GW1909m: from Germany to the Catalan Pyrenees

Born four years ago near the Ger­man town of Nord­horn (Lower Sax­ony), he is the pro­tag­o­nist of the longest known grey wolf mi­gra­tion. Known by the tech­ni­cal name of GW1909m, in Feb­ru­ary 2023 this male wolf was de­tected in the Pyre­nean mu­nic­i­pal­ity of Vi­laller. The in­valu­able con­tri­bu­tions of a French cit­i­zen helped ex­perts from Cat­alo­nia, France and Ger­many re­con­struct his jour­ney.

Ac­cord­ing to the De­part­ment of Cli­mate Ac­tion, the wolf in ques­tion has trav­elled 1,240 kilo­me­tres. Pre­vi­ously, the longest straight-line dis­tances recorded were 1,092 km, be­tween Nor­way and Fin­land, in 2007; 880, be­tween Ger­many and Be­larus, in 2009; and 829, be­tween Switzer­land and Slo­va­kia, in 2022.

This fas­ci­nat­ing story began a year ago, with the dis­cov­ery of wolf fae­ces by the Spe­cial Ca­nine Group (GEK9) of Rural Agents in Vi­laller on Feb­ru­ary 13, 2023. An iden­ti­fied male had been known to be in the area since 2021, but au­to­matic pho­tographs dur­ing the win­ter of 2022-2023 raised the sus­pi­cion of the pos­si­ble pres­ence of a sec­ond spec­i­men. Ef­forts there­fore in­creased, re­sult­ing in the col­lec­tion of the Vi­laller sam­ple. The ge­netic analy­sis in­di­cated a lin­eage “w1”, re­fer­ring to the wolf pop­u­la­tion of Cen­tral and East­ern Eu­rope, the first case of this type in Spain. A sam­ple was then sent to the French lab­o­ra­tory An­ta­gene, which con­firmed its co­in­ci­dence with that of an in­di­vid­ual pre­vi­ously lo­cated in the re­gion of Bur­gundy, in east­ern France.

This same wolf had been seen on June 17, 2022, when a dri­ver spot­ted a wolf-like an­i­mal run­ning along a road in the com­mune of Fleurey-Les-Fav­er­ney, in the Haute-Saône de­part­ment in France. Thanks to this, an of­fi­cial of the French Bio­di­ver­sity Agency (OFB) man­aged to col­lect some hairs in a wire fence at the place where the wit­ness had in­di­cated the wolf had passed. It was dis­cov­ered to be of the same “w1” lin­eage, prompt­ing the French au­thor­i­ties to send their sam­ple to the Ger­man lab­o­ra­tory for cross-analy­sis. And thanks to fae­cal sam­ples analysed there in Au­gust 2020, it is known that GW1909m was born in a group lo­cated near Nord­horn, a few kilo­me­tres from the bor­der with the Nether­lands. Wolves have spread in Eu­rope thanks to strict legal pro­tec­tion since the late sev­en­ties.