that this will go a little way towards convincing or inspiring you as to why we should allow
wolves and wildlife a place in our world.
So firstly, a little bit about me. I’m just a young ecologist with aspirations of becoming a
naturalist. I’m currently doing a PhD on the ecology of wolves in Poland, and spend my time
tracking these fantastic beasts around forests. This sort of adventure-based research may
sound trivial to some, but it serves an important societal purpose for two reasons. First, if
we better understand the wolf, we will be able to more effectively protect and manage this
conflict-prone species. Secondly – and this is the more important point − the ecological role
of wolves and other large carnivores in our environment remains a critical gap in human
knowledge. This latter point is important because biodiversity is continuing to plummet all
over the continent, and if we are to understand the reasons behind this, we must find out
how species interact with one another.
Apex predators play crucial roles in our environment by driving species interactions from
the top of the food chain. In Europe, this role is mostly played by the wolf, who drives land-
scape scale changes by hunting smaller animals. When the wolf is absent, as is the case in
many landscapes across Europe, serious disruptions to natural processes often result. One
of the best examples is the hugely overpopulated 1 million strong deer population ravaging
the Scottish Highlands. Here, with the wolf extinct, the thriving deer proceed to eat any and
every last bit of vegetation. This problem is what’s dooming the regeneration of the Caledo-
nian Forest, which once stretched from one coast of Scotland to the other. Essentially, Scot-
land has become an ecological desert devoid of any meaningful biodiversity due to the ab-
sence of wolves.
So aside from instilling a greater sense of wonder to our forests, wolves have a critical eco-
logical role to play. But what about their threat to humans – that which the wolf is renowned
for in mythologies worldwide? The reality is that wolves are shockingly terrified of humans.
So much so that after years of roaming through forests I’ve never even seen one. What’s
more, there have been no documented wolf attacks on humans in Poland for decades, possi-
bly going way back to the Second World War. Despite this, foresters and hunters are forever
spreading rumours about menacing wolves lurking in the undergrowth. This year in fact, a
local newspaper in southern Poland wrote about voyeur wolves ‘observing children return-
ing from church and school’. While this was a patently absurd statement, it’s not to say that
there is no threat whatsoever, but we need to keep some kind of perspective. There is
around one bear attack on humans a year in Poland – but nobody uses this as a pretext for
shooting at them. So using the same logic, why should we shoot wolves?
Tracking wolves
We monitor wild wolf populations by tracking them through forests. Through various ap-
proaches we can find out their population numbers, number of pups, diet and a host of