The return of the wolf in Europe

A hackle-raising howl filled the moonlit valley and died away. The slight young woman with a knapsack stood quietly and listened. Nothing. Then, cupping both hands round her mouth, she howled once more.

This time she heard an answering howl, with the playful yapping of pups, coming closer. Ghostly as puffs of smoke, three young wolves sprang into the clearing. They shot curious glances at the intruder, then darted back into the moon-shadows. Sabina Nowak sighed happily: “my big bad boys are safe for another year”.

Trekking through the Beskids, a mountain range in southern Poland, Nowak checked out three more wolf packs over the next few nights. All were raising new pups, a triumph of their will to survive.

It was a victory, too, for the 43-year-old researcher who is showing how humans can live in harmony with a wild carnivore. "The wolf is a large predator and can cause trouble," she says, "but it's not the dangerous beast people think. It's a beautiful and useful creature to have in the forest, and it can survive even in crowded Europe —as long as we make room for it."

Wolves used to roam everywhere in Europe, but by the 1970s they had been hunted almost to extinction outside the Soviet Union and Romania. Now they're on the move.

France, Germany, Sweden and Norway once again have wolves and over the past few years several have been spotted in Switzerland. It's only a matter of time, experts say, before they turn up in Belgium, the Netherlands or Denmark.

Most countries now protect these animals, but not without controversy. A large male weighs up to 175lb and can kill a horse; shepherds in the French Alps claim more than 1,500 grazing sheep were killed in 330 wolf attacks in 2002. In one instance, a flock of 400 were driven over a cliff.

Farmers and shepherds take a tough stand against these predators, demanding compensation for livestock killed by wolves or even that they are hunted down. Poland is on the front line of Europe's "wolf wars". Its huge forests provide corridors along which migrant animals can move west into Germany and beyond. But Poland's wolves were themselves close to being wiped out—until feisty, hazel-eyed Sabina Nowak took up their case.

She grew up in the industrial "black country" of Katowice. Living with her parents and sister in a small flat, she developed a passion for the mossy green cathedrals of primeval forest where she hiked and camped. Later, as an activist for forest protection, she was struck by the key role that four or five wolf packs played in the health of Białowieża Primeval Forest, in the north-east.

"The wolf is nature's true forest manager," she told colleagues. "The forests are damaged by deer. There are too many because its natural predator is being eradicated." Convincing hunters and officials was an uphill battle— most foresters were hunters as well, and they believed wolves killed the antlered stags they prized as trophies.

By tracking wolves and analysing scats and the remains of a kill, Nowak found they preyed on the young, old or sick, never on animals in their prime. "A pack of wolves kills three red deer a week and there's plenty of historical evidence to show that wolf-kills keep the population in balance and good health," she says. "Carcasses provide rich pickings for scavenging birds, mammals and insects, so a forest that supports wolves will also be home to many smaller species."

With a small group of supporters and her colleague Robert Myslajek, Nowak set up the Association for Nature Wolf in 1996. The organisation aimed to study how wolves adapt to human presence and to help local communities adapt to wolves.

When Nowak tried her first wolf-howl, Robert fell about laughing. His grin faded when they heard answering howls. She was talking with wolves!

This transformed her work. Students who came from all over Europe to work with her sat in the forest all night, listening for answers while she called from different spots. In this way, Nowak could sweep an entire valley for wolves in one night. Soon, she had identified four different packs around her village near Bielsko-Biala, where she lived in an old farmhouse with her husband and daughter.

In winter, Nowak tracked wolves up to 12 miles a day through the snow. Their huge paw prints could be read like a book. She saw how "just married" couples playfully pushed each other into the snow, and how they behaved with more decorum once they had a family. Sometimes, she found wolf tracks on top of her own footprints made minutes before. “Now the wolves are tracking me!”, she thought.

But she wasn't frightened. Despite their predatory potential, wolves are not man-hunters and only a wolf with rabies is truly dangerous. In the whole of Europe there are records of just four people being killed by non-rabid wolves in the last 50 years.

Wolves mostly stay out of sight. Except when she is howling, Nowak has only rarely encountered them. "Suddenly there's a wolf a few yards away, so handsome and kingly," she says. "In a blink, he vanishes and there's never time for a photograph. But even if we don't see wolves, we know where they are and what they are doing—that's the important thing."

Still, the Polish government was allowing some 30 wolves to be hunted annually until Nowak spoke to environment minister Jan Szyszko and an audience of wildlife experts and media in 1997. "The costs of fencing against deer and the damage they do exceeds £20million a year, but wolves can do the job for free," she told them.

Nowak spent three hours talking and fielding questions. "That's the longest lecture I ever survived," the minister told her with a smile. A member of parliament in the audience observed: "Sabina, I think you just made the wolf politically correct." Soon afterwards, hunting wolves in Poland was banned. Then the real problems started.

When the doorbell of Nowak's farmhouse rang, she opened it to confront a furious neighbour, farmer Franciszek Worek. "It's a disaster!" he cried. "Your lovely wolves have killed 23 of my sheep—what are you going to do?"

Nowak helped collect and bury the carcasses, then wrote Worek’s application to the local court for £46 compensation per animal. But she also made a promise: "Don't worry, wolves will never attack your flock again."

A few days later, Nowak brought Worek a fluffy, white puppy. It was a livestock guard dog, bred in the Tatra Mountains for centuries to protect farm animals from wolves and now kept as pets. Called Drab, it soon grew bigger than a wolf. Living with the sheep day and night, it would bark loudly if a wolf dared to approach.

Nowak also knew that hunters in the old days channelled wolves towards their guns with long strings of red bunting called fladry. For some reason, wolves never dared to cross it. She had reels of it made by local women. Now, when enclosing his flock for the night, Worek surrounds the pen with fladry tied to sticks. "The wolves don't bother us anymore," he says.

One day last winter, Nowak was hiking along a forest road when she spotted tracks where wolves hadn't been seen for years. The first pack had divided; its younger members were establishing a new territory. "This is a microcosm of what's happening in much of Europe," she says. "It's marvellous to see the big bad boys of the forest coming back."

Not everyone agrees. Last May, a parliamentary committee in France recommended that shepherds in designated areas could shoot wolves to protect their flocks. In Norway, though the country had barely 30 wolves last year, the government carried out a cull. And wolf hunting is still permitted in Spain. Most European farmers argue the compensation for stock killed by wolves is inadequate.

"But farmers can adopt simple measures that have been effective for centuries," Nowak says. "Yes, wolves bring trouble, but we can all learn to share the forest with them."

Polish foresters now back her ideas. "Sabina's work is very convincing," says Janusz Zaleski, deputy chief of Poland's Forestry Directorate. "Thanks to her, the return of the wolf might be our gift to Europe."