The Nordic Ark, July 12th 2008. Part 26

After we left the first few owls, we came to a huge enclosure with no sign posted ... at least none that we could see. But looking around we spotted a beaver among the trees. Cool, since we didn't know they had them. And look, there's a panda in that tree! OK ... that's weird ... and what's that over there, is that a leopard??

PWNED!! :-D

Turned out the enclosure was actually empty. They had put up life size cutouts of the animals, very lifelike ... another exercise, the point of this one being to see if you could spot every species featured. We managed most of them. But at first we were totally fooled. :-D

A little later, after we'd seen the reindeer and then the wolverines and were sort of curving back again - by this time we'd started to lose track a little, I think, of what was where and what we still hadn't seen (the enclosures kind of wrapped around each other in a way - suddenly you'd come across another part of an enclosure that you thought you'd left behind, and there the animals would be, even after you thought you'd missed them) - a little later we suddenly saw an animal standing by a tree. One of those that we thought we'd missed. A wolf. :-D But it didn't look completely real ... or did it?? ... it wasn't moving, not an inch ... and those cutouts back there looked so real too ... Fool me once, etc. We weren't about to be tricked again. Yeah, it's another cutout. Really convincing though. But it's a fake ...

Or so we thought until it moved. ;-)

We'd given up seeing them, but suddenly, there they were. Two of them, SO close to the fence. And totally unstressed, just relaxed and calm. We didn't see the cubs, only these two adults. But still ... Wow. :-)

We didn't get a lot of good pictures of the wolves. Unfortunately. They were hard to photograph. But it was SO cool to get to see them. :-)

(Photo credit: top three: me; bottom two: KAS)