“I had just dropped my son off at his nanny's and was on my way home when I saw him. He passed two or three meters from the car, ”says Marina Varraniac-François.
This 28-year-old mother still can't believe it. Monday, around 10 am, she came face to face with ... a wolf, less than a kilometer from her home, in the town of Gurat, in the south-east of Charente.
The young woman had the presence of mind to take out her smartphone, film and photograph the animal: “I initially thought it was a large dog, but it looked very much like a wolf. He was scared, it showed that he was afraid. "
The French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) and the Charente prefecture this Tuesday morning authenticated this observation as being that of a gray wolf. Without knowing it, Marina Varraniac-François thus contemplated the first canis lupus lupus crossed in Charente since September 19, 1926. That day, reports the daily Charente Libre, the wolf had killed eleven sheep in Hiesse, on the border of the Vienna.
Monday, his chance meeting quickly spread in the department. “Two OFB experts came the same evening. I was waiting for their confirmation. For me, wolves are in the mountains, ”says Marina Varraniac-François, who lives in a hamlet lost between forests and hilly fields.
In the territory search phase
In New Aquitaine, the presence of the gray wolf was however noted in Dordogne in 2015 then in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques in 2018 and 2019. Last November, it was a nurse who crossed this protected species in the vineyards of Saint- Thomas-de-Conac, in the southwest of Charente-Maritime.
READ ALSO> Already 90 wolves slaughtered in 2019 in France, the ceiling raised to 100
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“The species is known for its great dispersal capacity, especially during the territory search phase. Since its reappearance in the Southern Alps in 1992, the wolf has traversed territories as distant as the Pyrenees, Lorraine, Burgundy, or even the Somme ", specify the OFB and the prefecture of Charente. According to them, the wolf could currently look for a new territory where to settle after leaving his group, a phenomenon called "dispersion". An individual, notes the OFB, can thus travel up to 800 km from his place of birth.
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