Happy Thought for 14 March, 2025

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

There once was a wolf that left his pack, striking out on his own. Contrary to the popular myth of the “lone wolf”, he wasn’t searching for solitude: he was actually looking for what many of us humans also seek: a safe place to live, a steady supply of food, and a family he could call his own. 

 

This journey took him three months and over 2,000 km, including swimming at least one major river, and over high alpine mountain passes where the snow would have been well over 6m deep. We know about this journey because not long before he began it, he was fitted with a GPS collar. 

 

This is Slavc (pronounced something like “Slawts”), running away after getting his GPS collar in Slovenia in 2011. 

 

Slavc running through the trees. Photograph: Hubert Potočnik 

 

Slavc eventually made his way to a National Park in northern Italy. 

The team who was tracking Slavc (actually, they were mostly studying the pack in Slovenia that Slavc had left behind, but they were also keeping an amazed eye on the GPS tracks he was laying) sent the coordinates to a local park ranger after it looked like he had stopped ranging so far, so quickly.  

 

Later, a researcher described the scene: “Somehow, in thousands of miles of space these two wolves - the only two wolves for thousands of miles - found each other. There's this incredible photograph of their two tracks meeting in the snow and then finding each other for the first time and you can see their joy at meeting in the snowpack; the paths of them weaving through each other.” 

 

(Yes, I tried to find that photograph, but my internet search skills have failed us all, this time!) Here’s a generic photograph of wolf prints in the snow, let your imagination do the rest.) 

Markus Trienke, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons 

 

This other wolf has been dubbed by local humans as Giulietta, or Juliet (very appropriate because this national park is just north of “fair” Verona). Over the next several years, Slavc and Juliet had several litters of pups that they raised to adulthood, and both of our original pair lived to a ripe old age for wolves in the wild (at least 13 years old, each).  

 

Image: Still from a trail camera of Slavc and Giulietta, from Italian nonprofit organisation Io non ho paura del lupo (I’m not afraid of the wolf) https://www.iononhopauradellupo.it/en/  

 

Thanks to the Rare Earth podcast for bringing us the delightful story of Slavc and Juliet. 

 

P.S. Happy Pi day! (also, it's always a happy day to have a pie.)