Are there wolves in transylvania

The poor sheep ran away terrified and in just seconds the hungry animal had grabbed a little lamb Almost any Romanian would recognise the speed and cunning of The Big Bad Wolf from a number of local fairy tales, and could predict its eventual downfall at the hands of the vengeful.

At the same time, according to the officials at the ministry of environment, real life attacks on livestock are on the rise, and calls for culls can be heard across the country, both from livestock farmers and hunting businesses.

Ovidiu Ionescu is a scientist, hunter and the man employed by the state to compile official information about wolves in Romania and come up with the yearly hunting quotas. We meet at his office at the University of Forest Research and Management, in the medieval city of Brasov.

Bear skulls hang alongside mounted antlers on the wooden walls. A map of the country hangs above his desk, peppered with hundreds of numbers which represent the distribution of wolves.

The wolf population, he says, lies somewhere between 2, and 2,, by far the largest in Europe and, in the Carpathian Mountain regions at least, one of the most densely compacted populations on earth.

Officially, the population is slowly increasing and the wolves' territories are spreading. It is the latter situation which most worries the government. We harvest large carnivores where the damages are registered. While the evidence does suggest a spread in wolf territories, the numbers and stability of the population is strongly disputed by many independent conservationists. Because there is no relevant and credible national data, nobody knows if the population is growing, is stable or decreasing.

The problem, as he sees it, is that the main monitoring and management of wolves is done by the hunting associations which, since the privatization of hunting in , have sprung up at an exponential rate. There are now almost 1, associations, each responsible for an area considerably smaller than a wolves territory, and each with a bottom line of making a profit. And for them, the wolf is competition.

Wolf hunting brings in little money. It is the wolves' prey - deer, chamois and wild boar - that keep the hunting associations in business. So the economic logic is clear - to get rid of the wolves. Every year, the hunting associations have to state the number of wolves in their areas, and give the numbers to Ovidiu Ionescu and the Forest Research and Management Institute.

This is the biggest problem. While the official numbers given by the hunting associations came to wolves, Milvus' count was considerably lower - between 20 and Ovidiu Ionescu is aware that the hunter's estimates are vastly inflated and, based on the theoretical estimates of how many wolves could live in each area, he calibrates the numbers down to a level that is at least ecologically possible.

This process, he admits, is "completely arbitrary" , and the final numbers are still well over double those found in the independent study. Add to this the threat of poaching, which Milvus Group speculate could equal or even exceed those killed officially, and the situation is potentially very grave for the wolf. Hunting does not only diminish the number of wolves, it also changes their behaviour, says Kecskes:. Predation results are discovered during the day, when fresh tracks can be followed in the snow usually backtracking from the kill site.

However, with clues from night activity monitoring, the intuition of experienced trackers, and much hard work, most kills are found. Throughout the year, and especially when the presence of livestock is not a factor, the wolves of Transylvania prey primarily on three wild ungulate species: roe deer Capreolus capreolus , red deer Cervus elaphus , and wild boar Sus scrofa , along with smaller animals, such as hares and foxes.

Despite the fact that wild ungulate populations are not necessarily limited by predation, and animals killed by wolves may not otherwise be available or desired by human hunters, the belief persists among many Romanians that the wolves are competing for this quarry.

Hunting in Romania is operated as an important revenue-producing activity for the state and for private businesses. Hunting associations charge membership fees and grant permission to hunt in hunting areas leased from the state, and foreign trophy hunters pay agencies to organize and outfit hunts. Non-association hunters are charged trophy fees for animals they take or shoot at but do not recover.

Trophy hunting — maximizing the size and quality of target animals — is a primary goal of much of the hunting in Romania. There are approximately 60, registered members of the hunting associations, but not all of them are active hunters every year. For each hunting area, state game managers determine optimum game populations based on its size and environmental characteristics. They monitor game populations, set hunting quotas, and allow a certain number of hunters each season.

When numbers allow, or a specific problem animal is identified, bears and wolves can be designated as game, and about wolves and bears are legally shot in Romania each year the annual quota for wolves is usually around , half of which is reserved for foreign trophy hunters, who typically do not take many. Thus game managers deliberately allow significant numbers of large predators in the hunting areas, consistent with national conservation goals.

Hunters generally accept this, at least in part because they believe the predators improve the health and trophy quality of other game species. A study in the Carpathian Mountains of nearby Slovakia seemed to confirm this effect when it found that swine fever among the wild boar population tended to occur only in areas where there are no wolves.

It is assumed that wolves frequently eliminate infected animals rendered vulnerable by the effects of the disease before they have a chance to infect other animals. Predation studies and local reports indicate that wolves in Romania also prey on dogs. The victims are usually from among the countless strays that roam the forests of Romania, but occasionally a shepherd dog or a pet is also killed, and it is clear that pet owners must take precautions in areas where there are wolves.

One morning during the predation study, a young forestry student from eastern Germany named Titus announced that he had found a wild boar kill.

We quickly piled into the project vehicles and drove the hour-long, bone-jarring ride into the home territory of the subject wolf pack. Stopping a short distance up a snow-covered track that fronted a heavily traveled paved road, we spilled out into a stiff, cold wind, and breathlessly followed Titus up an open slope.

Over a small rise was the dramatic site of the kill: bloodied snow stamped down by hoofs and paws in a circle several meters wide, hair and blood scattered about, along with two forelegs and a few flat sheets of boar hide.

The mostly fleshless spine sat upright on the snow, resembling the back of a miniature stegosaurus. A short distance away was the large head, upright and still looking formidable with its large, sharp tusks. A full-grown male wild boar can weigh up to pounds and is very capable of defending itself. The two wolves we were monitoring could not likely have killed this large male unless it had been seriously sick, or perhaps wounded by a human hunter. As dramatic as the scene was, I was especially intrigued when I glanced up and saw skiers swishing down the slopes of a small ski area on the other side of the paved road, perhaps meters away.

Were any of those recreational thrill-seekers aware of the violent drama that had unfolded so recently and so near? It is commonly assumed that wolves require vast areas of remote wilderness in order to thrive, indeed, to survive.

Of more importance to viable wolf populations is the size and shape of contiguous habitat, which in Romania, as in New England, consists primarily of lush, temperate forests.

For such a heavily populated country, the amount of undeveloped land in Romania is remarkable. People primarily dwell in cities and villages, and suburban sprawl is rare, since the economy does not yet support automobile-dominated mobility. It happens that the forested area of Romania is similar in size to that of Maine — about 27, square miles. The Romanian forest carpets the roughly backwards-L-shaped expanse of the Carpathian Mountain chain, and it is permeated by access roads for logging, hunting, and livestock.

Horses are sometimes still used to haul timber, not only because of the lesser capital expense but also in some cases to limit excessive damage to the forest. The human effect on suitable wolf habitat is arguably greater in Romania than in northern New England — certainly more people live near its forests.

Yet wolves live in Romania almost entirely unnoticed by the public excluding shepherds — in some places right to the edge of dense human settlements. A radio-collared wolf whose range included the forests immediately surrounding the city of Brasov , residents was discovered routinely traveling at night into the city with her pack to raid a trash dump for food.

These streetwise wolves have been filmed diligently crossing busy roads on their way to and from the dump, while the general public was unaware of their presence. In certain forests of central Europe where no significant populations of large predators exist, damage to trees from overbrowsing and bark peeling by wild ungulates is a serious problem.

In addition to slowing the regeneration of new forest, overbrowsing can lead to problems such as soil erosion and the invasion of non-native plant species. A CLCP study found that browsing damage to trees in study areas in Bavaria which has hunting but no large predators was 10 times greater than in Romanian study areas. While many factors influence browsing damage by ungulates, large predators may help prevent overbrowsing in certain situations, especially when browsers could exacerbate transient problems caused by drought, fire, or heavy insect infestation.

Natural predation tends to be a consistent, adaptable, and self-regulating part of the system that helps to maintain or restore the composition and dynamics of ecosystems. Zarnesti is at the center of recent efforts to realize economic benefits from the presence of wolves and other wildlife in the region. Thousands of workers and their families were forcibly relocated to the town from other parts of the country. In recent years, both factories have fallen on hard times, with the paper mill being all but shut down.

The unemployment rate has soared to around 50 percent. Wolves from Romania's forests stare out from the display of large carnivores in Sfantu Gheorghe's Museum of Hunting Trophies. Hunters from all over Europe come to Romania to shoot the same animals that the wolves prey on; deer, wild boar and chamois.

Yet almost no one comes to shoot the wolf. So, for hunters, the logic is clear: The more wolves they report, the more they are permitted to cull. Yet officials insist hunters are not endangering Romania's wolf population. Ovidiu Ionescu is head of large carnivore management with the Institute for Forestry and Management. He is responsible for drawing up the wolf hunting quotas for each area. We hunt between wolves per year, it is about 10 percent of the population and the wolf can easily recover up to 35 percent of the population, so the effect is more psychological than biological.

But the authorities here have their own interests in the hunting industry. Ovidiu Ionescu himself is president of the Brasov hunting association. For years, he has faced campaigns from conservationists over the lack of transparency in his wolf counting system.

The problem comes with the hunting quota for wolves. Hunters are permitted to cull up to 30 percent of the population. Even when this quota isn't filled, independent specialists believe many wolf deaths are never reported.

If the population reports are exaggerated and the wolf shootings are under-reported, the wolf population may plummet without anyone even noticing. We rarely see them, but wolves are a central part of Romania's forest ecosystems. By keeping down the numbers of ungulates such as deer and wild boar, they allow the new trees and vegetation to grow. This in turn provides habitats for birds and other animals.

But here in Transylvania, if hobby hunters continue to call the shots, wolves could well exit the scene altogether. Once hunted to near extinction, wolves have slowly returned to Germany. A wolf center in the north of the country aims to inform visitors and challenge their notions of the creatures as mere predators. Wolves were hunted nearly to extinction in Germany in the 20th century.

But over the past decade, they have been making a slow return. Farmers say the wolves are pests and should be hunted down. Sweden caps its population of wolves at animals, allowing for some to be hunted each year. Some argue capping the population - which was once nearly extinct and is now largely inbred - is arbitrary and cruel.

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