopefully be able to research a little more about them.”
After a Howl Night, visitors are welcome to walk through most of the park to view the various foxes, coyotes and bison as well as the other wolves that can be heard howling from afar. Additionally, a fox specialist delivers an informational talk inside the red fox enclosure.
These trainers spend every day handling, feeding, medicating and training the foxes, often sleeping inside the enclosures to strengthen the bond between them. The foxes, having both been rescued from euthanasia, are high-spirited in the evening, especially with a trainer coaxing them with treats.