Lothian woman makes tracks in wolf country
A SOCIAL worker from Midlothian has spent two weeks tracking wolves in mountains on the border between Poland and the Ukraine.
Sue Green, 47, helped discover that wolves in the Carpathian Mountains preferred to eat deer rather than sheep, despite claims by farmers that their flocks were being decimated by growing numbers of wolves. There have been calls to return wild wolves to the Scottish Highlands where they once lived before being hunted to extinction. Deer are regularly culled by hunters to prevent herds becoming too big.
Ms Green , who braved harsh winter conditions in dense forest, which is home to many predators including bears and lynx during her stay, said they walked for ten miles a day in search of wolves.
“We did manage to find a lot of dung which we then dried and put in a special machine which showed what the wolves had eaten. We found deer in its faeces and we could also see from samples in the bone marrow of the deer that the wolves had only been eating old deer.
“So this lent weight to the argument that wolves are actually helping the deer population by thinning out the weak, leaving more food for the young and healthy.”