By Michelle Nijhuis
In early November of this year,
Danish scientists confirmed that a male wolf had crossed the northern
border of Germany and taken up residence in Jutland, the peninsula that
forms the mainland part of Denmark. The country’s last known resident
wolf was killed in 1772, a year in which the emotionally unstable King
Christian VII was in the midst of a messy divorce from Princess Caroline
Matilda of Great Britain. (Caroline Matilda’s eldest brother,
meanwhile, was preoccupied with his upstart colonies across the
Atlantic.) Eight Danish monarchs and nearly two hundred and fifty years
later, in spite of a sevenfold increase in Denmark’s human population,
the country is a remarkably safe place for wild animals.
The Jutland wolf may be a harbinger of a broader recovery. According to a study published today in the journal Science, Europe is “succeeding in maintaining, and to some extent restoring, viable large carnivore populations on a continental scale.” Historically, these same carnivores—bears, wolves, wolverines, and lynx—were zealously hunted. In 813, for example, Charlemagne established the luparii, an élite corps charged with killing wolves; though the animals held out against the luparii for more than a thousand years, by the nineteen-thirties they were believed to be extinct in France. (The luparii, for their part, survive in vestigial form as the lieutenants de louveterie, volunteer wildlife officers who help manage France’s populations of boars, jackdaws, and other nuisance creatures.) In recent decades, however, the European landscape has become considerably more predator-friendly. The Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which took effect in 1982, greatly restricted the conditions under which large carnivores could be captured or killed. At the same time, urbanization was drawing people away from the countryside and its wild inhabitants. In 1950, about half of the European population lived in urban areas; today, nearly three-quarters does.
Carnivores have also learned, in a sense, to live with people. According to Adrian Treves, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, European brown bears, which are closely related to grizzlies, are shyer and more nocturnal than their American brethren. “Over many generations, the brown bears of Europe have adapted to the risk posed by people,” Treves told me. Likewise, European wolves have broadened their diet, eating not only large prey, such as deer, but also small mammals and carrion—and, in the case of at least one Greek wolf, apples and figs. As the Science study notes, a third of the European mainland is now home to at least one large predator species. Wolves have established permanent residence in twenty-eight European countries, brown bears in twenty-two, and lynx in twenty-three; large carnivores can be seen in forests, farmland, and even, at times, in suburbs. Though the study’s authors acknowledge that some isolated populations remain critically endangered, they conclude that, over all, Europe’s large carnivores are an “often underappreciated conservation success story.” And the comeback, though not without its hitches, has elicited little public fuss. Run-ins with humans are rare, and in many places traditional livestock-protection measures—including the use of guard dogs and shepherds—have been sustained or revived. “If you want to conserve large predators, you don’t need to exclude people,” Guillaume Chapron, one of the Science study’s lead authors, told me. “You just need to have the political will to coexist.”
In the Western United States, attitudes toward large predators are less measured.
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