Following the wolves in Slovenia

A few weeks ago, we organised a wildlife tracking in Slovenia together with a society Dinaricum. Almost 30 volunteers gathered together on a lovely Saturday morning in Bled, where we first had several presentations about the two societies and how to track wildlife. Our main aim of the day was to gather non-invasive genetic samples from wolf. This includes hair, scats and urine. The easiest way to find these is by following wolf tracks, which likely bring you to some of these.

After splitting into groups, we drove off to Pokljuka on icy roads. There, we took out our maps, planned the route and headed into the forest. We followed various forest paths and roads as wolves like to follow them as well. We did not have too much hope to find wolf tracks on the day because of a lack of snow and the presence of ice everywhere. However, soon we came across what looked like wolf tracks. As they weren’t fresh, it was really hard to distinguish them from dog tracks, but considering there were no human owner’s tracks next to them, we had high hopes. Walking on, we came across such tracks quite frequently. But even more common were red deer tracks and we also saw fox, roe deer, squirrel, and marten tracks.

It was a lovely day to walk around and search for tracks in a nice group of like-minded people consisting of two biologists, two foresters and one engineer. We had numerous interesting discussions, including which animals we’ve already seen. After two of us expressed a wish to see a bear one day, a PhD student doing his thesis on bears offered to take us watch them. So, I’m very excited to go bear watching with him in three weeks!

Towards the end of our walk, I noticed a big poop full of hair on one forest road. Could it be wolf? We thorougly examined and dissected the scat and identified large chunks of vertebrae bones and many, many hairs. The scat also had a very particular smell, one that is apparently typical for wolves. We also took a sample of the scat to be genetically analysed at Biotechnical faculty, University of Ljubljana. We set off further, happy with our smelly finding.

After we finished the tracking, all the participants gathered together in a restaurant for a nice dinner. There, we of course shared the stories and pictures of what we saw and found, and all-together, 8 genetic samples were found. Considering the conditions were far from ideal for this activity, we were rather happy with the outcome. We spent the rest of the evening eating way too much delicious food, chatting and getting to know each other, before we headed back to our homes. It was a very lovely day spent outside assisting wolf conservation.