May Blog

On Good Friday we had dinner with friends in Säljemar, just north of Gävle. Sitting in their glassed-in verandah overlooking the still frozen Baltic Sea in the hazy light of dusk, we could not have asked for a more picture-perfect setting.

Suddenly our host pointed out to the ice and we all turned to look.

"It's a wolf," I cried. The big and squarish animal that was walking across the ice along the horizon could not have been anything else. We were not all in agreement about what we had seen. There were more people around the table who believed what we had seen was a fox. But this animal was too big and did not seem to have the nimbleness of a fox.

It all happened so quickly that we unfortunately had no time to take a closer look at the animal through binoculars.

There are more wolves in Sweden now than there have been for almost a hundred years. 27 wolves or about ten percent of the population was culled in the winter in the first (sanctioned) wolf-hunt in more than fifty years (SwPress Mar10).

Wolves have been spotted in the south of Sweden, in Stockholm suburbs and on the ice close to where we were near Gävle. Three wolves were recently killed by a train in Dalarna. The police even followed one lone wolf that crossed right through the center of Stockholm one night.

Still it is a privilege to actually see one.