After years of being hunting to near-extinction, wolves are making a comeback in some of their historical ranges in Europe and North America. With their return comes a growing concern that the predators are moving too close to human settlements, becoming bolder and less fearful of people. Researchers set out to see if that\u2019s true, running a four-month-long experiment in Poland\u2019s Tuchola Forest. Their findings suggest that the \u201cbig bad wolf,\u201d as portrayed in popular culture, still has a healthy fear of humans.<\/p>\n
Tuchola Forest in northern Poland is representative of the human-dominated wildlife landscape wolves are reoccupying across Europe, with a mix of pine plantations, farms and towns, the authors write in their recent study. Wolves (Canis lupus) were first spotted there in 2005; today, the forest has about 15 wolf packs.<\/p>\n
To see how fearful they are of humans, researchers attached camera-speaker units to trees along 24 forest road intersection across 1,100 square kilometers (425 square miles) of Tuchola, covering the ranges of 10 wolf packs.<\/p>\n
The speakers played one of three audio recordings when triggered by motion: women and men speaking calmly in Polish; dogs barking; and a control sound of bird calls, a natural part of the forest. The researchers then made hundreds of recordings to see how wolves and their prey, such as red deer (Cervus elaphus), roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa), responded to these playbacks.<\/p>\n
The study found both wolves and their prey fear humans. Wolves fled 2.4 times as often and abandoned the site twice as fast when they heard human voices compared to bird calls. Meanwhile, the deer and wild boar ran 3.4 times as often and abandoned the sites 2.4 times faster after hearing humans compared to the control sound.<\/p>\n
The camera recordings also showed that both wolves and their prey were more than four times more active at night compared to humans, who use Tuchola Forest mostly during the day for forestry and recreation, including hunting deer and wild boar.<\/p>\n
A 2024 study using camera traps in six European countries found that wolves were more active at night in all places with human presence. Only in locations like the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in Ukraine, completely abandoned by humans, were wolves more active during the day.<\/p>\n
Liana Zanette, study co-author and an ecologist at Western University, Canada, told Mongabay by email that it\u2019s previously been argued that wolves are mostly nocturnal because their prey are afraid of humans and are the ones trying to avoid people. \u201cIn Europe, deer and wild boar are hunted while wolves are legally protected so there is good reason to expect this alternative explanation could be true,\u201d Zanette said.<\/p>\n
But the Poland study experimentally demonstrates that wolves are nocturnal in human-dominated landscapes because they, too, fear people, she added.<\/p>\n