When rewilding works — a visit to the Alps to track wolves
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As we stood on the ridge overlooking the valley one of the more observant of our group pointed to a distant 'dot' soaring against the piled-up clouds. Our guide quickly identified the dot as a golden eagle, and it was getting closer. Within a minute the bird had come so close that we could see its enormous, splayed wings and the pale band of feathers that stand out from its otherwise dark plumage. It was eyeballing us, but once it decided we were not food it turned and effortlessly descended into the ravine on the far side of the mountain where we were standing. It was a magical experience, but we had not hiked for hours to this ridge to look for eagles. We were on the hunt for signs of wolves, and in these mountains they are plentiful.
You might think you’d need to travel to the USA for an experience involving wolves, snow-capped mountains, eagles, and other exciting wildlife. But I was in the French Alps, not far from the border with Italy — only a day and a half from Ireland by sail-rail to the French Alps, or about two hours driving north of Marseille. It's a close-to-nature experience on a par with anything you’d get in North America, but without the carbon emissions that come with a trans-Atlantic flight.
Like most places in western Europe, wolves were exterminated from France by the early 20th century. Despite the persecution, a small number hung on in the Italian Alps and, following legal protection in the 1990s, these wolves began to spread out. By 1992 they were officially recognised as having returned to France. Today, the best count is that there are around 1,200 of the animals, including a recently identified pack in the Calanques National Park, right at the doorstep of Marseille, a city of more than one million people.
While wolves are now present in many regions of France, the Alps is where there is the greatest density and where visitors are most likely to see evidence of their presence.
The trip I was on was not about seeing wolves; they are shy and rightly avoid people. Rather, it was about tracking them into their mountain habitats, learning about how they move through the landscape, and getting an appreciation for the environment in which they live. The sighting of a golden eagle was a treat, but our group was also lucky to spot chamois (a type of mountain antelope), roe deer, wild boar, black woodpecker, and a strikingly coloured fire salamander.
This part of the Alps is also home to vultures, red deer, mouflon (an impressive, high-altitude sheep), marmots and, albeit in low numbers, lynx. It’s an incredible community of animals right in the heart of Europe, and one that is doing surprisingly well, not only due to legal protection of many species but also because depopulation of these mountains since the early 1900s has seen the natural regeneration of vast forests of pine, beech, and spruce.
It’s a phenomenal testament to the power of rewilding, especially considering that the landscape in which we were tracking wolves has not been ‘abandoned’ by people. There are still forestry activities harvesting commercial timber while summer pastures are grazed by sheep and cattle. Through my binoculars I was able to see a small group of sheep on a high slope and thought aloud how they were living dangerously. But no, I was corrected, these sheep are always accompanied by their guard dogs, even when not supervised by people. The dogs are reared as part of the flock, essentially they believe they are sheep, and are successful (much of the time) in preventing attacks by wolves. The wolves themselves mostly stick to wild boar, roe deer, and mouflon.
Our expert guide could point out all the signs of these animals along the forest tracks: the nibbled shoots of tree branches, the upturned earth from digging badgers and wild boar, and the prints left in snow or soft mud of hooves and paws. The signs of wolves were not hard to find. Their poo is everywhere and it’s unmistakable. Hefty, cigar-shaped droppings stuffed with the hair and bones of recent kills. Defecating is more than relief for the carnivores, the piles of poo are signposts to other wolves, markers of territory, or coded messages to their kin. It is also a powerful signifier to all the other animals in the mountains that this is wolf country.
Their presence here changes everything. Our guide told us that since their arrival in the 1990s, to a landscape that knew no fear of them, the larger animals have become much more elusive. The chamois stay on the higher ground where the wolves find it harder to hunt, the wild boar are largely nocturnal. Wolves will eat the small predators too, like foxes and martens, and it was not unusual for us to see that these smaller animals had pooed on top of the wolf poo. What were they trying to say?!
On the morning of our last day, after we had packed up and left our lodgings, we got word from a local forester of fresh wolf tracks, something we hadn’t found up to then. We immediately doubled back. Torrential rain had filled rivers which had lain a layer of silt near the road we had just driven down. There, in the smooth mud, a wolf pack, five animals strong, had passed through only hours before.
Their prints leave a line that is arrow-straight and we could see that the pack members were travelling close to one another. It’s spring, perhaps one was a pregnant female. They will look for a den close to water. The other pack members will help with hunting and bring her food while she is feeding the pups. What a privilege it was to see these signs and what a thrill to know that places like this still exist.