Rewilding Europe's lost wolves

Wolves have rewilded themselves across continental Europe – but not yet in the UK. It’s a hot topic for conservationists and for farmers. Poland-based Tom Diserens is an expert on how wolves affect other woodland species. Karen Thomas tracked him down

Welsh biologist Tom Diserens is working far from home, in Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland, having finished a PhD on how medium-sized carnivorous animals behave around wolves.

Diserens, whose mother is Polish, moved to Warsaw to study in 2015. He studied with conservation biologist Robert Myslajek, an expert on wolf genetics who traces links between populations in different forests. Myslajek and his wife Sabina Nowak have monitored how wolves have recovered since 1998, when Poland brought in strict protections.

There’s not much call for wolf ecologists in Snowdonia, where Diserens grew up – which could change if ever UK rewilders bring back the big, bad apex predator of our scariest fairytales. “It’s the first question people ask me,” Diserens says. “Are wolves dangerous? And then, what should I do if I meet one?”

Wolves died out in the UK during the 18th century, driven to extinction by culling, hunting and habitat loss. But rewilding has thrust them back on the agenda, as UK conservationists have brought back beavers, water voles and sea eagles. In the US, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, to great acclaim.

The UK has no surviving large predators. Advocates for wolves say that releasing them into the Scottish Highlands would control deer, helping woodlands to regenerate. The proposal has sparked heated debate, with angry headlines pitting supporters – Ben Goldsmith and George Monbiot – against opponents – Therese Coffey and Ray Mears.

Diserens is ambivalent. “On the one hand, wolves historically have a bad reputation,” he says. “But on the other, they’re massively glorified. There’s scaremongering about wolves threatening livestock, pets and humans, and there are claims that wolves will transform these ecosystems. The truth lies somewhere in between.”

Wolves in the wild

Poles are more relaxed about wolves than people in neighbouring countries, Diserens says. Farmers whose families have lived for centuries with wolves found ways to adapt, keeping dogs to defend their flocks.

Unlike Welsh or Scottish hill farmers, they bring livestock in at night – compensation schemes for wolf attacks require it. When all else fails, they use electric fences.

Białowieża Forest is one of the best places to study wolves in the wild. Three times the size of Anglesey, it’s Europe’s best remaining primordial forest. Scientists here have found that herbivores, especially red deer, avoid wolf dens and hunting routes – which helps trees and other plants to regenerate more quickly.

But Diserens looked at wolves’ impact on the midsize carnivores they sometimes kill; badgers, racoon dogs and foxes. He found that these smaller meat eaters follow wolves to pick up carrion, which may lead to wolves killing more of them.

“I still don’t know enough,” Diserens says. “But to find that these animals don’t avoid wolves here – that they depend on food left over from wolf kills – is an amazing result. Studies in other parts of Europe found that midsize carnivores avoid their predators as herbivores do, but we don’t observe that here.”

With no large carnivores to prey on them, the UK’s deer and fox populations are thriving. Releasing wolves in Scotland could help to manage deer numbers – and boost populations of the ground-nesting birds that foxes attack, Diserens says. “And with huge numbers of people being so interested in large carnivores, it could boost wildlife tourism too.”

Wolf attacks

Diserens hopes to tap interest in wilder spaces to bring tourists to Białowieża, but he sees barriers to bringing wolves back to Scotland. “It’ll be a hard sell,” he says. “Any region that lives for some time without an animal becomes accustomed. Even natural recolonisation in western Europe has become controversial.

“People have forgotten how to live with these animals. They feel wolves are being forced upon them. In Romania and Poland, where wolves have always existed, they are far less controversial. And wolf attacks on humans – though we cannot trivialise them; they do happen – are extremely rare. That’s three cases of wolves biting people in Poland in the last five years.”

A recent, global study confirmed that 26 people were killed by wolves between 2002 and 2022. That included 12 in Turkey, six in Iran, four in India and one each in Canada, the US, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

It concluded: “In Europe and North America, we found evidence for 12 attacks… of which two were fatal across 18 years. There are close to 60,000 wolves in North America and 15,000 in Europe, all sharing space with hundreds of millions of people… The risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.”

Left to themselves, wolves rarely trouble people, Diserens says. Problems arise when wolves get too close to humans – when people feed them, or leave rubbish. “They’d been foraging in bins, close to people’s homes,” he says. “They came to associate people as a source of food. They came to settlements and bit people. But once the wolves were shot, Poland’s news cycle moved on.”

People need to learn to live with wolves, Diserens says. That could mean specialist wardens, or insurance cover, or public-safety campaigns. But it will always be a hard sell to UK farmers, he predicts.

“Farmers in western Europe are having to learn how to live with wolves. In the UK, it’ll be a decision by policymakers whether to reintroduce wolves. That means the benchmark for bringing wolves back to the UK will always be that much higher. Doing it would completely change how people farm. You can’t let thousands of sheep roam unprotected through a landscape of wolves.”

Yes, wolves would help some ecosystems to recover, he concludes. “But it’s hard to predict how far it would affect deer populations and which tree species would then benefit. So people may need to hold off predicting that the wolf is some kind of saviour of ecosystems and biodiversity – yes, it probably will have some positive effects. But we don’t know how great.

“And on the anti-wolf side, it would be great to see more people accept that you can mitigate conflict, protect livestock and compensate people for loss. As the US biologist David Mech says, the wolf is neither saint nor sinner, except to those who want to make it so.”

Where are wolves found in Europe?

Poland’s wolves came close extinction between the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, when farmers tried to exterminate them. By 1972, Poland had just 60 wolves, most in the Carpathian Mountains and forests east of the River Vistula.

The extermination attempt stopped during the 1970s, when wolves became a game species, with regulated hunting. By the mid-90s, the population grew to 850.

In 1998, conservationists persuaded the Polish government to protect the species. The population has grown to 2,000 wolves and is spreading, through western Poland, into Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

“Now, there are wolves in all of Poland’s large forests and in many smaller ones,” Diserens says. “Wolves recover nicely if you just stop hunting them. They reproduce quickly and travel long distances. As long as there’s an ecological corridor between forests, wolves disperse themselves.”

There are now around 17,000 wolves in Europe, with up to 14,000 in EU member states. But this has brought a backlash. In September, European Union (EU) officials pledged to review wolf protection after farmers made complaints about lost livestock.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen led the charge. Last year, she lost her pet pony, Dolly, to a wolf attack. “The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans,” she said. “I urge local and national authorities to act where necessary. Current EU legislation already enables them to do so.”

Tom Diserens is a Welsh biologist living in Poland

Find out more: tomdiserens.com

This story is published in the December 2023 / January 2024 issue of The Environment magazine

Rewilding Europe's lost wolves