From the moment the rangers first saw him on their trail cameras, the problem was apparent. The wolf, spotted deep in the woods of Italy’s Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park, was not grey like his companion, but an unusual blond. His colouring indicated this was not a wolf at all, but a hybrid wolfdog – the first to be seen so far into Piedmont’s alpine region. And where one hybrid is found, more are sure to follow.
“We thought he would go away,” says Elisa Ramassa, a park ranger in Gran Bosco who has tracked the local wolves for 25 years. “Unfortunately, he found a female who loves blonds.”
The blond specimen spotted in Piedmont illustrates the latest development in a worrying new trend. Over the past two decades, Europe’s decimated wolf population has slowly been resurrected through years of painstaking conservation work. Now hybrid numbers are rapidly growing – and if their spread continues, scientists fear they may put the European wolf – as a wild, genetically distinct animal – at risk of extinction.
A huge victory for my shading skills. The shadows on the floor don't really make any sense, but I don't care. The next task is to put this together with coloring, and then I'll be a real artist!
The narrative behind this piece is a few lycanthropes witnessing someone experience it for the first time, most likely a recently-bitten friend. I have little story beyond that, but perhaps it'll be expanded someday.
I'm slowly becoming a furry artist because all the other things I'm into are dying or dead, and this is the only community that still has lots of stuff going on. Though, I suppose Transformers still has pretty good momentum...
For at least as long as I’ve been involved in nonhuman communities, there’s always kind of been this emphasis on not just identifying as nonhuman but also being able to accurately label that identity under the massive amounts of terms that exist to describe every variation in personal experience one can have. Hearted identities were seemingly given the “middle child treatment” and experiences like flickers or links or even frequent cameo shifts were often harshly criticized. And while I’m glad to see much of that has changed now, there is still quite a bit of label pushing and a hierarchy of experiences.
Before I distanced myself from the therian community, I was a frantic mess trying to label everything and anything I experienced just to feel some validation among my peers. I lost sight of who I really was deep down because my focus was more on the labels and how to fit them than my actual lived experiences. Now though, I feel so much relief and confidence in my identities that I hardly ever question or doubt myself anymore. Not having a billion words to juggle around stresses you out a lot less, trust me.
All this is not to say I don’t sometimes like to have words to describe my experiences though! Specifically as of late, I’ve been questioning what the squirrel means to me. I sat with the possibility of being squirrelhearted for a bit, but that just doesn’t seem right; squirrels don’t feel anywhere near the same as bears, coyotes and Twilight for me. It occurred to me though that whenever I see squirrels, or objects and art depicting them, I immediately think of my daemon. Her tiny voice in the back of my mind squeaks with excitement at recognizing herself, the same way I do when I see a wolf. “It’s me”, she says, “it’s Philomena”, I say. I get this warm, aching feeling in my stomach like I just have to have the object, that I just have to be with my daemon in the physical.
So I wondered what I could call this feeling, an almost hearted adjacent experience. And I remembered the word I “coined” for such things as this - and many other types of feelings of being drawn to something -: Calling.
Squirrels call to me because of Philomena. I like them because they remind me of my squirrel-girl. I like watching their movements because it helps me visualize Philomena. I feel drawn to squirrels because they make me feel closer to her. They bring her to the front of my mind and briefly give us back some closeness to each other that we’ve lost recently. Without Philomena, squirrels don’t mean much to me. It’s only because she’s a red squirrel do I feel an affinity with them.