The children had great fun decorating the tree for the wolves with all kinds of goodies. Bologna, hotdogs, celery with peanut butter, cookies with peanut butter, little candies and even breakfast cereal with peanut butter. Did you know peanut butter makes an excellent glue for sticking things to Christmas trees? Multicolored spaghetti was draped as tinsel while star fruit garnished the branches. Fruit roll-ups tied as bows and red candy licorice draped all around. It was quite the colorful tree. With a little help from Santa and the Wolf Park staff, everything was set.
      We lured the wolves into their holding pen, well all but Maya and Erin who are still being harassed by Marion. John Davis carried in the treat laden tree down to the enclosure, leaving only a few items for the local birds to snatch up. Monty and Pat came in and distracted Erin and Maya, who were thankfully a little hesitant about the tree now set upright in a conveniently hollow tree stump. Monty had half of one of those beef stick summer sausages. We decided why they call them Summer sausages, in the winter they become quite hard. Maya, who has not been able to get much in the way of treats lately because of Marion, and probably would not be able to share much of the tree, got the entire summer sausage piece. Maya was happy.
      The pack was then released. Seneca, Miska, Tristan, Chetan & Marion all came bounding up the hill to see what all the commotion was, and what was this tree, this very unusual tree doing in their pen. At first they seemed a little suspicious about this strange tree. They all circled and sniffed and sniffed and then -- it did not take long for their noses to get to work and sniff out every piece of hot dog and bologna in a matter of seconds!
     Marion had to do a little bit of climbing, her expertise of course. Seneca too managed to get up to the top as well, sniffing and eating all the best bits. Well, that's the alpha perks - getting all the best bits.

Tristan finds a morsel. Hm, what's this? It's kinda strange, fruity and peanutty. I think it meets his approval.

Miska looks like he is thinking, hm, now what's left here. Hm, I don't know what this stuff is, but I like the sweet fruity taste ;-)

Marion walked off with one of the red licorice pieces to enjoy it in peace away from the tree while Tristan still looked for any tasty leftovers. Marion really liked that red ropy thing. She just laid there and savored every morsel.

     Erin finally got brave enough to check out the tree. She too found the fruit rollups were fun and tasty treats and ran about with hers until she was done with it. She thought running about with it was more fun than eating it though.
     As with all kids on Christmas, they got bored with their gifts quickly enough. Mark Woodcock, who was also getting bored, started rolling the wet mushy snow into a large snowball, one big enough to start a snowman. It never got that far. Well, this one did manage to procure a face, but that was purely by chance, really...
     The wolves seemed convinced that there was something fun going on here too and tore each one apart. Some even guarded 'their' snow and Miska was seen to actually have a play face, though briefly. Monty only took a few digital photos of Tristan pawing one apart, but Monty took lots and lots with his 'real' camera, the F5, so perhaps someday there will be a few additions to this page, or at the very least some cool prints for sale of wolves having fun with large balls of snow on wolfphotography.com :-)
 
All photography, but the background image, on this page were taken on December 16, 2000 by Monty Sloan with a Nikon Coolpix 990 digital camera. The background photo was taken by Monty in December 1998 just south of Anchorage Alaska with a Ricoh digital camera. Now if only Wolf Park would get snow like that! Indiana could use some of those mountains too ;-)