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 re-
turns home to find his baby missing, and Gelert with his mouth smeared with blood. Believ-
ing 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 inter-
est by talking about a few aspects of wolves and their research. My hope is