PONTIMIA PASTURE: Using a powerful torch, Aliki Buhayer-Mach momentarily drenches a nearby mountain top in light, straining to see if wolves are lurking in the shadows.

If the predator were to get past the electric wires stretched around this high-altitude pasture in the Swiss Alps, the 57-year-old biologist knows “it would be a massacre”.

She and her 60-year-old husband Francois Mach-Buhayer — a leading Swiss cardiologist — have settled in to spend the night watching over some 480 sheep grazing in the remote mountains near the Italian border.

The pair of unlikely herders are among several hundred people volunteering this summer through OPPAL, a Swiss NGO seeking a novel way to protect wolves, by helping chase them away from grazing livestock.

“Our goal is that by the end of the summer season, the livestock are still alive... and the wolves too,” OPPAL director Jeremie Moulin said.

He co-founded the organisation three years ago in a bid to help promote and improve cohabitation between wildlife and human activities, at a time when swelling wolf populations had emotions running high. “I think this project helps enable dialogue,” Moulin said.

Up to 400 volunteers will take part in OPPAL’s monitoring programme this summer, spending nights camped out in mountain pastures, watching over grazing sheep and calves. Aliki and Francois joined from the start, and now do two five-day stints in various locations each summer.

“It’s our vacation time,” Francois said, looking around the desolate spot, reached after a four-hour drive from Geneva and a nearly two-hour hike up a steep, rocky path.

Published in Dawn, August 23th, 2023