This is the seventh installment of our "Open Road" summer series, which looks at unusual spots across the state. Look for it every Tuesday.
MANNS HARBOR -- Howling does not come with lessons.
Which is why the decision to howl on a recent Wednesday evening for 70 vacationers was a bit intimidating, as they stood in the middle of a buggy Dare County maritime forest with hands cupped around their mouths, and hoping their impostor howls could persuade a real-life pack of endangered red wolves to holler back.
The wolves don't always howl, explained Kim Wheeler, executive director of the Red Wolf Coalition. But if they do, it's a chance to hear something that can't be heard anywhere else in the world.
Fewer than 200 red wolves live in this part of North Carolina, the only ones living outside captivity.
Wheeler leads groups on the howlings every Wednesday in the summertime inside the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, a federally protected swampy wilderness off U.S. 64 that rarely gets a second glance from travelers intent on knocking off the last few miles before reaching the Outer Banks.
The weekly howlings don't offer much in terms of bells and whistles. There's nothing to take pictures of, no wolf spotting as part of the event, no souvenirs or trinkets to pick up other than the small red wolf temporary tattoos that Wheeler hands out.
Nor is there any guarantee the wolves will actually howl.
Wheelers' howling excursions are a marked departure from the mini-golf and dune buggy rentals on the Outer Banks. But each week, she draws crowds of anywhere from 70 to 90, most from other states and even other countries.
Evening excursion
She stands on the bed of a truck in a parking lot near the entrance of the wildlife refuge, regaling vacationers with information about a species that most had never heard about, much less thought needed to be saved.
The effect of the day in the sun played out on the sleepy faces of the children waiting for the howling, their hair still holding the salt from ocean swims and tan lines poking out around their flip-flops. The smell of bug spray hangs in the air.
The red wolf, a smaller cousin to the grey wolf and first listed as an endangered species in 1967, was hunted near the point of extinction when, in a desperate move to save the species, the remaining population of red wolves in a corner on the Texas-Louisiana border was rounded up in the late 1970s and brought into captivity to breed.
That capture netted 17 full-blooded red wolves, 14 of which were selected to begin breeding. In 1987, North Carolina was chosen as the place to release the predators.
Wolf territory
The North Carolina red wolves live on 1.7 million acres in the eastern counties of Washington, Tyrrell, Hyde and Beaufort. Surrounded on three sides by water, the land, most of it private and rural, was a place to release the wolves in their natural habitat where they could be contained and monitored with tracking devices around their necks. In addition, coyotes, which the wolves can breed with if given the opportunity, are relatively scarce in the area.
They're out there
Before the caravan of vacationers drives into the refuge for an actual howl, Wheeler encourages them to make the most of the evening.
"I know y'all are on vacation," she said. "But I'm telling you, howling is the best stress reliever."
The caravan, headed by Wheeler in her truck with a "WOLFNANY" license plate, heads out, and the group reassembles several miles inside the refuge, trying to keep quiet and preventing the gravel from crunching under their feet.
Wheeler marches off into the woods alone to offer her expert howls to get the wolves going. Her voice bounces around the evening air, three howls in a row.
After a few seconds of waiting, the wolves offer their critiques. Their responses start low, then fill in with other pitches of different wolves, their distinct howls overlapping and rising and falling for a five-minute stretch. And then it stops.
Howling good time
"I love it when they show me the red wolf love," Wheeler said, emerging from the woods and rejoining the group.
Then it was time for the vacationers to try to find their inner wolves.
"Ahhh, wooo!! Ahhhh, wooo!" nearly three dozen children howled in unison, their eyes wide with concentration but their howls punctuated by the occasional giggle. Then the adults joined, and nearly 70 human voices sounded off their best wolf impression.
It didn't seem enough for the wolves this time, and they didn't respond to the crowd of howlers.
That didn't dampen the mood.
"Sometimes there's more to life than what we think there is," said Rita Muncy of Virginia as she headed back to Duck to finish her vacation.
Just as the once-captive wolves got their chance to roam free and live as they like in North Carolina, the content vacationers also got to throw of the shackles of their daily lives and spend a summer night in the woods, just howling away.
