Wildlife and Conservation

1The wolf returned to the glen without announcement. One morning in February, a farmer checking his sheep found tracks in the mud beside the burn that he had not seen before, large and deliberate, following the line of the fence. He photographed them with his phone and sent them to a wildlife organisation in Edinburgh. By the end of the week, the confirmation had come back. For the first time in two hundred and seventy years, wolves were moving in this part of Scotland.

2The reintroduction of apex predators to ecosystems from which they have been removed is one of the most contested ideas in modern conservation. The science is compelling. Where wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in 1995, the effects cascaded through the entire ecosystem in ways that surprised even the scientists who had predicted them. Deer populations were controlled. Riverbanks recovered. The number of species using the park increased measurably. The wolves had, as biologists say, changed the rivers.

3The objections are equally serious. The farmers whose livelihoods depend on livestock are not wrong to be afraid. Compensation schemes exist, but they are imperfect, slow and often inadequate. The idealisation of wild predators by people who do not live alongside them is a recurring friction point in conservation debates. An environmentalist writing about the majesty of apex predators from a city flat is making a different kind of argument than a sheep farmer watching a ewe bleed out in the early hours of a January morning.

4What the return of the wolf to Scotland represents, beyond the specific ecological arguments, is a question about what humans owe to the landscapes they inhabit. Extinction is permanent. The species that were eliminated from these islands over centuries, through hunting, habitat destruction and simple indifference, cannot be recalled simply because we now know better. Some of them can, with effort and controversy, be brought back. The question is not only whether we can, but whether we are willing to accept the costs.

5The farmer with the photographs had complicated feelings about the tracks. He said, in an interview given some months later, that he had stood in the field for a long time after taking the pictures, looking across the glen. He had lived there his whole life and had never seen the land look the way it did in that moment: suddenly, and strangely, more complete.