Iberian Wolf
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| Canis lupus signatus Cabrera, 1907 |
The Iberian Wolf is a subspecies of Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) that inhabited the forest and plains of North Portugal and North-Western Spain. It can be identified by its thinner and smaller complexion and a pair of dark marks in its front legs that give it its subspecies name, signatus ("marked"). Iberian wolves live in small packs and hunt a bigger variety of animals than other wolves, from rabbits to roe deer, wild boars and red deer and even small carnivores and fish. In some places they eat calves and other domestic animals.
The subspecies differentiation may be developed at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages due to the isolation of the Iberian Peninsula when glacier barriers grew in the Pyrenees and eventually reached the Gulf of Biscay in the West and the Mediterranean in the East.
Until 1900s the Iberian Wolf inhabited the major part of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the Francoist Government started an extermination campaign during the 1950s and 1960s that wiped out the animals from all Spain except the NW part of the country and some isolated areas in Sierra Morena. Similar politics in Portugal led to the extinction of the animal south of the Douro river. Luckily, some Spanish naturalists and conservationists like Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente claimed for the end of the hunting and the protection of the animal. Today, the hunting of wolves is banned in Portugal, but allowed in some parts of Spain but not others. Overall, the Iberian Wolf is expanding to the South and East. There are reports of wolves returning to the Basque Country and to the provinces of Madrid and Guadalajara. A male wolf was founded recently in Catalonia, where the last native wolf was killed in 1929. However, this animal was not a member of the Iberian subspecies, but (surprisingly) an Italian Wolf (Canis lupus italicus). It reached the region from France, probably from a reintroduced pack.
Some authors claims that the South-Eastern Spanish Wolf, last sighted in Murcia in the 1930s, was a different subspecies called Canis lupus deitanus. It was an even smaller and more reddish form, without dark spots. Both subspecies were nominated by Ángel Cabrera in 1907.
