I recently received this mail which provoked the following debate on the forum here.
I was interested to read your article on http://www.iberianature.com/material/wolf.html.
“On the 4th of July at about 10 am I was leading a group of 7 trekkers from the UK down a mountain path in the Picos de Europa. We went from Refugio J D Ubeda to Sortes (I think this is just inside Austurias). At about 1000m altitude on a bend in the path we stopped for a break and quickly noted all the goats on the nearby hillside were all looking at another single animal higher up on the slope.
Getting my monocular focused it clearly was a large carnivore (bigger than a adult goat) which appeared to be trying to stalk the goats and some nearby sheep. There were no other humans visible in the area. It’s muscles in the shoulders were visible as it walked like a big cat. My immediate thought was that it looked like a Puma but the distance and background made the shape of its head difficult to see. It was being harassed by a couple of diving choughs or ravens, the spooked goats kept moving away from it, so in the end it just sat up on it’s haunches and looked at us.
Could this have been a Wolf ?
I attach some of my long range grainy photos that could be anything from a Big Foot to a Martian but I suspect it was a Wolf.
My apologies if you get lots of stupid questions like this all the
time but this ‘Beast of the Picos’ is bugging us.
Yours,
IO1 Steve Houghton