Grey wolf spotted between France's Charente and Dordogne for first time in almost a century

A grey wolf has been sighted near the border between Charente and Dordogne in southwestern France - the first seen in the area for almost a century as the once-extinct predator continues to spread around the country.

The beast was spotted and filmed by a local woman, Marine Varraniac-François, 28, on Monday morning as she was driving home after dropping off her son with his childminder in the village of Gurat.

The sighting was later confirmed by France's biodiversity office l'Office français de la biodiversité, OFB, and is the first confirmed wolf presence in Charente since 1926.

"He passed within two or three metres of the car," she told Le Parisien.

"At first I thought it was a big dog, but it looked a lot like a wolf. He was scared, you could tell he was scared,” she said, adding that it was “very exciting” to have wolves so close to home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b7UjPuCmRA

France’s wolf population last year surpassed the 500 mark, making it “demographically viable” in a milestone hailed by conservationists but which farmers warn could see an exponential rise in attacks on their livestock.

European grey wolves were wiped out in France in the 1930s but in 1992, an alpha mating pair crossed the border from Italy. Since then, Canis lupus has spread throughout the Alps, across the Rhône valley into the Massif Central and up the eastern border of France to the Jura and Vosges mountains.

It has reached the sparsely populated plains of eastern France, and there have even been unconfirmed sightings in the Paris area.

The sighting of a lone individual is “not surprising at all and is part of normal behaviour” for wolves, according to Yann de Beaulieu, head of OFB’s “big predator” unit in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, western France.

Autumn and winter usually mark a “dispersion” phase in which individual non-alpha wolves leave the pack of a given area to search for new territory. During their search individuals can “travel up to 800km in six months,” he told AFP.

A protected species under the Berne convention and European law, the wolf can no longer be hunted or poisoned. Yet culls can exceptionally take place when all other methods fail.

France’s agricultural and ecological transition ministry, which is in charge of protecting and regulating the wolf population, this month set the number of wolves authorised to be culled at 17 per cent of the population, thought to be 530.

If the number of attacks remains high, that percentage could rise to 19 per cent by year’s end.