Three weeks later the follow up report finally arrived. It turned out he had been sitting in a
gap in the mobile phone network: in his family’s so-called ‘denning and rendezvous site’.
This technical jargon refers to a small portion of a wolf family’s wider territory where they
spend most of their time. In Kampinos Forest, this unsurprisingly lies within a wet marsh-
land to which humans seldom visit.
It looks like Kampinos has recovered well. Last I heard he was still roaming around Kampi-
nos Forest. But his real adventure will start soon. He’s getting to the age where he will soon
leave home to establish his own family. The best part is, that with great excitement we will
be able to follow the next part of his life story.
By allowing wolves like Kampinos to return to our forests and thrive we’ve made progress
to reversing the damage of millennia of persecution. So I hope you remember the take home
message: stories about wildlife and the environment are not doomed to failure from the out-
set. If together we take an interest to care and manage wildlife conflicts, as we are beginning
to do with the wolf in Europe, it’s possible for us to live alongside the nature we share this
world with, ensuring the future of mother nature’s legacy for future generations.
An interactive version of this article with links to video clips of the Kampinos wolf pack can
be found at www.trackingwolves.com/introduction.
The author of this article is a researcher at the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish
Academy of Sciences. His personal blog can be found at www.trackingwolves.com. Follow
him on Instagram @tomdiserens.
Photo by: Tuluma Das