In recent years, scientists have come to appreciate the full impact that an apex predator, such as the wolf, can have upon its wider environment. Perhaps their gain could be our gain, too perhaps their return heralds change for the better, for the whole ecosystem. Our loss has been their gain.īut then again, maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Where we have withdrawn, they have grown. There are now more than 100 German wolf packs, each of five to 10 animals, occasionally more. In the early 00s, they crossed the border into Germany from the dense forests of Poland, finding sanctuary in former army testing ranges and post-industrial ruins. Iberian wolves now wander the ghost villages of Galicia, and Eurasian wolves haunt abandoned cold war-era military sites along the former iron curtain. Mainly, however, the wolves live where we have ceded ground. Recently, while the residents of Scanno, Italy, were confined inside to halt the spread of Covid-19, four wolves were seen to hunt a herd of deer through the town they took down a hind and devoured it right there in the street. These are all crowded countries, intensively farmed and densely populated, and the wolves’ presence there indicates how closely our ranges have come to overlap. ![]() Last year, wolves were confirmed to have set up home in a Dutch national park. In 2017, the first wolf for more than a century was spotted in Luxembourg and the first wolf was sighted in Denmark for 200 years. There are an estimated 12,000 wolves in Europe now, far more than in the contiguous US – where the grey wolf was similarly persecuted, until legal protections came into force in the 70s – and they have now been documented in every single country on the European mainland. Brown bears: 17,000 of them, spread through Scandinavia, the Dinaric Alps, the Carpathian mountains, Bulgaria, Greece, Cantabria, the Alps. Some 9,000 of them or more are now thought to live on the continent, having been hunted to local extinction in western and central Europe by the middle of the 20th century. Lynx: low to the ground, ear-tufted, slinking through the shadows, rarely seen. Wild boar rootle in new woods.Īll this Arcadian plenty has tempted in the carnivores, who crept in quietly at first, testing the waters. Along the rivers’ edges, otters dive and beavers build their dams – some reintroduced, many recolonising territory of their own accord. Deer graze in shabby pastures, leap tumbledown gates. Rabbits, badgers and foxes dig their homes between the roots. Songbirds raise their voices, trail up and down the scales, an orchestra coming into tune. The still summer’s air is soon vibrating with the tiny wings of insects. Then tiny trees take root and the ground starts to bristle with new life as soft and hard woods, hoisted from the earth, spread a densely embroidered tapestry of life across the landscape. As annual crops fade away without human input, shrubs and fast-spreading thorns take their place. While our attention has been elsewhere, nature has been expanding into the gaps left behind. ![]() Some estimate that in the three decades leading to 2030, an area the size of Italy will have been abandoned within the EU alone. When they do, ever more land often goes unclaimed, unploughed, unrestrained. As the value of livestock has dropped, young people, too, have increasingly abandoned rural areas for cities. In Europe, patterns of farming and land use have been changing on a grand scale, as marginal land – too steep or too depleted to be worth the effort of farming – falls into disuse. ![]() But over the last century, a different narrative has been writing itself into existence. Everywhere we go, it seems, we wreak death and destruction, chipping away at the natural world. We have become well acquainted with graphs that plot the advance of humans against the decline of all else. If the trajectory of the European wolf is dispiriting, it is also familiar. There, the wolves in exile clung on, waiting for an opportunity, preparing for their victorious return. In Europe, those that survived retreated to rare enclaves, finding sanctuary on the high ground of the Apennines, or fleeing east into the debatable lands where Europe bleeds into Asia.
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