Wolves are listed as species of least concern in Europe and their numbers have rebounded in recent decades.THOMAS KIENZLE/Getty Images
Adam Weymouth’s latest book is Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness.
In December, 2021, a hunter shot a large, dog-like animal that he took to be a coyote, about 250 kilometres south of the Canadian border in upstate New York. Yet after three separate, conflicting lab analyses, it was determined that the animal had in fact been a wolf.
It wasn’t the first to be killed in this way.
Wolves have been absent from south of the St. Lawrence River, in both Canada and New England, for more than a century, pushed to extinction there as they were across much of the globe. But since 1993 more than 10 wolves have been killed in these regions, while the unreported number is likely far higher. Lab work has shown some of these to have been captive in origin, but others appear to be wild wolves.
Wolves are capable of travelling greater distances than any other terrestrial mammal on the planet. A certain portion, both female and male, are hard-wired to disperse and seek out new territories, and these dead wolves are well within the range of current populations.
Canada maintains the second largest population of gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the world, but wolves found south of the St. Lawrence also include the eastern wolf (Canis sp. cf. lycaon), which remains one of the most endangered wolves on the planet. The Canadian government considers the eastern wolf a distinct species, a little smaller than the gray wolf and with distinct genetic markers. It is found only in southeast Ontario, including within the Algonquin Park, and in southern Quebec, with an estimated population of between 350 and 1,000 adults.
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At the time of the 2021 shooting, wolves were not protected in the United States. Donald Trump’s first administration removed Endangered Species Protection from wolves across most of the country the year before, though this was restored in 2022 and remains in place (for now). In Canada, the wolf is classed as a game species, only fully protected within national parks, although the eastern wolf is listed as “threatened.”
In both countries, it is more or less open season on coyotes. It is not easy to tell a large coyote and a small wolf apart, even, apparently, in the lab, and especially through the crosshairs of a gun. That wolves and coyotes are known to hybridize makes the distinction even more contested. But if wolves who make these forays into new territory are consistently being hunted, it is difficult to see how they might one day regain their former range.
Canada maintains the second largest population of gray wolves in the world.Gary Kramer/The Associated Press
I have seen firsthand how vital protection is for these pioneers. While researching my new book, Lone Wolf, I walked for several months in the footsteps of a wolf who had crossed the mountains of Central Europe a decade before. Known as Slavc (pronounced “Sh-lough-ts”), he was born in southern Slovenia in 2010, and the following summer was fitted with a GPS-tracking collar by Hubert Potočnik of the University of Ljubljana, as part of a project researching wolf behaviour. Dr. Potočnik had no idea, of course, what Slavc would go on to do, but at the end of that year he left his pack behind and embarked on a journey of more than 1,500 kilometres. He crossed Slovenia, then the Austrian Alps, and came in the spring to Italy, to the foothills north of Verona.
A good portion of young wolves will leave their natal pack and embark on these great journeys, but what made Slavc’s journey exceptional was not only its distance but the legacy he would leave. There had been no wolves in these mountains for more than a century, but it was here that he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. They may have been the only two wild wolves in thousands of square kilometres of mountains, but in ways that are hard for us to understand, they had somehow found each other.
Swiftly and inevitably, the female was christened Juliet by the local press, after one half of Verona’s most famous couple. But Juliet’s choice of name was also apposite because this was a union as significant as that of the Montagues and Capulets. Juliet was a member of the Italian subspecies Canis lupus italicus, a descendant of the wolves that had clung on in the Apennines during the centuries of the purges. For his part, Slavc came from the Dinaric population that spanned former Yugoslavia and reached down as far as Greece.
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Their meeting was a bridging of dynasties – not just genetically significant, but a symbolic watershed in the wolf’s return to Europe. To defy centuries of persecution, to find one another in the sheer immensity of the Alps, to repopulate the lands that they were banished from – for even the most rational of scientists, it is hard not to see this as a love story. A decade on, there are at least 17 packs back in these mountains, many of them Slavc and Juliet’s own descendants.
There is something remarkable happening in Europe. The wolf was once the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on the planet, spanning the Northern Hemisphere from the tundra to the tropic’s edge, but by the mid-20th century it had been all but eradicated from Europe, as it had from much of its former range. Yet this was not to be their final act.
Their numbers have rebounded in recent decades, thanks to continent-wide protection afforded by the European Union. There are now upward of 21,500, an increase of 1.800 per cent since 1965, and they are living in every European country but for the islands, listed as species of least concern. Nowhere in Europe have they been reintroduced, they have done this entirely on their own. Wolves are an inherently conservative species, alert to any alteration in their environment, and recognized by both biologists and hunters as one of the hardest animals to trap. Yet they are driven too, by this urge to set out, and this, too, their survival is predicated on.
The wolf is classed as a game species in Canada, only fully protected within national parks, although the eastern wolf is listed as “threatened.”LENA MUCHA/The New York Times News Service
Popular culture has the lone wolf as a Clint Eastwood archetype: fearless, self-sufficient and misanthropic. In reality, a lone wolf has left behind its family and is searching for the same three things we all are: enough food to eat, enough land to make a life, and a mate. A lone wolf does not intend to remain as a lone wolf; it has simply not yet found what it is looking for. They embody what the great migrators on this planet have always known, both people and animals alike: that movement is an existential necessity. That in times of crisis, nothing can be contained. That in times of need, we move.
Such a vision does not sit comfortably within our current politics. As I crossed Europe I saw that rise in nationalism first hand: a hardening of borders, and a scapegoating both of the wolf and the migrant in these rural hinterlands. When we are talking about the wolf, I came to see that we are never only talking about the wolf. Time and again on my journey across the Alps I found the provenance of the returning wolves called into question. I heard rumours that scientists were smuggling them in, and somehow getting rich off it, or that there are farms in Bulgaria and Romania where wolves are bred for export, the implication being that homegrown wolves might be acceptable, but that these are migrants, refugees.
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The wolf’s return was not emblematic of an ever-changing world that refused to be contained, but indicative of malevolent intent. “Look at its face,” someone would say, getting up a video on their phone. “Look at its behaviour. That’s not a true Austrian wolf.” Genetic analysis and academic research might claim otherwise, but at a time when scientific truth has also been politicized, objective truth does not always get the final say. I often felt on that journey that vexed questions around genetic purity and species’ origins fed into political framings that encompassed far more than wolves.
Wolves are more than capable of recolonizing both Maritime Canada and the northeastern United States. They have, after all, returned to countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, some of the most densely populated, intensively farmed nations on the planet. Yet had the legislation not been in place to safeguard them, their already risky dispersals there may have been suicidal. The wolf’s return is testament to the desire of life to thrive – but we also need attitudes and policies that transcend borders to enable it to flourish.
