hunting him, and he will grace our forests with his wild presence once again.
The wolf nine years ago and today. Notice how the wolf was confined to the sparsely populated eastern forests, and difficult to access southern mountains. Nowadays in Poland there are few forests left to colonise, which is why our wolves are now migrating further afield, to Germany, Czechia, and even Denmark and the Netherlands. Wolf occurrence data and wolf habitat maps are courtesy of Dr R. W. Mysłajek.
Now of course not everyone is as happy about the return of the wolf as nature enthusiasts like myself. To many, the wolf is a sheep-eating menace, to be exterminated should he ever reappear. Livestock eating beasts aren’ t just a slight inconvenience, they are a serious threat to farmers’ businesses. On top of this, the tales and mythologies of most human cultures present wolves in anything but a positive light: just recall the fairy tale of little red riding hood, known to all European children, wherein the wolf eats the beloved grandma. Or in Wales, where we have the legend of Gelert the dog, in which Prince Llywelyn the Great returns home to find his baby missing, and Gelert with his mouth smeared with blood. Believing the dog to have savaged his child, Llywelyn kills his dog with his sword. Only then does he find his baby unharmed under its cradle along with the body of a wolf that had attacked his child and been killed by Gelert. After that day Llywelyn is overcome with remorse and never smiles again.
Thus some people hate wolves and some fear them. But these conflicts have the potential to be managed and the mythologies to be dispelled. The recovered wolf population in Poland is proof that humans and wolves can co-exist; in the process long lost ecological processes can be restored and modern landscapes gain a little more wonder. As a scientist working on the front line in wolf conservation and ecology, in this short article I hope I can pique your interest by talking about a few aspects of wolves and their research. My hope is