A Photographer Following the Wolf's Tracks in New Territories

As a wildlife photographer, Andoni Canela is also a tracker. He knows how to read signs in the snow, rock, or flora to locate the species he wants to capture. Bears, pumas, lynxes, and wolves, the most difficult ones. "You have to follow tracks, see where the wind is so they don't catch your scent, make no noise," says Canela, a 55-year-old from Navarra who learned to read nature by the Ebro river as a child. "You wait for them, you observe them. Waiting is observing. You need patience and confidence. When you feel there's no way and no luck, you must persist and know that the effort is worth it, even if it seems exaggerated."

With this eagerness to see what few have seen, Canela planned outings of two to three weeks every two months, an estimate that "is not exact," but approximates what these years have been like, since the late nineties, documenting the wild life of the wolf in the Iberian Peninsula. "There are areas where it's practically impossible to see them, like the Pyrenees or the Galician coast," says the author of works like 'The Call of the Puma', 'The Iberian Imperial Eagle', or 'The Cantabrian Brown Bear'. "Sometimes I could be there for one or two weeks and see nothing. But where the landscape helps, I can see wolves every two or three days."

Now this work will become a book titled 'Wolf Territory', with 150 photographs, most taken in the last five years, during which the species has expanded into new territories that Canela has also explored. Funded by crowdfunding, which ends on October 27 on Verkami and has already reached its goal, 'Wolf Territory' gathers photographs in fourteen Spanish provinces.

"Ten years ago I made a book with wild wolves in areas where they had never been extinct, like northern Castilla y León, Zamora, Asturias, Cantabria, and Galicia," explains Canela, who has published a dozen photobooks, four of them through crowdfunding. "But this time I focus on the territories they are reaching, like the Pyrenees, with Italian wolves that have crossed the Alps; or Madrid and Ávila, where the Iberian wolf that had been extinct for decades has returned. In between, the Castilian plateau."

With the wolf, the difficulty is double. On one hand, there is the clash with the population living in areas "where the wolf has been extinct and has returned, and there is a big rejection because it occasionally attacks livestock," says Canela. "We must try to coexist, trying to minimize the killings and, if it happens, seek solutions and support. But in rural areas, there are also social, historical, and political reasons, which contrast with the almost total positivity of the city."

The other difficulty the photographer faces is the cunning of the animal. "It knows much more about what's happening," Canela admires. "Besides having senses that are far superior to ours, they have better knowledge of the terrain and greater strength. In a battle of equals, wolves would have no problem defeating us."