Hunted to extinction but wolves survive to this day
EVERY October, just before folk don werewolf costumes at Hallowe’en, Wolf Awareness Week is held.
It celebrates one of the world’s most controversial species, historically vilified to extinction in Argyll, Lochaber and later Scotland as a whole, but now so ecologically valued there is talk of reintroducing them.
The Eurasian wolf, the world’s largest wild canid and most widely distributed mammal, roamed freely across North America, most of Asia and Europe, including Scotland, until they were hunted to extinction by the 1740s.
Once the wolf was revered rather than feared. One of the earliest depictions in Scotland is the Ardross wolf, an ornate carving on a Pictish stone of a wolf striding along with a leisurely gait, tongue lolling. Elsewhere, a genealogy of Anglo-Saxon dynasties records the East Anglian founder of a dynasty called ‘Wuffa’ and his tribe, who were known as ‘Wuffings’ (wolf people).
Evidence of wolves in Scotland turns up in surprising places. The word ‘wolf’ in Gaelic is ‘lub’, ‘Mac Tire’ (‘Earth’s son’) and also ‘madadh alluidh’ (‘wild dog’), found in many place names such as Lochmaddy on North Uist, and even Ulva, a Gaelic corruption of the Vikings’ name Ullfur, or ‘wolf island’, in Old Norse.
One theory argues crannogs, or man-made islands with houses on top, were built between 500BC and AD1500 to keep families safe from wolves. The animals instilled such fear in Lochaber during Queen Mary’s reign that the stretch between Blackwater and Rannoch was deemed unpassable, and refuges were erected for the safety of travellers elsewhere in the Highlands, termed ‘spittals’ – hence the Spittal of Glenshee.
A 400-year-old medical compendium, compiled by the Beatons of Mull, contains a ‘thread charm’ against wolves, placed under the door or threshold. Given people’s reliance on livestock, it is not surprising protection was sought from the divine, such as this Gaelic prayer collected by the Lismore folklorist Alexander Carmichael:
Lift our flocks to the hills. Quell the wolf and the fox, Ward from us spectre, giant, fury,
And oppression.
Wolves, it was said, when hungry, ransacked churchyards and feasted on newly buried corpses they unearthed. Burials were transferred to islands, such as Innishail in Loch Awe and Eilean Munda in Loch Leven near Ballachullish.
Calum Maclean, collecting folk memories in 1951, recorded Allan MacDonald from Bunroy, Brae Lochaber, saying: ‘There’s a place up in Glenroy which they call Achadh a’ Mhadaidh [the wolf field]. There was a woman on the hill taking home a creel of peats.
‘When she lifted her head to go there was a [she-]wolf with its mouth agape ready to lunge. She put her hand out to keep it at bay. She put her hand into its mouth and strangled it by thrusting her hand into it and choking it.’
Huge swathes of forest in Perthshire, Lochaber and Argyll were systematically destroyed to deprive wolves of their habitat and, as time went by, sightings grew scarcer. The story is that the last wolf in Argyll – possibly the last in Scotland – was shot at the Wolf Stone, Clach a’ Mhadaidh, near Furnace.
Lochaber’s last wolf slayers include hunter-bard Dòmhnall MacFhionnlaigh nan Dàn (Donald MacKinlay of the Lays), Andrew MacGillivray or Anndra Mòr nam Madadh-allaidh (Great Andrew of the Wolves), and John Dun Campbell, who killed the last wolf c.1663 at Achach a’ Mhadaidh (the wolf’s field) in Glenroy.
However, most famously Sir Ewen Dubh Cameron of Lochiel is credited with shooting the last wild-living wolf in Great Britain, near Killikrankie in 1680. Apparently, an auction catalogue for a London museum in 1818 put this stuffed wolf up for sale, labelled: ‘Wolf - a noble animal in a large case. The last wolf killed in Scotland by Sir Ewan Cameron.’ Unfortunately, the whereabouts of this piece is now unknown.
SNH said there were no plans to reintroduce wolves into Scotland, but they were breeding in captivity. A pack of European grey wolves live at RZSS Highland Wildlife Park, which opened in 2010.
In May, Ruby, with the father Jax, gave birth to her second litter of cubs – octuplets composed of five females called Pollidh, Brora, Suie, Meagaidh and Sneachd and three males, Cuillin, Cairn and Torridon – pictured dooking for apples before Hallowe’en.
Douglas Richardson, head of Living Collections at RZSS Highland Wildlife Park, said: ‘Although dooking for apples is not exactly standard wolf behaviour, because of the pups’ natural curiosity, they were straight into the water chasing the apples.’