"Wolves are howling once again in our mountains. We all ought to be pleased about this, and not merely those who study the animals." So it runs in a French magazine Science et Nature, where a dozen pages of text and pictures and the cover are given over to the fact that what might, a few years ago, have been an accidental incursion from the Appenines in Italy, now turns out to be a real migration. There are two small packs of wolves, eight in one, live in the other, in a mountainous areas about eighty kilometres north of Cannes. Alive and well and breeding. In the French national park - a huge area - of Mercantour.
The behaviour of the wolves can be more easily traced when snow falls, and then something between twenty and thirty people, scientists and foresters and other officials, check the number of animals, their territorial reaches and so on. The faeces gives the investigators a fair picture of what the wolves eat; chamois and moufflons (a kind of wild sheep), also marmots, hares, wild boar and the small rodents, some birds. Farmers get compensation for animals lost, chiefly sheep and goats.
In 1995 over 57 thousand francs were paid out for thirty six killings. Then in 1995, up to November, 359 animals were killed, with many wounded. Estimated cost up to November of that year over 400,000 francs - say £50,000. We are told, by the way, that 400 pieces of wolf faeces were collected last year, but not all have to date been studied. Phew.
The many photographs show handsome and, you could say, jolly looking wolves, brilliantly be furred. It's sixty years since France last had wolves, and the writers of this piece are clearly thrilled. They point that there is no danger of being overrun by them, because in a pack, only the dominant couple reproduces itself. And there is just one brood per year. Of the average of four born, only two are likely to reach full growth. And, it says, that predatory animals never wipe out entirely their prey. That is, with the exception of the human predator.
The national park and its periphery are covered by these investigations, an area totalling about two thousand square kilometres, more intensively within five hundred square km. Maybe, it says in one part of the article, this is the beginning of the natural recolonisation of the Alps by wolves. So pleased, they all seem. Good luck to them.