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

Co-author Irina Rotenko Multi-breeding in a wolf pack is one of the enigmatic questions of the grey wolf reproduction. When we began to investigate the wolf reproduction in Belarus (mainly in Naliboki Forest and Paazierre Forest) in details, we found the phenomenon of a pack multi-breeding. Till 2019 we gained more or less detailed information about denning of 59 wolf breeding groups (i.e. pair or a complex breeding group that consists of two breeding females and adult male, at least) in Paazierre Forest in the northern Belarus and in Naliboki Forest in the central-western Belarus. Also, an au ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko In this post we address to a newly registered trend in breeding of wolves in Belarus, in particular relating to the earlier giving birth in wolves in Naliboki Forest, the central-western Belarus and in the whole country. While starting a detailed study on reproduction in wolves in Belarus in the 1990s, I (Vadim Sidorovich) visited all wolf-related local people (in total there were seven persons), who have relatively large experience in wolf pup searching in the country. Two of them (Lienard Jurevich and Baliaslaw Sadowski) lived in the core area of Naliboki Forest. Taki ..read more

Recently we found two hibernation dens of an adult male brown bear, which suggest complex hibernating of the bear. Initial hibernation den was made by the bear in kind of a wide burrow of 2 metres as long. Nearby this initial hibernation burrow-den there were at least five other tries to dig such a burrow-den. The farthest such a try was found on the distance about 80 meters from the actual one. All found preparation of the bear for hibernation were situated in young spruce-birch thickets with big rotten uprooted spruces. The November and December of 2022 in Naliboki Forest were snowy and fros ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko During the winter of 2022-2023, we continued our study on the wolf distribution in Naliboki Forest, the north-western Belarus. In the early winter we faced with rather low number of wolves in Naliboki Forest. In the area of about 2 thousands square kilometers there were found only two wolf packs of 6 and 5 inds as well as two lone wolves and two wolf pairs. So, a total in Naliboki Forest there were 17 wolves or slightly fewer than one wolf per 100 square kilometers of the forested terrain. The area around Naliboki Forest up 20 km as wide was lowly populated by wolves to ..read more

Co-author Irina Rotenko In this blog we have presented our own materials on the interference between wolves and lynxes in Naliboki Forest, the north-western Belarus in several quite large posts before. Recently we took several videos suggested an afeared behaviour of a wolf, while it was investigating a lynx marking spot. See in the below videos ..read more