The Wolf and the Deer – A Story from a Wolf Watching Adventure

The European Nature Trust (TENT) hosts expertly-guided impact-driven trips for wildlife and nature lovers to the wild corners of Europe. TENT’s General Manager, Jacob Dykes, experienced an unforgettable encounter with the wild wolves of Italy on a Coexistence Adventure. If you are seeking your next adventure, consider the wild corners of Europe. There are vast, intact ecosystems to be explored; perfect for friends, families, couples and solo travellers, our Coexistence Adventures afford something rare and vanishing in today’s world – a chance to connect with the natural world around us, to give back, to drive nature’s recovery through experience.

By Jacob Dykes, General Manager, The European Nature Trust

Wind whips the grasses, rocking the trees, but the bluffs beyond lay still under the azure morning sky. Moments ago, eight human figures had vanished into the scene. In silence, they had walked through ancient beechwoods, reached the summit, selected a juniper bush to crouch behind, and disappeared. 

‘Use the shutter sparingly’, whispers Francesco Romito, one of our conservationist hosts for the trip, and Vice President of Io Non Ho Paura Del Lupo, an NGO whose name means ‘I am not afraid of the wolf’. The name is reassuring, but there’s a mysticism about this creature, and the prospect of them sensing the landscape on a hunt around us awakens a primal sense, long-buried by modernity. ‘The sound can give us away; wolves see and hear in ways we don’t.’

If you had to pick one spot in Europe to see wolves – to understand their ecology and history – this would be the prime location. We’ve come to Pienezza, a mountainous valley in the heart of Italy’s Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park. In this region, the wolf has found historic refuge from undulating periods of persecution across the centuries. The paw prints that our guides at Wildlife Adventures spotted earlier that morning on the forest floor, held an imprinted and often overlooked history.

The story of wolves in wider continental Europe – as it has been globally – is checkered with wonder and brutality at the hands of humans. As a native species, wolves have co-evolved with Europe’s biodiversity; indeed, there was a time when the wolf was the most widely dispersed terrestrial mammal on the planet. Their natural prey is wild ungulates, including red deer, roe deer, chamois, ibex, wild boar. However, wolves have had historic enmity with livestock interests; across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, European agriculture experienced profound shifts, leading to an expansion in herd numbers, which has significantly increased livestock levels across Europe and simultaneously reduced their levels of protection. Throughout these centuries (and long before), the wolf in Europe faced intense persecution, including direct killings, poisonings and trappings, backed by widespread eradication campaigns. By the 1960s and 1970s, wolf populations reached their lowest levels in Europe; they almost completely disappeared from Central Europe, confined to small fragmented populations. Here, sheltered in the Apennines, and particularly in the Abruzzo region of Italy, wolves clung on. 

Around 1970, when the EU’s Habitats Directive entered into force, ecological and social changes in Europe allowed the dramatic recovery of the wolf and other large carnivores. Waves of rural-urban migration led to natural reforestation and an increase in the wolf’s natural prey base, improving habitat conditions. A combination of land abandonment and legal protections created the right ecological conditions for wolves to begin their natural recovery. Many Italian wolves – the ancestors of those around us here in the Abruzzo region today – ventured north to repopulate areas of the Alps, journeying to their historic homelands in Central Europe. From a nadir in the 1960s, when wolf populations in Italy were as low as 100 individuals, they have climbed back to an estimated 3,500 today in the country, and are now found in 21 countries in the EU. But politics has brought wolves into the crosshares once again.

Today, European wolf populations have taken advantage of their innate abilities of dispersal to naturally recolonise regions of their historic range from which they have been historically driven. In such areas, animal husbandry measures had adapted to a landscape devoid of large carnivores, leading to a decline in practices for managing and protecting grazing livestock in the presence of wolves. In result, there is a high degree of social conflict surrounding wolves today where they have returned to their natural habitat. This is typified by cases where wolves become symbolic of wider societal divisions and economic tensions. Folkloric depictions of wolves as villainous, depraved beasts further entrench opposition to the animal’s presence, functioning as social memetics that create division between conservation and agricultural interests, leading to distrust in environmental policy. This phenomena was largely responsible for the EU’s recent decision to downgrade the wolf’s protection status under the Bern Convention, from ‘Strictly Protected’ to ‘Protected’ – a move widely regarded as politically motivated, refuted by the EU’s own scientific community, which opens the door to wolf culling as a false and ineffective solution to livestock depredation. Today, legal and illegal killings by humans represent the highest cause of wolf mortality in Europe. These are often violent encounters, including beheadings, skinnings, poisonings and more. Yet, the damages to farm animals remain limited: on a large scale, the impact of wolves on livestock in the EU is small. Considering that there are 60 million sheep in the EU, the level of sheep depredation by wolves represents an annual killing of 0.065%.

Francesco Romito drapes camouflage netting over the barrel of his camera lens. He takes a breath and fixes his gaze on four red deer grazing in the valley. They raise their heads as the wind snarls and shifts. The peak of the mountain becomes prism-like; its stature warps the senses, hitching distances to one another in a vanishing expanse of rock and grassland. And then, two skulking silhouettes appear on the ridgeline, diaphanous and glossy in the morning light. They trace the mountain, walking the shoulders of the golem, before disappearing, vapor-like into the landscape. 

The wolves have skirted the valley, out of the scent and sight lines of the deer, outwitting them. Then they emerge like spectres from above. We can see the wolves from our vantage point, but somehow the deer can’t. As Barry Lopez describes in his book ‘Of Wolves and Men’, wolves have an astonishing ability to read the landscape spatially and relationally, seeing not only its features, objects and agents, but relationships between them. Perhaps it is this ability that gave the wolves their advantage. They skulk down into the valley, buying meter after unseen meter, moving between the rocks and shrubs that obscure them from the deer’s sight. The group of wolf watchers cling to their breath; the movement of this apex predator has drawn the landscape’s vastness to a single point, eyes focused on the scene before them, as predator and prey lock together in ancient dance. 

Five meters. Four meters. The crickets around us, the only sound breaking the tension. Three meters. The wolves lunge towards the deer, giving chase. What unfolds now is not instantaneous, but an hourlong standoff. The deer spot the predators and flee, but gaining ground, they halt, knowing they cannot escape without the wolves chasing, in their characteristic fashion of hounding prey over vast distances to deplete their quarry to exhaustion. Likewise, the wolves know their limits, the preciousness of their energy. The wolves steal glances back and forth, their faces and posture signalling runic instructions to each other beyond our human powers of detection. After circling each other in the valley, predator and prey reach some kind of mutual agreement, winding down their energies, and both dispersing in different directions. It is a difficult existence: it’s estimated that only 10–15% of wolf hunts result in success. 

Somehow, we forget that we are at 2000m of elevation. We were guided to this wild location by professional ecologists and conservationists that have each dedicated their lives to sharing the wild beauty of such spectacles with nature-lovers like us. On the trail, Umberto Esposito, our guide from Wildlife Adventures, shows us an image on his camera. The deer are fleeing from the two wolves, the sinews of their hind legs rippled in the pursuit. It is an image that has fascinated us from our earliest beginnings, one etched onto cave walls from which the earliest form of human culture was born. We each pause to look. ‘In Italy, there exists no single word for wilderness’, says Romito. We breathe and continue with our descent, speechless; this single image, etched in our minds – a glimpse, perhaps, of the undefinable.

Francesco Romito from Io Non Ho Paura Del Lupo, captures the scene on video, below.

A Journey of Coexistence

This scene played out on one of The European Nature Trust’s Coexistence Adventures, where 8 wonderful guests had the chance to observe wolves under expert guidance. A 4-night experience, guests hiked comfortable distances through pristine beechwoods, observing signs of the landscapes with local naturalists and wildlife photographers. Most importantly, their presence on the trip became part of the process of conservation; 50% of what they had paid to be there, went directly to the NGO Io Non Ho Paura Del Lupo, contributing to conservation programmes seeking to rebuild a better relationship between wolves and humans. From the comfort of authentic accommodation in the local town of Pescasseroli, where traditional Italian cuisine was served, guests forged lifelong friendships founded on their shared experiences in the wild.

Such trips have the capacity to recourse our relationship with nature and better our personal wellbeing. A recent study confirms what many of us already know to be true – humans’ connectedness with nature is in freefall. Published in the journal Earth, scientists have shown that, between 1800 to 2020, our sense of connection with natural systems has dropped by 60%, as the size of the urbanised or agricultural environment has grown exponentially. Conversely, studies show that time spent in wild nature dramatically improves our mental and physical health, reducing stress and anxiety, while fostering a sense of care to the wild systems on which we rely. 

The Coexistence Adventures are part of The European Nature Trust’s mission to connect people with nature. As well as funding conservation projects ourselves through a network of impactful NGO partners, we believe that the process of conservation is incomplete without a real public connection to the wild around us. What’s more, people are increasingly seeking impactful ways to travel that meaningfully give back to the natural environment. That’s why our expertly guided trips – hosted by conservationists – are increasingly forming a core part of our work as an environmental foundation.