Co-author Irina Rotenko At the start of June, we discovered wolf pup tracks alongside numerous lynx footprints nestled between the root plates of two toppled spruces. We installed a camera trap at this location. Following our visit, the wolf pack seemed to have moved elsewhere. The camera trap documented numerically repeated visits by a yearling ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko In mid-May 2023, an adult female lynx, whom we refer to as Mikhalina, gave birth within a densely layered treefall spanning approximately three hectares. She had three kittens. The following two photos depict the treefall. In the video positioned below, you can see the Mikhalina den as it was in March 2024 ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko Historical Context and Current State of Brown Bears During the Great Lithuanian period, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, brown bears were abundant in the Naliboki Forest and surrounding forest massifs. Reports of hunting these animals frequently appear in the game husbandry documents of the Radziwills and other magnates. Up until the First World War, the brown bear remained a standard game species and a relatively common trophy in the hunting collections of the local elite, indicating a high-density population in the Naliboki Forest. The Budy hunting manor, located ..read more

Co-authors Irina Rotenko and Viktar Kasilovich During the 2024 wolf denning season in Naliboki Forest, we initiated our study in early April and, as of early June, continue to employ camera traps to monitor three wolf families with pups. Our previous research (Sidorovich and Rotenko, 2019, along with several blog posts) indicated that lynxes, brown bears, and bison exhibit aggressive behavior towards wolf breeding. Additionally, red deer and elks have been known to attack wolf dens housing pups and those with roaming young pups. Regarding the aforementioned wild mammals previously identified a ..read more

Coauthor Irina Rotenko The Naliboki Forest, located in the central-western part of Belarus, is home to a dense population of wolves. Recently, brown bears have begun to populate this forested region, prompting an important question: how do these two large predators interact? Specifically, the aggressive interactions between wolves and brown bears, and the influence of their individual traits on these encounters, warrant further investigation. In Europe, observations of brown bears and wolves are mostly limited to man-made feeding stations, with only theoretical speculation available beyond tha ..read more

Co-authors: Alieksandr Mysiev, Irina Rotenko and Dmitry Mysiev  In the winter of 2023-2024, we’ve captured two enlightening series of footage featuring large road pipes, remnants of Soviet-era construction, now seamlessly integrated into the forest’s landscape. These structures, though abandoned by humans, have found new purpose as integral parts of the local ecosystem, frequently visited by various animal species. Among these visitors, the large predators—wolves and, notably, lynxes—stand out. Prior blog entries have documented their presence in such man-made structures: (1), (2), (3 ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko We wanted to know which animals scavenge on elk carcasses and how often they do it. So we set up camera-traps near two dead elks in Naliboki Forest (a large forest-swamp terrain in northwestern Belarus).  Both elks died in early winter, but under different circumstances. In the first case: a poacher shot a big female elk, but she escaped and died later. Her body lay in a small glade, visible from the forest edge and the sky. In the second case: a brown bear killed a big male elk and hid his body under the pine tree canopy in a boggy area. The two carcasses wer ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko During 2023, we continued our long-term studies on the wolf reproduction in Naliboki Forest (see Sidorovich and Rotenko, 2019 and other posts in this blog for details and more information). An outstanding feature of this year for the reproduction of wolves in Naliboki Forest was the relatively low number of lynxes (15-20 individuals). This is 4-5 times lower than that in 2016-2018. Lynx is one of the hostile species for wolf pups (Sidorovich and Rotenko, 2019; Sidorovich, 2022), and presumably killing of wolf pups by lynxes can nullify the breeding efforts of wolves. Ho ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko In our large experience and large dataset on wolf reproduction in Belarus (e.g., Sidorovich and Rotenko, 2019), there is much evidence that the widely spread idea of monogamous wolves is mainly wrong. Wolf couple in Naliboki Forest We studied the wolf reproduction in Belarus (basically in Naliboki Forest and Paazierre Forest) for almost 25 years, and during this long period we gained many kinds of materials (finding of dens with pups and tracing the litters until winter by camera-traps ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko In Naliboki Forest, a central-western region of Belarus, a dense population of wolves has long existed. In the past decade, brown bears have expanded into this forested area, raising a pressing question: how do these two large predator species interact? Particularly: the aggressive interference of wolves and brown bears, and how their individual characteristics affect the encounter, is important to investigate. In Europe, apart from the known observations of brown bears and wolves at man-made feeding stations and some rough theoretical thinking, we would like to say tha ..read more