MATTHEW LANE
KINGSPORT – Time to say hello to Bodaway, Yonah and Winema – Bays Mountain Park’s newest wolf pups.
Late last Friday, park officials arrived in town with three gray wolf pups, the newest addition to the park’s wolf habitat. The pups are tan and in keeping with tradition at the park are named after Native American words – the female is “Winema” (Bodoc for woman chief), and the males are “Bodaway” (Arapaho for fire maker) and “Yonah” (Cherokee for bear).
This third generation of wolves is being added to the habitat to better strengthen and maintain pack cohesion.
Park Naturalist Rhonda Goins traveled to the Minnesota Wildlife Connection last week to pick up the wolves and arrived back in town last Friday evening. She said the trip was good, but a little stressful for the pups.
“There was road construction on every single interstate and we had to stop every two to three hours to feed them and let them use the bathroom,” Goins said. “The feeding is hard because we just pulled them from their mother that morning and we had to ween them on the road. That’s why they’re so skittish.”
After about three or four days, Goins said the pups are now eating like regular wolves.
“They’re about halfway there. When someone new comes in (to the habitat), they’re skittish again. They’re very inquisitive little things.”
Bays Mountain Park’s wolf program first began in 1992 with the arrival of three 6-month-old pups. Additional wolves were added in 1995, 2004 and 2007. For the second year in a row, Bays Mountain Park has expanded its wolf population by adding a third generation of gray wolves to the habitat.
Ideally, the park likes to keep around 10 wolves in its habitat at any given time, a good mix of older and younger pups in order to maintain a healthy pack dynamic.
Two years ago the park’s wolf habitat lost all three of its elder wolves and when the park attempted to replenish its numbers, the usual source experienced two years of failed breeding seasons. As a result, the park went with another wolf breeder last year — the Minnesota Wildlife Connection — and secured four new pups – two males (Unalii and Ahuli) and two females (Takoda and Ela).
Now, with these three new pups, the wolf pack is back up to full strength.
“(The older wolves) can smell them and we let the puppies do normal things and if they want to see something, they have to climb up on one of the stumps. They have to figure that out themselves,” Goins said. “And they’ve howled one or two times on the way home, but they’re still stressed and have not really started howling.”
As with previous additions to the habitat, the new pups are in the beginning stages of the socialization process where park staff and volunteers will stay with the pups 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the next three months to acclimate them to humans.
At the end of the process, probably in mid-August, the park will introduce the pups into the main pack.
“It’ll be on a Sunday morning when no one is here. It’ll be less stressful for them,” Goins said.
Park staff raised more than $8,200 to purchase the wolves. The wolves themselves, including vet care, cost $1,600 with the additional money going towards covering the trip to Minnesota and park preparations.
Two months ago, Goins and the Bays Mountain Park Association launched a fundraising drive to purchase a permanent structure to be used in support of the wolves, a place where volunteers would spend the night during the socialization process.
The fundraiser fell short of its goal and this year the association is leasing a camper for the summer, in addition to some volunteers pitching tents near the wolf habitat.
“The commission wants to build a permanent structure,” Goins said. “We rented a camper for this time and we’ll have five more years until we do it again. By then we hope to have a wolf center for an office, with bunks and bathrooms.”