Bears, Wolves and an Iceman

The Archaeology Museum in the northern Italian city of Bolzano is heaving. Despite the crowds it is impossible not to be enthralled by the remarkable story of Ötzi the iceman, a Copper Age mountain traveller who met a sticky end and became entombed in ice for more than 5,000 years. He was discovered by a couple of hikers in 1991 who had briefly strayed from the main path. Alongside the well-preserved body, items of clothing, tools, weapons and food remains had survived the deep freeze. The story is presented imaginatively and authoritatively, and what I find particularly interesting is the breadth and depth of research linked to such an extraordinarily rare discovery.

Bolzano, with a backdrop of angular snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites, is the administrative capital of the autonomous region of Alto Adige. Alto Adige is also known as the Südtirol — much of this region is predominantly German speaking with a complicated history going back to the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One. To the German-speaking community, Bolzano is known as Bozen.

We have timed our visit by chance with the annual Piazza Gries Fiesta and following the museum visit, stop to enjoy a local Forst beer from one of the many sellers (I have yet to find a stand that sells anything else). A headline in a nearby newsagent catches my eye. The President of the local province, Maurizio Fugatti, is seeking support from the EU to cull bears and wolves in the hills surrounding the town. This follows the fatal attack by a bear on a local jogger in April 2023. Bears were reintroduced to Trentino province south of Bolzano from 1999, but the population has grown more quickly than expected, with young males in particular willing to travel some distance. At the time of writing, the jury is still out on the bear’s fate with a court having suspended a culling order following an outcry by national and international animal welfare groups.

Opponents to the bear’s reprieve are concerned that the growing bear population is not only a threat to local people who use the hills, but the bears will keep away those tourists attracted to the spectacular hiking and cycling trails that lace the hills and mountains in this region. It is an example of the polarised debate around the reintroduction of carnivores. I see no evidence of a dearth of tourists in Bolzano, but I have to admit that when my partner suggests we catch the cable car up to one of the hiking trails in the hills above the town, I hesitate momentarily before becoming rational again.

According to EuroNatur’s Christian Stielow, bear tracks were discovered in Germany near the Bavarian-Austrian border earlier this year[i]. Livestock were killed and the first calls for culling were also heard in Germany.  It is only 150 kilometres to the Bavarian Alps from here — not far for a brown bear. Are the people of the Bavarian Alps prepared for the return of this native carnivore or will there be similar headlines and pleas to the EU for a change in the law?

Back in Britain, the bear is long gone — along with all its other large carnivores. By the latter half of the 20th century, there was also a very real danger of saying goodbye to a sizeable number of our remaining predatory mammals: pine marten, polecat, otter, wildcat and some of the bat species. Hunting, trapping, overzealous game keeping, use of toxic chemicals and habitat loss were the key factors in the decline of these native carnivores.

Life without large carnivores is therefore the norm in Britain and this is our baseline. Each generation creates a new baseline and this baseline shifting makes it difficult to get across the idea that what is normal today is not representative of the past, that our biodiversity has not always been this impoverished. Today’s attitudes to the natural world have therefore developed based on an environment with a deficiency of carnivores. Farming has not needed to cater for arboreal mustelids getting into poultry pens and fishing lakes have got along nicely without otters.

Surprisingly though, things are currently looking up for British carnivores — a rare environmental good news story. Otters are in almost every river, which is a remarkable recovery since the banning of organochlorines. Polecats are spreading north, south and east from their Welsh stronghold since receiving a degree of legal protection, and the pine marten is now thriving in mid-Wales thanks to an astonishingly successful reintroduction by Vincent Wildlife Trust.

So, is now the time to bring back a few more? The lynx? The wildcat? The wolf? The bear? Or are we just too zoophobic as a nation? Too far removed from our primeval roots to share our countryside with the Eurasian wolf? Too far removed from those primitive connections our ancestors like Otzi had with the natural world. When Ötzi was found, he was wearing a bear skin hat and his Copper Age community would have coexisted with bears and other large carnivores. We make a huge fuss about a few hundred wild boar living in Britain being a threat to public safety, yet in France and Germany the boar population is more than a million.

As pressure grows to ‘rewild’, to bring back species that have gone extinct, will people in Britain embrace this or will our disconnection with the native carnivore population be a barrier to further recovery of our predatory mammals. Will ‘rewilders’ be able to address negative attitudes towards carnivores; attitudes that have roots in our history and culture or will all attempts fail when it comes to the crunch.

EuroNatur’s project manager Antje Henkelmann talks of the incidents in Trentino and in Bavaria as “… a vivid reminder of the potential risks and conflicts associated with the coexistence of large predators and the people who live or earn their living in their original habitats.”[ii] Antje makes the point that even with the most careful management strategy, conflicts between humans and wild animals cannot be completely ruled out, but it is clear that if reintroductions are to work then we have to get used to the idea of sharing our living space with wild animals. Certainly, work by EuroNatur and other conservation bodies has shown that low-conflict coexistence of humans, grazing animals and large predators is possible.

Only with carnivores can you have a healthy ecosystem and keep natural processes in balance. They are an indispensable part of our wider and wild ecosystems. This includes the Eurasian wolf, which has spread across mainland Europe and is now knocking at our door. Will we ever let it in?

[i] https://www.euronatur.org/en/what-we-do/news/learning-to-live-with-bears

[ii] https://www.euronatur.org/en/what-we-do/news/nature-and-species-conservation-have-their-price