A GREY wolf that was returned to the wild after being hit by a car has covered 1,000km (620 miles) in the past nine months while making its way from northern Italy to the French Alps, say researchers who have tracked it with a radio satellite device.

Paolo Ciucci, lecturer in zoology at the Department of Human and Animal Biology at Rome University, said that signals from the travelling wolf showed that it had reached the French national park of Mercantour, which lies between the Côte d’Azur and the southern Alps. The distance is 350 kilometres as the crow flies, but the wolf’s route meant that it had covered three times that far.

Willy Reggiani, head of Life Natura, an EU-backed wildlife conservation project in Emilia Romagna, said the experiment began last February when the 11-month-old male cub was found injured beside the ringroad west of Parma. Gianmaria Pisani, a veterinary surgeon who examined it, said that it would almost certainly have died if passing motorists had not called park rangers.

The cub was named Ligabue after Antonio Ligabue, a painter and sculptor who specialised in wild animals and whose works are on show at a museum in Parma.

As the wolf recovered, the Emilia Romagna conservationists and zoologists from Rome University attached a radio collar to it. After final health checks and a hearty breakfast of wild boar and roebuck, Ligabue — by now weighing 28kg — was turned loose on a snowy morning in March between the Cisa and Lagastrello passes high in the Parco dei Cento Laghi (Park of a Hundred Lakes) in the Appenines near Parma.

Signor Ciucci said that the scientists monitoring the wolf’s progress had held their breath for the first few days as they watched the signals from the global positioning satellite on Ligabue’s collar.

In the past, radio-tagged wolves have rarely travelled more than 50km, Signor Ciucci told the newspaper Corriere della Sera. For the first four days, he said, Ligabue was disorientated, and did not stray far. Then the cub moved off westwards along the crest of the Appenines on the border between Emila and Tuscany. It crossed and recrossed motorways, stopping for several days in the Lunigiana area near La Spezia before travelling into Liguria behind Rapallo, Genoa and Savona.

Eventually Ligabue crossed the Italian Maritime Alps to a nature reserve in the Pesio Valley, in Cuneo province, and stayed there with resident wolves for a while before crossing into France at the end of September.

“I think he is still looking for a new life,” Signor Ciucci said. “He will eventually find his social niche. But he is very young in wolf terms. It is rare that wolves start thinking of settling down until they are two years old.”

The battery in the tracking device is expected to last until July.

There are an estimated 500-600 grey wolves in Italy. They are protected but are often poisoned by farmers and shepherds to protect stock.

DECLINE OF THE BIG BAD PREDATOR

In its heyday the grey wolf (Canis lupus) inhabited much of the Northern Hemisphere. In the 19th century, as more land was enclosed for farming, it was persecuted ferociously. Today there are at most 15,000 wolves. The grey wolf is Europe’s second largest predator after the brown bear, and it has played a key part in folklore, such as the Big Bad Wolf.

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