A few resources for adding the wolf into your curriculum.

Red Wolf Recovery Project – Teachers, give your students something to howl about! For educators interested in bringing the red wolf to their classrooms, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Red Wolf Recovery Program offers a variety of tools and resources to enhance the learning and teaching experience.

Defenders of Wildlife Wolf Curriculum – Teachers, give your students something to howl about! For educators interested in bringing the red wolf to their classrooms, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Red Wolf Recovery Program offers a variety of tools and resources to enhance the learning and teaching experience.

If you have a TiVo or a DVR through your television provider put WOLF and/or WOLVES in your keyword search and find shows you may have missed otherwise about wolves. Depending on your dvr you may be able to auto record shows.

In the wild a wolf can live up to 13 years or more, in a protected wolf park or a controlled area of land, a wolf can live to be up to 16 years old. But most wolves usually live to be to around 8 years of age. The record wolf lifespan is about 20 years of age. Life in the wild is difficult for the wolf, with human population taking up more and more wolf habitat and with those who would kill the wolf, a long lifespan is unlikely. In a controlled environment they can live longer because they are safe from the outside dangers of traps, snares, enemies and poisons.

Wolves have incredibly good hearing and can hear sounds up to six miles away, including some high-pitched sounds that even a human can’t hear, in the range where bats and porpoises produce sound. Even when it sleeps, a wolf’s ears stand straight up so it can catch sounds made by other animals at all times.

This helps the wolf catch prey, and lets it know when danger is near. Their large, pointed ears act like big scoops to catch lots of sound. Unlike humans, wolves can easily tell what direction sound is coming from by turning their ears from side to side. The direction the ears are pointing when the sound is loudest tells the wolf which direction the sound is coming from, which can help them locate rodents under a snow pack.

Next to smell, the sense of hearing is the most acute of the wolf sense. Wolves can hear as far as six miles away in the forest and ten miles in the open. Wolves can hear well up to a frequency of 25 kHz. Some researchers believe that the actual maximum frequency detected by wolves is actually much higher, perhaps up to 80 kHz (the upper auditory limits for humans is 20 kHz), also according to some naturalist wolves’ hearing is greater than that of the dog.

Out of the wolf’s forty-two teeth, forty help the wolf in securing its prey. There are six incisors on the top and six on the bottom, two canines on the top and two on the bottom, eight premolars on the top and eight on the bottom, and four molars on the top and four on the bottom. The largest teeth are the canines, or fangs, which may reach two and a quarter inches in total length, including the portion embedded in the jaw. These are the tools that help the wolf hold onto its prey.

The cutting and chewing is done by the carnassials, or flesh teeth – the fourth upper premolar and the first lower molar. These specialized teeth are much like a pair of self-sharpening shears
and function well in cutting tendons and tough flesh. The massive molars help crush bones.