WILD THINGS : Call of the Fairly Wild

Paul Kenis is a little wolf mad. To the endless distress of his wife, the living room decor is wall-to-wall wolf mobiles, wolf plates and wolf decanters. He even plays a howling wolf tape; it’s not the musician.

Outside, in his 20-acre back yard high in the canyons above Julian, Kenis has created a real Alaskan gray wolf preserve--the only one in California.

Kenis, 51, a biologist and retired Navy marine environmentalist, started the 11-wolf pack from two cubs back in 1977. As the population grew, he and his wife, Judy, a botanist, turned the preserve into the Center for Science and Education, a nonprofit, self-funded field station that allows students and other researchers to observe Alaskan wolves without having to make a long trip north.

Unlike most people who keep wolves, Kenis allows his to run wild. “People socialize wolves so they can work with them,” he says. “It may be fun, but it’s not natural. Here, in this situation, you see how they really are: timid and fearful. They hide and pace and show a lot of wild behavior.”

They don’t eat like their cousins in the wild, though; Kenis feeds them carcasses donated by nearby ranchers.

Though he is not a conservationist (he’s vociferously critical of the Sierra Club and other environmentalists), he hopes at some point to breed Mexican gray wolves, which are nearly extinct.

In the meantime, he continues to study his wolf pack “casually,” he stresses. “Most of my stuff is anecdotal,” he says. He leaves the hard science to visitors.

“Animals in the wild have a beauty that’s unique. They’re almost a natural art form. You can’t control them,” he says. “The only way they’re controlled here is that they’re in captivity.