Wolves In Southern Europe

Bird On! News
28th March 1997

Chris Mead

I do appreciate that Wolves are not birds but there is a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology (33, 1561-1571) by Alberto Meriggi and Sandro Lovari which is very interesting. They have carefully looked at 15 previous studies of Wolf predation in Southern Europe. These often showed that they were mainly feeding on domestic livestock and this inevitably brought them into conflict with the local farmers - conservation confrontation in a big way!

Their solution is very interesting because the detailed analysis indicated that the wild ungulates were much preferred to the domestic ones and the fact that these were extinct or scarce in the areas with most predation on domestic stock indicated the solution. Reintroduce several wild ungulates to give the Wolves back their natural food resource and the sheep and goats will be bale to live in relative peace.