Walking in the Footsteps of the Lone Wolf, with Adam Weymouth

TENT Trustee and naturalist Catherine Capon sat down with author and newly appointed Ambassador, Adam Weymouth, to explore the story behind his remarkable new book Lone Wolf.

Adam Weymouth is an award-winning writer and journalist whose work explores the often complicated relationship between people and the wild. His latest book, Lone Wolf, follows the thousand-mile journey of Slavc, a wolf who travelled from Slovenia across the Alps and into northern Italy, where his arrival helped spark the return of wolves to a landscape from which they had been absent for more than a century.

To write the book, Weymouth retraced Slavc’s route on foot, travelling through the mountains, farms and communities of Central Europe and speaking with farmers, conservationists, hunters and others living alongside the returning wolves. In this interview, Adam’s perceptive take on human-wildlife coexistence raise poignant questions around our place in the natural world. Later, Adam discusses the experience of hosting TENT’s Wolf Watching Adventures in Italy, and the power of impactful ecotourism to forge a better relationship between people and wildlife.

Following Animals, Understanding People

Adam’s work has long explored the relationship between people and the natural world. His first book Kings of the Yukon took him on a 2,000-mile canoe journey down Alaska’s Yukon River, following the decline of salmon and exploring how the disappearance of the species was affecting the ecosystems, economies and cultures that depend upon them. Lone Wolf follows a similar thread. For Adam, the return of wolves to Europe offered an opportunity to explore not only the ecology of a recovering species, but also the people living alongside it.

“A lot of the work that I do has come to look at this overlap between people and the natural world. I seem to have built a career out of following animals around and seeing how they’re changing the lives of the people that live next to them.”

The Journey of Slavc

“It’s kind of a love story at its heart.”

The story of Lone Wolf began a decade before Adam started writing the book. At the time, he was walking across Scotland, starting at Alladale Wilderness Reserve, exploring attitudes towards the possibility of wolves returning to the Scottish Highlands. During his research, he came across the story of a young wolf being tracked by researchers at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. The wolf had been fitted with a GPS collar so researchers could understand how he moved through his territory. But instead of remaining within the familiar boundaries of his home range, the young wolf set off on a remarkable journey.

Born near Slivnica Mountain, he was later named Slavc. During the winter of 2011–12, at around 18 months old, Slavc travelled across Slovenia and into Austria before continuing through the Alps towards Italy. He crossed motorways, travelled through human-dominated areas and climbed high mountain passes, even crossing the Drava River having never swam before. Over approximately four months, Slavc travelled around 1,000 miles before reaching the Italian Alps.

There, he encountered a female wolf whose origins remain less certain. Genetic evidence suggested that she may have come from a small population in western Italy, near the French border. She was later named Juliet. The two wolves had travelled hundreds of miles from different parts of Europe and somehow found each other in a landscape where wolves had been absent for around a century. Together, they formed a new pack.

For Adam, this is where the story becomes more than an extraordinary tale of animal movement. Slavc and Juliet represented the reconnection of previously isolated wolf populations, with their descendants contributing to the recovery of wolves in the entire Alpine region.

The Return of the Wolf

For three-quarters of a million years, wolves completely dominated the Northern Hemisphere. But by the middle of the 20th century, humans had pushed them close to extinction across almost all of Western Europe, with only around 100 left in the Italian Apennines by the 1960s.

“It’s amazing what humanity can achieve when we puts our minds to something; in this case, wiping out this incredibly dominant species.”

Yet the only two wolves for thousands of square miles somehow found each other in the Alps, forming the first wolf pack in the area for around a century. Having originated from separate, isolated populations, their meeting brought together new genetic diversity, helping to reduce the risks associated with genetic bottlenecks and inbreeding.

The wolf’s return across Europe has come entirely under its own steam. Nowhere in mainland Europe has the wolf been reintroduced – they’ve done it themselves, by setting out on journeys like this one.

Wolves and People

When he was writing the book, Adam wanted to understand the experiences of the people he met, including shepherds and farmers dealing with the practical realities of living alongside large carnivores. Many of the communities he encountered were already facing significant pressures. Drought, rising energy and animal-feed costs, an ageing farming population and the challenges of maintaining traditional rural livelihoods were all part of the wider picture. Against this backdrop, the return of wolves could become another source of frustration.

“It’s illegal to go and shoot a wolf, but I would meet people who felt that that was a risk worth taking just to help them feel like they had some kind of agency over their lives. I saw the wolf being scapegoated for these much more complicated, complex issues that are happening in the Alps at the moment.”

As Adam explained, the wolf can sometimes feel like a problem that people can actually act upon – perhaps more directly than taking action against the broader sociopolitical environment that too often limits the rural opportunity to make a comfortable living. But the story could not simply be reduced to conservationists versus farmers. Many of the farmers he met had deep personal relationships with their animals and were maintaining traditions that had shaped mountain communities for generations.

“To me, the question has to be, how do you preserve both biodiversity and cultural diversity at the same time?”

It is a question that sits at the heart of the wider challenge of coexistence. 

Protecting Biodiversity and Cultural Diversity

One of the recurring themes of Adam’s journey was that the conservation of wildlife cannot always be separated from the future of rural communities. Across Europe, traditional ways of working the land are changing. Younger generations are leaving rural areas, farming communities are ageing, and some traditional knowledge and practices are at risk of disappearing. Adam sees a parallel between this and the biodiversity crisis.

“I often feel that, as much as we have a biodiversity crisis, we also have a cultural crisis.”

The challenge, says Adam, is not simply to bring wildlife back, but to find ways for wild species and rural communities to thrive alongside one another. It is a question that offers a different way of thinking about conservation: not simply protecting wildlife from people, but finding ways for people and wildlife to share the same landscapes. This is where taking a holistic approach to wolf conservation, with a focus on practical coexistence measures, becomes so vital.

This is the driving philosophy behind TENT’s Coexistence Adventures. TENT and Adam believe that ecotourism is a fundamental part of conservation; that it can be a force for good. When responsibly designed, nature-based tourism helps fund conservation, supports local livelihoods and small, nature-based businesses, while building public support for protecting the remaining wild parts of our continent. Every Coexistence Adventure is built around that principle. What’s more, our trips are designed in partnership with conservationists behind Europe’s most impactful conservation projects.

The challenges are real, but Adam’s journey also showed that coexistence is possible. Across the landscapes he travelled through, he encountered practical measures designed to reduce conflict between wolves and livestock. These included electric fencing and livestock guardian dogs, including the Maremma-Abruzzese sheepdogs traditionally used to protect flocks.

One example stood out. In the area where Slavc and Juliet established themselves, Adam met a young couple who had moved into shepherding after previous careers elsewhere. They spent their summers in the mountains with their flock, using electric fencing and four guardian dogs to protect their sheep, and had never lost a sheep.

Their experience demonstrated both the potential of coexistence measures and the reality of what they require: time, labour, knowledge and a commitment to actively managing livestock alongside predators. Compensation for livestock losses can also play an important role, but Adam found that it cannot always address the emotional impact of losing an animal.

For communities whose livelihoods and traditions are closely tied to their animals, coexistence therefore requires more than financial compensation. It requires practical support and solutions that work within the realities of rural life.