Wolves lead a feast and famine existence

Wolves lead a feast and fam­ine ex­ist­ence and can go up to two weeks or longer without eating.

When they do chow down, they make up for it by gor­ging. In sci­entif­ic stud­ies where cap­tive wolves were not fed for sev­er­al days and then giv­en the op­por­tun­ity to eat as much as they wanted – most gained nine kilo­grams (20 pounds) in a frenzy of feeding.

These three wolves  were run­ning and play­ing in deep snow after feed­ing on a big moose kill in Alaska. According to the pho­to­graph­er, John Hyde, the oth­er nine mem­bers of the pack were too full to move.

I love the en­ergy and move­ment of this photo and the play­ful­ness of it too. The wolves look like they’re run­ning full out, yet ap­pear to be with­in touch­ing dis­tance of one another.

I won­der if they were glid­ing through the snow like syn­chron­ized swim­mers or de­lib­er­ately bump­ing into each other?

Either way, I’m de­lighted the im­age was chosen for the cov­er of Return of the Wolf.