FOR A HOWLING GOOD TIME . . .
There’s nothing like Algonquin Park’s good ol’ wolf howl, which is part of the Winter in the Wild Festival,
ALGONQUIN PROVINCIAL PARK— If my kids have a formative memory of Family Day, it will be standing in the dark in Ontario’s most famous park, listening to naturalists howl like wolves and then holding their breaths to wait for the wolves to howl back.
They didn’t, but the anticipation is half the fun, right? Besides, Hazel is 8 and Charlie is 4 and consumed by the irrational fear that wolves might eat them.
That’s not likely with dozens of people lining a snowy path near the Mew Lake Campground for one of Algonquin Provincial Park’s famous public wolf howls.
“Most people that visit don’t see or hear a wolf,” admitted park naturalist David LeGros in a fireside talk before the howling expedition. “Wolves work co-operatively to hunt and prey on deer, moose and beavers. They don’t eat people, by the way.”
The occasion was the 6th annual Winter in the Wild festival. Free activities were spaced out along the Hwy. 60 corridor on the Saturday of Family Day weekend, culminating in the wolf howl.
The park has long hosted late-summer howls, giving a talk at the Outdoor Theatre and then leading a parade of cars to a highway spot where a wolf pack was recently heard.
February’s howl is on foot. We chatted by the fire, learning how wolves were considered “public enemy No. 1” until the late 1950s, when a researcher started dragging around a record player and recorded howl to provoke a response. Park staff eventually figured out it was easier to mimic a howl.
More than130 people unexpectedly showed up for the first “wolf hunt” in 1963 and a tradition was born. Almost 200,000 people have joined wolf howls since then. Each summer howl attracts up to 600 cars loaded with people.
“Wolves will howl to communicate with their family or their pack,” LeGros said. “We usually have a 70-percent success rate with our howls.”
He led us in silence in the dark to an airfield and then howled a bunch of times, with help from colleague Tania Jermol, but not us, like I expected. We didn’t hear any replies, putting us on the 30-per-cent side of the success/failure ratio, although LeGros was sure he heard one faint response.
“It’s still pretty exciting. It’s still pretty cool. It’s still a pretty special experience.” It is all of those things. Equally fun but much less glamorous is the Guided Winter Bird Walk that Charlie and I did earlier that day on the Spruce Bog Boardwalk Trail. We trekked 1.3 kilometres down snowy paths in unseasonably warm weather and saw “Algonquin specialties,” such as the grey jay and boreal chickadee.
The jay made headlines last year when the Royal Canadian Geographical Society declared it should be Canada’s national bird since it is friendly, smart and hardy like the rest of us. The feds don’t yet seem interested in making it official.
The jay — better known as the whisky jack for its indigenous name Wisakedjak — lives year-round in our woods, hides food for the winter and even breeds in winter.
National bird or not, these social birds will land on human hands to eat and Algonquin hopes more people will come to the park just for a glimpse of them.
Several dozen of us, everyone from hardcore birders to young families, joined park naturalist Lev Frid for the bird hike. Friends of Algonquin Park handed out loaner binoculars.
The grey jays kept their distance, but a black-capped chickadee landed in my hand to eat bird seed. Frid called them “aggressive little birds” that form winter flocks and seem to help each other but actually engage in “inner civil war.”
I now call them my Family Day friends. Jennifer Bain was hosted by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership. They did not review or approve this story.