Of all the creatures in the world, wolves draw me to them more than any other. I have longed to see them for more years than I can remember and I have always thought that getting clear up-close views would be forever beyond me.
I have spent many hours on trips to Spain, Poland and Sweden trying to get even the slightest glimpse of them but usually to no avail. I have seen a wolf, twice, on separate trips to north-western Spain but on both occasions the views were distant and fleeting. On other trips I’ve found the signs of wolves including footprints, scent marking, scat and the grizzly remains of kills, but have often been a few minutes behind them and never caught up.
The first time I stood in wolf territory, in Sweden, I could sense their presence in a way I couldn’t quite understand; something in the deep pine forest, the dark lakes, the misty meadows. It felt different to move through that land knowing they were there. That feeling captured my imagination like no other animal has before or since.
So, to celebrate a rather large birthday recently, we flew to Finland to spend time looking for wolves as well as other mammals that live in the northern wilderness.
…and on one night my dreams came almost unbelievably true…
We headed to the far east of Finland to Kuhmo, not far from the Russian border. After driving out to a ‘base camp’ in the forest to collect some provisions and a couple of sleeping bags, we moved out to within 150 metres of Finnish/Russian no-man’s-land. We entered our two person hide, with its comfy benches, narrow observation windows and holes for cameras, and settled down for a 14 hour stay and what we thought would be a long, and possible fruitless, wait to see wolves.
Defying expectations immediately, a brown bear appeared in front of the hide, followed shortly after by a wolf! They both checked the area right in front of the hide for some of the limited food that is put out to attract them. They appeared indifferent to each others presence; rivals in truce with the food available to both of them. Flying around them were gulls and ravens in good numbers, attracted by the bait but wary of the large carnivores.
As these two wandered off, another bear and wolf appeared and checked out the area for food. The bear took a large chunk of meat and trotted off into the distance while the young wolf continued to hang around, with yet another bear appearing. The wolf soon picked up a large piece of meat itself and ran off perused by the bear into the distance.
During the first few hours of watching, the cloud came in and it rained heavily. The photographs I took were given an extra dimension with the water forming beads on the long grass and changing the texture of the bears’ fur particularly.
We spent around six hours from the moment we arrived at the hide, watching the bears and wolves looking for food and interacting with each other. At one stage, a large male bear appeared and wandered through looking for a meal. In the distance a mother bear and two cubs cautiously moved through the tree line. The male bear spotted them and headed off in lumbering pursuit with the mother and cubs making a quick exit. Later the small family approached the hide from a different location but didn’t stay long, wary about the presence of other bears.
In all, we saw four wolves, the alpha male and female and two youngsters from last year. For a short while three of them came together, the small pack bonding in the long grass. One of the youngsters submissively lay on its back as the alpha male stood over it and the alpha female joined them. This stood out as a the sign of watching wildlife acting perfectly naturally, unbothered by our presence in the hide.
The tense truce between the bears and wolves finally broke towards the end of those six hours as the food diminished and the competition for that which remained increasing. The alpha pair started pestering a bear with the wolves rushing it and the bear retaliating and chasing after them. Some distance away, it was hard to see if any food changed hands but it was clear that the wolves were becoming an annoyance to the bear like crows are to the red kites that float above our garden at home.
Eventually, the bears and wolves melted away into the distance and peace fell onto the area, bar the odd screech of a gull or cronk of a raven. The birds had been there throughout the hectic period with the bears and wolves and the large number of ravens, in particular, provided a backdrop to the feeding. Also making an appearance were several white-tailed eagles, two of which sat just a short distance away, enabling me to get the closest pictures I’ve taken of these huge birds.
As the light started to fall, we were given one last view of the wolves as they reappeared close to the hide, seemingly on the purposeful journey to our rear. The alpha pair and a youngster passed in front of us and vanished off to our left, not to be seen again.
Now started the long wait. With another eight hours in the hide, there wasn’t much to do but patiently sit, scanning the distant treeline and hoping something of interest would appear. The Finnish nights in July don’t get properly dark, instead a light twilight descended on the scene. All the details were still visible, even the trees 500 metres away. Towards the end of the vigil, as the sun rose again, a mist started to form over the land. This turned into thinker clouds slowly moving across the land, from the open area into the trees. As the mist dissipated, a large dark figure moved slowly in the distance, a final view of a large bear.
I barely expected to see one wolf, let alone four, and so close that I managed to get some photographs I have only dreamed of capturing. Without doubt this was one of the wildlife highlights of my life, alongside very few that can rival it.
This night was part of the Finnish Mammals trip operated through Naturetrek and led by the brilliant Belgian guide, Jan Kelchtermans.
Next month it will be 15 years since I had a holiday that, with no exaggeration, changed the course of my life.
In 2009, I was in my eleventh year of my career and settled into a routine of working long hours and doing far too little with my time away from the office. I had long held an interest in nature but was doing absolutely nothing about it apart from some cycling in the local countryside and occasionally thumbing through the pages of BBC Wildlife Magazine. Essentially, an interest I had held since childhood was a barely burning ember of what could have been a passion.
However, a spark from the ember had been floating in the air for sometime, wafted by the pages of that magazine, in particular the pages showing adverts for wildlife holidays. Every once in a while I had noticed one of those adverts and had a cursory look at the linked website. On one such visit to those pages I came across a holiday that would eventually catch that spark and ignite it.
From being a child, I always felt a calling of the northern forests – probably after seeing pretty rubbish 1970s American TV movies about families surviving in the wilderness either after a shipwreck or heading out to escape the rat race. After very little Googling, I found the one I remember most, called ‘Sea Gypsies’. There were more including ‘The Wilderness Family’, with the father of the family seemingly always played by Robert Logan.
The holiday I had noticed was to just such forests, but those of central Sweden and the Bergslagen Forest in particular. It seemed a good trip on which to test whether liked such holidays; it was only a short distance from where some of my family live and, so I could see them while also having a few days in nature.
Having already arrived in Sweden a few days earlier, I was given a lift to the local airport at Västerås where I met the guide and the four other guests, before we headed out for the one hour drive to our venue for the first three of the next four nights. We were staying at the basic but very comfortable hostel-type accommodation of Grimsö Wildlife Research Station, which is part of the Swedish agricultural university. Here, amongst other things, they research the interaction of the country’s wildlife with farming.
That first evening, after we had settled in, we headed out in the minibus to search for European elk (älg in Sweden and Moose in American). The sun was dropping slowly, occasionally blinding us as we headed towards it amongst the roadside forest. It had rained not long before leaving Grimsö and the last of the springtime warmth from the early May sunshine was evaporating the lying water and steaming off the road’s surface with mist forming down at the bottom of the shallow valley meadows. We turned off the quiet main road and onto unmade dirt tracks, slowing down to a crawl as we rounded bends and came across each meadow amongst the thick pine forest. We drew a few blanks at first but eventually, standing at the edge of the trees, we saw two dark shapes emerge and there were two adult elk quietly grazing the long, damp grass. They after a little while sloped off into the forest but we were to come across more as we continued along the tracks, finding 17 in all over a couple of hours. In some ways these creatures were the stars of the trip, not just because they are the ‘kings of the forest’ but because we saw a lot of them. Quite often on such trips you get fleeting glimpses of an animal’s hind quarters as it disappears into dense undergrowth but in this case they were very easy to see feeding at dusk in numerous forest clearings.
Before returning to Grimsö, we stopped the minibus at the base of a walking track and hiked the short distance up to a rocky clearing high above the valleys. It was here that we would have our first attempt at trying to converse with the local wolf packs. With a bit of instruction, we cupped our hands around mouths and howled out chilly evening air over the hills and forest. After 10 or 20 seconds, we stopped to hear if we had a reply. Unfortunately, there no howls coming back and after another failed attempt, we headed back down to the waiting minibus. We were told that the wolves could have heard us much further away that we could have heard them, so I liked to think that they had indeed called back but just out of earshot.
The next morning, after being out late, we had a walk through the forest looking generally for wildlife and experiencing the Swedish wilderness. The evening before was the first time I had ever been in a wolf territory and it stirred something visceral inside me, a true sense of wildness and some trepidation. Even walking in daylight in a group of people, I felt the presence of wolves and a deep feeling of the wild and untamed. Walking across the uneven, moss and rock covered ground amongst the birch and pines, we found wolf prints, scat (droppings) and the very old remains of a wolf-killed elk with only fur remaining. That walk, rather than the attempt at howling the evening before, triggered a yearning to see wolves in the wild that has never left me and it has led to more trips in search of them in several more European countries.
The evening was spent focusing on beavers with a canoe trip on a quiet and slow-moving river. We were picked up by another guide and made our way to a nearby river bank where we unloaded three large Canadian-style canoes and launched them into the river. At dusk we moved off and paddled calming up stream, hearing the slowly quietening birdlife and the rippling of the water against the side of the canoes. Our patience was tested with a long wait and we had seen no sign of the animals by the time we turned back to our launch site. However, almost as we were about to give up hope, we came across a dark lump floating around in the water. A brief glimpse ended with a loud slap of its tail and it dived beneath the water and permanently out of our sight. We returned to minibus with only that short sighting of the beaver and with a little disappointment we headed back to Grimsö for the night. Little did I know that years later, in a lake only a few miles away, I would regularly see both adult and young beavers during annual stays at a family summerhouse in the forest.
The second full day started with some free time and I took a walk around the area close by the research station. Our guide had heard there was a very special nest that we could possibly go to see and we headed out to find it. After more walking over the uneven forest ground, we came across a tall tree stump with a shattered top. At the very top, at first hard to see, was a nesting great grey owl, sitting very still on a clutch of eggs. It seemed almost oblivious to our presence apart from an occasional glimpse in our direction but we soon reversed away so not to disturb this amazing bird from its nest.
Later that evening we again headed out into the forest in search of wolves in hope of hearing them howl. We had our evening meal out in the open as we sat around a warming campfire, which kept the cooling effects of the damp spring air at bay. As we sat around the first, the tour guide’s small dog walked to the edge of the huddled group and growled out towards the darkness. A shiver shot down my spine; ‘could there be a wolf out there watching us?’ I thought to myself, a sense of both fear and excitement coursing through me. A spotlight was shone out into the surrounding woods, going from point to point, pausing and moving on, trying to pick up movement or the shining retinas of staring eyes but there was nothing looking back at us.
Afterwards, we had another couple of attempts, at different locations, to howl out into the forest in hope that wolves in the darkness would howl back in return. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be and we headed back to the research station with perhaps the biggest hope of the trip dashed for a final time.
The last full day started with a long drive north. We may our way to a small lakeside homestead and then out into the surrounding forest. Eventually we arrived at a wooden shelter at the edge of a clearing. Set up with desk chairs, bunk beds and a toilet, we settled in for a long night as we waited for brown bears to appear. We had seen their paw prints on route to the hide but that was the closest we got to them. As it became too dark to see beyond the small viewing slots, we all headed to our bunks and in the morning the view was still empty apart from a cawing raven or two. The ravens called out a range of different sounds, varying significantly over the course of our stay in the hide. We were told that they have distinct calls when a bear is nearby and each time they made a different noise there was a little jump in expectation but each time the hope ebbed away again. We reluctantly and sadly made our way back to the homestead for a very good breakfast, but only after very gingerly opening the door to the hide, just in case the bears were waiting for us behind it.
With another long and uneventful drive back south away from the unseen bears, that was it, my first wildlife trip was over. The only notable moment on the journey was when we were driving along a particularly long and straight road and we saw a car heading towards on the wrong side of the road (for Sweden). It only moved back to the correct side at the last moment and we had slowed down to avoid it. Very kindly, I was dropped off at the home of my Swedish family and said goodbye to the rest of the group as they went onwards to the airport for the flight home.
What had I learned from the trip? Well, it showed me that wildlife holidays can be deeply immersive experiences, spending time in nature with people who know so much about it or, like me, want to learn and share it with others. I also found that you can’t guarantee seeing the wildlife but just being in the places they inhabit can be almost as good, even if you don’t see the species you really want to. I’ve come to value finding the breath of nature in the places I visit, the true experience isn’t always seeing a particular animal but being in locations that have so much wealth in their ecosystems that we simply don’t have in the UK. Overall, that trip really did reignite my love of nature and I returned enthused and energised to actually do something with that passion I had found.
That holiday changed so much. Within 18 months, I’d been on three further wildlife holidays with the same tour company, to the Scottish islands of Islay and Jura that autumn, to Iceland in the following late winter and to Spain, to look for wolves again, the following autumn. The Sweden trip also put the idea of wildlife volunteering into my head and I started to look for local opportunities close to home, although I didn’t do anything about it immediately. However, the idea was firmly planted and it was to become a central part of my life away from work.
In 2011, two years after that first trip, I had no more wildlife holidays planned and work was particularly busy and not very happy. Despite those trips, I hadn’t made any further changes to my life to grow that interest in nature. However, not being happy at work and frustration with my home life led to the biggest decision of my life to that date; to take a year off.
Over that year, I spent many weekdays and Sundays volunteering locally, nine weeks residential volunteering for the RSPB at three sites across Scotland and Wales, I went on wildlife holidays to Speyside, Norfolk, Mull and Iceland (again) and had 11 weeks in Sweden over course of four visits. This intense period focusing on watching and photographing wildlife, and volunteering, transformed my life after I returned to work, ensuring I was infinitely happier in both my work life and home life.
When I returned to work, I continued to volunteer both locally and more widely; with a local group in Cheshire, with an osprey project in North Wales and on RSPB Ramsey Island, with the latter culminating in a three-month stay in 2019. I also continued to take wildlife holidays including, up to now, another trip to Spain to find wolves (which I did), and others to the Falkland Islands, Finland (successfully finding bears), Botswana (twice), Poland and Zambia plus various self-guided trips in England, to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, and Orkney.
That trip to Sweden, eventually, via a very winding route, led me to take that second trip to Botswana, to the Kalahari, was where I met my wife, Sarah. So, finally deciding to actually do something about my wildlife interest, rather than occasionally imaging that I should, has changed my life way beyond anything my imagination could have come up with when I was thumbing those pages of the wildlife magazine and glancing at the wildlife holiday adverts.
Daft Mumblings 