Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 110

Between 1927 and 1993, the wolf was extinct in France. Now, helped
only by the restraint of people who might otherwise have killed them,
there are over 200 wolves there, in at least twenty packs, some of
which have spilt into Switzerland. 42 The wolves which began to arrive
in Germany from Poland in the late 1990s - almost a century after the
species became extinct there - have now formed around a dozen
packs. 43 Since they were almost exterminated in the 1970s, wolf num-
bers in Spain have quintupled, to around 2,500. They have also grown
rapidly in Italy and Poland. 44 In 2011, 113 years after the species
became extinct there, a camera trap in Belgium produced footage of a
wolf dragging away the carcass of a deer. 45 Another one - or possibly
the same one - was seen in the Netherlands in the same year. 46
Bears on the Continent have more than doubled in number over the
past forty years. Though they have declined to critically low levels in
France, Italy and Spain, they have been allowed to multiply in Scandi-
navia, the Baltic states, eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia. Now
there are some 25,000 in Europe. 47 Extinct in Austria since the nine-
teenth century, they have slowly been reintroduced, though with a
fair number of setbacks: they are the most difficult and dangerous of
Europe's large wild animals.
The population of European lynx, reduced to almost nothing a cen-
tury ago, began to recover a little in the 1950s; since 1970 it has more
than tripled, to around 10,000. 48 During this period lynx have been
reintroduced to the Jura Mountains and the Alps in Switzerland, to
the Dinaric Mountains in Slovenia, the Bohemian Forest in the Czech
Republic and the Harz Mountains in Germany. They have reintro-
duced themselves in other places.
The European bison, or wisent, the magnificent animal whose bulls
can weigh over a tonne, once roamed the forests and steppes from cen-
tral Russia to Spain. Soon after the end of the First World War it became
extinct in the wild, and only 54 wisent remained alive in captivity. 49
Some of their descendants were released into the Białowieza Forest in
eastern Poland in 1952. Soon after the collapse of Soviet communism,
I spent a fortnight there in late spring, pedalling silently down the sandy
paths on a hired bicycle, then stalking as quietly as I could through the
trees whenever I came to a promising spot. Scarcely touched by forest-
ers, this is an ecosystem of the kind which must have been familiar to