The Agile Fox Friday Foto – 11.02.2012

After a year and a half of including a ‘pic of the week’ at the end of my weekly training summary, I’ve decided to let it stand as a post of its own. I’m also implementing a rule that the Friday Foto needs to have been taken sometime in the last week. No recycling. I am doing this to keep me engaged in building my photography skills, and to make me work harder to get fresh shots. Click here to see my previous Friday Foto posts.

The arctic wolf is a subspecies of the gray wolf. The only subspecies that is not threatened, due to the extreme conditions of their habitat which keeps them isolated from man’s activities. They live in darkness for five months out of the year and can go weeks without food. Relying more on stamina than speed to take down prey, they cover territories of up to 1,000 square miles. An adult wolf has 42 teeth, and can put down 20 pounds of meat in one meal. They consume all of their prey, including the bones.

We lucked out during our visit to the zoo on Saturday and got to the wolf display right as the caretaker was entering the pen with two huge bones (femur?) in a five gallon bucket. She placed a bone on a wooden platform and moved away. The female wolf approached, and after checking the surroundings, made off with it in her jaws. The male did likewise, and they both carried them around the pen for several minutes before finding different places to stash and cover them up. It was a fascinating look at their wild and careful behavior, especially contrasted with our little corgi that practically does backflips when you come into the room with a dog biscuit.

I love how this shot turned out. The lighting, the eyes, and huge bone are all awesome. What is really cool, though – is that I was able to take this straight through the fencing that was between us (it was 5-6 feet in front of me, and the wolf was probably 40 feet). Using a long lens at a wide aperture allowed me to compress the depth of field and make the fencing blur so much that it just disappears.