Wolfpaper - Orca Orca was born in April 1994 at the Wildlife Science Center in Forest Lake, Minnesota. Wolf Park wanted to add some unrelated puppies to the pack and they wanted some black phase wolves. So, we traded Chinook and Altair's five puppies when they were only three weeks old for a brother and sister, Karin and Orca, and Alyeska who was not related.
Wolves love puppies.
Those puppies are usually born to the pack, but in captivity the easy way to introduce new wolves it to add them as pups. We really could not see any difference in the pack's reactions to puppies which were their own, or have been acquired from other sources. Orca is very photogenic. Maybe it's his heritage. His grandfather was one of Jim Brandenburg's wolves featured in Brother Wolf.