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Reaching Ellesmere Island, in Canada’s far north, is an adventure of its own. It took six domestic flights for Israeli photographer Amit Eshel to get within striking distance, and then days of traveling by dogsled and snowmobile to make it to the northern part of the island. Eshel undertook the journey in hopes of spotting Ellesmere’s wolves, which have no known history of being hunted and are unafraid of the few human visitors they encounter. Yet only about 200 Arctic wolves (Canis lupus arctos) live on Ellesmere, which is roughly the size of Great Britain, and during Eshel’s first visit in April 2022, he and his Inuit guides searched for two weeks without finding them.
At times they were so close they almost touched me.
He tried again in 2024. This time, 12 days into the expedition, his group was moving across a frozen fjord in -31 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures when they spotted a single wolf through binoculars. Eight more soon appeared, and the pack moved slowly toward Eshel. “I laid down holding my camera with a wide lens and they came over for a very close look,” he says. “At times they were so close they almost touched me, and I could smell their breath.”
Eshel says he hopes the resulting composition imparts a sense of what it felt like to briefly be part of the pack. He also hopes it illustrates the playfulness of these oft-feared predators—particularly in a place where human persecution hasn’t compromised their natural curiosity.
His image was the Terrestrial Wildlife Winner in the California Academy of Sciences’ 12th annual BigPicture Photography Competition. 
This article first appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.
