Couple Operate Sanctuary to Save Timber Wolf Breed

A howl rises from the marsh grass in this coastal town. It’s the call of wolves, a species long absent from New England.

“Eleven timber wolves, to be precise,” says Paul Soffron, owner of Wolf Hollow, a federally licensed sanctuary for the endangered animals about 25 miles north of Boston.

Soffron, a professional animal handler and founder of the North American Wolf Foundation, has spent most of his life working with the animals. Now he and his wife are trying to keep wolves from disappearing altogether.

“They are slowly being exterminated,” Soffron says, looking out a window over the fenced-in area of several acres where the pack lives behind his home. “We’ve nearly wiped them out in North America.”

Wolves have been hunted and trapped to near extinction. Wolf pits, which were baited and spiked by settlers in the 1700s, still can be seen in Lynn, about 10 miles north of Boston.

The Eastern timber wolf, which roamed throughout New England, now exists only in captivity. The only states with wild wolf populations are Alaska, where they are hunted, and Minnesota, where wolves are protected as a threatened species.

Wolves have been listed as endangered in the rest of the country since 1973.

“The whole reason I put this place together was to get people to come in and learn something. It’s not just some roadside zoo,” Soffron says. “If you come here, you can’t just go see the wolves. You have to sit and listen too.”

Almost daily, school groups and other visitors listen as he and his wife, Joni, explain how wolves are the most highly socialized of animals despite the myths created by folk tales brought to the New World from Europe.

“Wolves only kill to eat, to survive,” Joni Soffron tells a group of students from Newton, seated on a bench behind the main enclosure. “Wolves won’t hurt their children. I wish I could, but I can’t say that about us.”

She stands amid a pack of wolves much larger than she. Two pups prance about nearby, tugging the head of a roadkill deer between them. Another young wolf snarls at her mother, prompting a quick retort from TeeBee, the pack’s top female.

“That’s Alyki,” she says. “We call her the bratty teen-ager.”

Like most families, the pack has a pecking order. At the top is Briar, the alpha or leader, followed by Soffron, regarded by the wolves as a retired alpha. That’s a rank in the pack Soffron must earn each day.

He scratches Briar’s rump, assuring the wolf he is still leader, but holds onto his blue ski hat lest he lose “points.”

“With wolves, you have to use common sense and good manners,” he says. “They have a code of honor that relates to the most noble of human behavior.”

Soffron criticizes officials in Alaska who allow wolves to be killed in some areas to boost caribou and moose populations for the benefit of recreational hunters. Alaska officials call the wolf kill a predator-control program.

“They just don’t realize how lucky they are to have wolves up there,” Soffron says. “Wolves are the best indication of a healthy ecosystem.”

The demise of predators elsewhere in the country has led to unchecked growth of other animal populations, such as deer, mice and rats that have contributed to the spread of Lyme disease in the East and hantavirus out West, he said.