Yesterday I went to Beenham in Berkshire to meet with 8 wolves who reside there at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust. Thinking up features for our Halloween special on The Hub, I was initially going to go on some kind of scary walk in Oxfordshire and make field recordings along the way. There are certainly plenty of places with ghoulish names like ‘Grimm’s Ditch’ or ‘Devil’s Copse’ from which to take my pick of spooky-name walk routes, but I wasn’t sure how the end result would turn out and whether or not it would make an intriguing radio feature. So I shelved that idea and then remembered that when Mark and I were out walking in Beenham some weekends ago, we heard the magnificent sound of wolf howls emanating from the lands of the conservation trust. Certain that this would provide a suitably Halloween-esque soundscape for radio, I sought out their website and was amazed to find that they actually host events focussed specifically around the sounds that wolves make, entitled ‘howl nights.’

As you can imagine, I was deeply excited about the prospect of an evening focussed around listening to wolves and learning of their ways, but what I wasn’t expecting was either how moving I would find the experience, or how much I would learn from it.

After only a few moments of talking to Toni Shelbourne who is the Education Officer behind the trust’s wide portfolio of study and conservation projects, I realised that having set the feature up as a primarily Halloween-esque endeavour, I was guilty of buying into the very myths surrounding wolves that the trust are working so hard to dispel. This was humbling and meant that I spent much of last night figuring out how to rework the feature, so that it would be more about contradicting the popular perception of Wolves as terrifying savages and less like American-Werewolf-in-London (for radio.)

The wolves at the trust are very effective ambassadors for their species; I think even the most canine-afeared individual would find it hard not to be won over in some way by watching the way they behave in their small packs and with their handlers. All 8 wolves have been acquired from a very young age (or born in the trust) so are very well socialised but it is very interesting to listen to the handlers speak about their relationship with these animals, and I am intrigued by the mix of genuine affection and respect that exists between these animals and the people who care for them.

The European wolves were actually born in the trust to parent wolves who themselves had actually been bought into the country by the late Roger Palmer, who founded the trust, and – according to the trust’s website – these wolves are the first European wolves to be raised in this country in five hundred years. I think that our native wolves were wiped out in the latter part of the 18th Century. There are plans to reintroduce wolves into Scotland, but as Toni Shelbourne points out, we are so unused now to living alongside top, Apex predators that there are a lot of social repercussions to consider. Not least of all for sheep farmers, whose flocks are tasty to Wolves and presumably easier to hunt down than the elusive deer.

However, it would seem that vigilant shepherding and the introduction of guard dogs for sheep flocks are effective protection against wolves who are shy and very much afraid of humans. All this was news to me.

And as for the howls… well, the sounds that Wolves make are very various and the howl is only one of a whole range of communication tools. Smell is very important to the wolf, who has over 200 million smelling cells in his nose as compared to us, who have about 5 million. And touch is important too, though without free hands they have to rely on their sensitive muzzles to make contact with one another when they are ranging around, hunting or playing on their feet. They also have a huge range of visual signals that they give to each other to communicate annoyance, submission, aggression etc. and make many sounds apart from the howl, including ‘monkey chatter’ which is where they clamp their jaws shut very loudly and rhythmically to warn others that they are playing too boisterously. The level of playfulness amongst wolves is immense; I enjoyed very much watching their antics together in the enclosures where they live and learning from Toni about what various behaviours mean.

Having said all that, the howling sound is amazing. Being only an extreme novice at studying wolf behaviour, I often could not tell when they were readying themselves for a good howl and when they were instead having a jolly good sniff to see who they knew and who they didn’t among our party of ‘howlers.’ When they did actually howl it was a long sound, both louder in volume and softer in texture than I had imagined, and after a long howl they would pause and listen very intently to hear if any of the other packs on the trust would reply.

I learned that the sound of the local bell-ringing practise, emergency sirens or even ice-cream van bells are all sounds that can cause the wolves to begin howling a response. When we had a rather timid try at howling, the wolves’ replies came back strong and steady across the night air and I confess that I found myself very moved by the complexity of the sound and the clearly social element of it. It turns out it really isn’t a spooky sound at all, but is a contact call, distinctive and powerful, very much befitting of its owners. At one point I asked the handler standing near to me whether or not the magnificent man wolf we were watching found it exciting to have so many new smells in the air and she said that actually, it makes him quite nervous. I wondered how something with a 150lb per inch of bite power and such a lean, muscular body could be nervous of anything, but apparently, he can. There is a saying amongst native american indians, that if you see a wolf once, then he’s seen you 1,000 times.

So I learned a lot about these animals in my short time at the trust and spent a fretful night last night trying to figure out how I could pack it all into a five minute feature for popular radio. I am not sure how much justice I have done to the wolves in my feature but you will be able to hear the results of my endeavours on BBC Oxford this Sunday evening, between 9-10pm. I have loved making features for The Hub this series and will soon be putting up a page here so that you can catch up on all the bits of radio I’ve been making lately if you missed them on either the live playout or the iplayer.

Last week’s show – in which I reviewed a local apple day – is still available on the iplayer, but only until Sunday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p004px1z/The_Hub_18_10_2009/

Wolves this Sunday and on the iplayer all week after that.