---
title: "Wolves, lynx and bears in Czechia – myths, facts and what to do if you meet one (interview with an expert)"
description: "An interview with an expert from Hnutí DUHA Šelmy about wolves, lynx and bears. We debunk myths and reveal their role in nature. How and why should we protect our large carnivores?"
canonical_url: "https://gramino.com/blog/wolves-lynx-and-bears-in-czechia"
last_updated: "2024-05-31"
---

# Wolves, lynx and bears in Czechia – myths, facts and what to do if you meet one (interview with an expert)

Authors: David Czempka

Date: 2024-05-31

An interview with an expert from Hnutí DUHA Šelmy about wolves, lynx and bears. We debunk myths and reveal their role in nature. How and why should we protect our large carnivores?

We filmed a video with Jirka Labuda, a field worker from the Czech large-carnivore conservation group Hnutí DUHA Šelmy, where he explains why protecting large carnivores in our country matters **clearly, in an accessible way and with concrete examples**. How are large carnivores spreading into our country? And what myths do people spread about them? Could you actually run into one while hiking through the Czech wilderness? And what's the situation like in Slovakia? **And what should you do if you do meet one?** You'll find all this and plenty of other interesting, useful information in the video, or you can read our conversation together in this article.

[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWJ1T9naeFo)

**David:** When we head out into nature, it's good to remember that we're entering places that are home to all kinds of animals. In this video, we'll look at the biggest animals you can meet in the Czech wilderness – large carnivores.

Here at Gramino, we believe large carnivores **are an integral part of a healthy natural world**. Since I don't know that much about them myself and didn't want to spread any myths, I invited an expert from Hnutí DUHA Šelmy, Jirka Labuda, onto this video.

**Jirka:** Hi.

**David:** Since I mentioned myths – what's the **most common myth** that goes around about large carnivores?

**Jirka:** For example, we hear a lot that **we drive around the country in vans releasing wolves** all over the place. That's definitely one of the biggest myths going around, and I can debunk it right here, because it's a myth from the very foundation all the way to the version that ends up spreading among people.

I can absolutely guarantee, on my name and word, that no nature conservation agency and no conservationists in Czechia release wolves. It can happen that someone keeps a wolf illegally and it escapes, but that's a completely different case from the one this myth is about.

**David:** Jirka, let's take this step by step... Which **animals count as large carnivores, and what do they have in common?**

**Jirka:** In our country, we can encounter three large carnivores. **The biggest is the bear, then we have the wolf and the lynx**. So we've got “only” three large carnivores here. And what do they have in common? They're at the top of the food chain and can influence the trophic systems beneath them.

**David:** Could you explain a bit more about their overall **role in nature** and why large carnivores matter? A lot of people might think it would be better if they had nature all to themselves.

**Jirka:** In nature, every creature has its own role. It took hundreds of thousands, even millions of years to develop into what we see today. And we can be glad that we can still see reasonably functioning ecosystems in nature. And because large carnivores **sit at the top of the food pyramid,** they serve several functions at once. One of the lesser-known ones is that lynx, wolves and bears can act as a kind of **“health police”**, limiting the spread of certain diseases within populations – for example among herbivores such as roe deer, red deer, or wild boar. For instance, in places where wolves live, African swine fever spreads far less among wild boar. And there are plenty more examples like that. So this is one of the important functions: they help stop the spread of certain diseases.

Another function is that large carnivores **don't let herbivores overrun the area** where they live, and they affect their behavior. So if we were managing a forest and wanted trees to keep growing up out of the undergrowth, large carnivores actually help foresters, because they increase the odds that a fir or beech sapling will grow properly instead of being browsed down by an overabundant deer population. So that's another one of the positive factors.

Another role of large carnivores is that they **put predation pressure on their prey**, for example on deer and roe deer populations. They force them to keep moving and relocating, which actually improves their fitness. Mostly it's an aging doe or a sick deer, or weak young, that get taken, and that's how large carnivores **keep their prey healthy.** It can sound like a paradox, but that's how it works in nature. It's the fit individuals that go on to reproduce, and the genes of the weaker ones don't get passed on.

**David:** You've already debunked the idea that large carnivores are back because Hnutí DUHA Šelmy is transporting and releasing them. **So why are large carnivores returning now** after such a long gap in our nature?

**Jirka:** The only reintroduction we've had – that is, catching a large carnivore and then releasing it – was with lynx in the Šumava mountains. But that was a long time ago, when a handful of lynx were brought over from the Carpathian population and released partly in Šumava, but also in other European countries – Switzerland and other Alpine states. That's ancient history now, but it had a positive effect on rebuilding the Eurasian lynx population in Šumava and the surrounding foothills.

The other large carnivores, though, **are spreading here naturally**. The alpha and omega of their spread is the change in legislation that took them off the list of game animals, so today they can no longer be legally hunted. Unfortunately poaching still happens, which is a negative factor – for lynx especially, it holds back their population growth. But other than that, they're spreading here on their own. So to sum up the specific species: we've already talked about the lynx – it still lives naturally here in the east, in the Carpathians, and keeps arriving naturally from the Beskydy Mountains. It's the same story with wolves, which arrive here from the Carpathian population, but also from the Central European lowland population, if we're talking about wolves settling in the Lusatian Mountains, the Ore Mountains, and Bohemia generally. They got here on their own too.

The bear still shows up only sporadically, in the Beskydy Mountains, and also belongs to that Carpathian population. It occasionally wanders in or makes its own way over from Slovakia.

**David:** You already said that poaching also holds back further population growth in a way. What other complications and problems make it **harder for them to spread?**

**Jirka:** Definitely **landscape connectivity**. Nowadays the landscape is getting more fragmented and built up – various linear developments like highways and railways are appearing, towns and industrial areas are expanding, and there's also **pressure from mass tourism** – motorbikes in the mountains, quad bikes, and so on. There really are a lot of negative pressures that people put on nature. But for now, large carnivores – and mammals in general – can still cope with it. Alongside poaching, that's one of the other main negative factors: loss of habitat and territory where large carnivores can live. That mainly affects the Eurasian lynx, because the wolf is fairly adaptable when it comes to settling in, while the lynx needs certain habitat standards and has limits it can't push past.

**David:** What are the  **numbers for individual animals or packs?** Could you break that down by species for us?

**Jirka:** The wolf population is going through the biggest **growth of all**. Since 2015 it has been steadily settling into Czechia, and it's been on the rise ever since – we can already talk about packs now, though individual animals can't really be counted. Last year and the year before, we're probably talking on the order of dozens of packs, so **around 50 packs**. In the Beskydy Mountains, it would be around 5 packs.

Another of the large carnivores is the lynx, of which there are something **like 100 individuals** (possibly up to 100) across the whole of Czechia, covering both the Beskydy and Šumava populations.

**For the bear, we're talking single digits** – animals that only sporadically wander in from Slovakia, staying around a month, at most 3–4 months, before disappearing again or heading back.

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**David:** You said there are roughly 100 lynx, 50 wolf packs, and maybe a handful of stray bears, which might sound like a lot to some people. What's the probability that I'll  **actually run into one of these large carnivores in the Czech mountains?**

**Jirka:** If we're wandering around Czechia, statistically we have the  **best chance of running into a wolf.** Partly because there are simply more individual wolves here than any other large carnivore, but also because wolves are very mobile and often cover huge parts of their territory. On top of that they're curious, so it can happen that in the early morning or late evening hours, when wolves are moving around their territory, we cross paths with one. But when that happens, it usually just looks like spotting a wolf's silhouette somewhere in the distance. And we might even wonder whether it's a wolf or a dog. After a minute or so, or a few dozen seconds, the wolf turns around and runs off. So that's roughly what meeting a wolf usually looks like, but we're really talking about a handful of encounters relative to how many people are in the mountains and how many wolves are out there. Seeing a wolf is more of a rarity, really.

**David:** And even that doesn't mean that if I meet one, I'm actually at any risk.

**Jirka:** With the wolf, that risk is genuinely very unlikely. And if we're talking about the lynx, then **seeing a lynx is a huge experience,** one we should remember for the rest of our lives. Not because it gives us an adrenaline rush, but because it's a rare chance to see such a shy, wild predator that still lives here.

**David**: And bears probably aren't even worth mentioning?

**Jirka:** With bears in Czechia, we can find some tracks in the Beskydy Mountains, but as for actually seeing one, **the odds of that are genuinely very, very low.** I'm out in the mountains almost 5 days a week, and have been for over 10 years now, and in that time I've only had 2 direct sightings of a bear. And that was when I was deliberately going out to look for samples and tracks, so I was moving through places where I knew a bear was present.

**David:** Jirka, you actually do monitoring for Hnutí DUHA Šelmy. Besides monitoring, what else does **your work involve?**

**Jirka:** It's a fairly broad range of activities we're involved in. Besides monitoring, probably the most important thing for me and for the rest of the team is **educating the public.** We run various seminars, we organize **wolf patrols,** where people can get trained on the topic, and then join various field trips and spend their free time in nature with like-minded people. Those are, I'd say, the most important activities. Besides that, we also work on **debunking myths,** and we inform the public about facts relating to large carnivores, and not just them. Those are our 3 main pillars – monitoring, education, and debunking myths.

**David:** How would you  **comment on the current situation in Slovakia?** A lot of people from Czechia head into the Slovak mountains. So maybe you've been getting some questions from people about the current situation too. What do you as experts make of it?

**Jirka:** We've definitely seen more questions about the situation in Slovakia. My take is that it's complicated, but complicated mainly for us, for people. Looking back, the bear population there hasn't really changed all that much over the past 10 years. It's growing very slowly. The **numbers are estimated at around 1,300 bears** in the Slovak mountains. It's just that more individual bears are getting used to human presence – these are the so-called container bears, which repeatedly visit villages and lose their natural wariness of people. Those are the cases that end up making headlines. And it's also directly related to the fact that almost every hiker now has a mobile phone and can document it, even a completely uneventful bear sighting. That drives up the number of posts on social media, and it can end up looking like Slovakia is crawling with bears, and that if I go there, I have a 50% chance of coming back with scratches from a bear attack.

So we really have to keep a level head about it and look at the issue factually. **We have a far greater chance of something happening to us on the drive to the Slovak mountains,** or of running into weather that gives us a hard time up there, than of being attacked by a bear. It's really still just a handful of cases, even though this year there will be some increase. We're only at the start of the year and quite a lot has already happened there. So we should be prepared for how to act if we do run into a bear, but we shouldn't panic.

**David:** Would you have any tips for someone who wants to head into the mountains? **How should they prepare?**

**Jirka:** Wherever we go – whether it's Malá Fatra, the High Tatras, Pol'ana, or anywhere else – bears really are present across most of the Slovak mountain ranges, so there's no point preparing for one specific location. It's more useful to keep in mind that we **shouldn't go into thickets, especially in the evening and early morning,** where there are unmarked trails, because there can be a lot of feeding sites there, or spots where hunters have raised hides for shooting deer, and so on. Bears can be lying low nearby, waiting for evening to come, and then head to the feeding site. And we might accidentally disturb them there. The bear will then defend that as its personal space, and disaster follows.

So the main rule is not to go into thickets. If we're on a trail and see bear tracks or fresh droppings, we should  **make our presence known,** letting it be known that we're out in nature and moving along the trail. If there are two or more of us, we should talk to each other. If we're talking, the bear will hear human voices from a distance and clear the way for us, pulling back. A bear doesn't want to meet us – in 99% of cases, it will do its best to

avoid us.

If we're walking alone, we **can sing, shuffle our feet now and then, snap a few sticks, or tap our trekking poles.** Basically just let it be known that we're passing through the landscape. That's the most important thing, and then also keep an eye on our surroundings. If we do spot an animal, we shouldn't try to provoke it, stare it in the eyes, or run... Whatever a person starts doing in a panic will usually just make the problem worse, and can trigger some curiosity in the bear, which might then start playing with us, chasing after us, and so on.

So then we should calmly turn around and walk back, if the bear isn't aware of us. If we do end up face to face with it, we really shouldn't stare it in the eyes, but should keep watching the situation – we can even try calming it with a steady voice. They're intelligent predators and can read our state. If I start to panic, that will wake up the predator's instincts in it, and it will get a bit more “revved up.” But if I stay calm, the bear will usually stay calm too, and may take the chance to check us out. If it can't tell where the voice is coming from, or catches our scent, it might stand up on its hind legs, look around, and then usually drop back down on all fours and run off.

I've had plenty of personal experience, including some fairly close encounters, and I have to knock on wood that nothing has ever happened to me. But I haven't yet had an encounter with a bear that had lost its natural wariness. In that case, where a bear is genuinely coming after you, advice gets difficult. If it comes to an actual conflict, running is no longer a good idea – the main thing is to protect your neck, stomach, and arteries, and not try to fight it, because that's not a good route to take. We really don't stand much of a chance against a bear. Even a 100 kg Mike Tyson probably wouldn't handle a 100 kg bear. So really, play dead, and then call for help quickly. But I hope situations like that become fewer and fewer, and we're never happy to hear about something like that happening anywhere.

**David:** And if someone really wants peace of mind and certainty, what about **carrying something like bear spray?**

**Jirka:** That's an excellent idea, and **I personally carry it too when I'm out tracking down a carcass** or moving through places where bears are more common. It's a kind of psychological safety net for me too. I've seen footage of interactions between bears and people, or hunters, from America using bear spray, and it's said to be more effective than a firearm. So if it's genuinely a proper bear-grade spray, it can work really well.

**David:** You've already mentioned the numbers for the individual large carnivores. How are those numbers established, and **how does the monitoring actually work?**

**Jirka:** We mostly focus on so-called non-invasive monitoring, which means that especially in the winter, **when there's snow on the ground, we head out to map large carnivores.** So we walk various transects as often as we can, under the best possible conditions, we cast tracks, and we try to collect genetic samples – from urine, droppings, fur, blood, and sometimes even carcasses. What also helps us a lot is **photo monitoring using camera traps,** which runs throughout the whole year. The fieldwork monitoring, where we go out to collect samples, also happens year-round, but mainly during the winter.

**David:** And what about **traps or something like that?**

**Jirka:** Lately we've also been doing more telemetry work together with Mendel University. That's already invasive monitoring. When we manage to catch a lynx or a wolf, it gets a so-called **tracking collar.** Using this device, we can track its feeding ecology, behavior, and distribution across its territory – where the animal roams, where it crosses roads, and plenty of other interesting information that we can gather and evaluate from it.

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**David:** I'd guess that based on this monitoring, you actually know which locations or areas have the most large carnivores.

**Jirka:** We've got the Beskydy Mountains pretty well covered. In Czechia as a whole, the Beskydy Mountains are actually the only area where you can encounter all three large carnivores. You can meet a lynx in the Beskydy Mountains, in Šumava, or the surrounding foothills, and occasionally elsewhere too, wherever individual animals happen to be migrating.

As for the wolf, it's currently on the rise, and you could say it can be encountered across most of Czechia, though mostly in the border mountain ranges. But wolves are very mobile, so you really can spot one even down in the lowlands in Bohemia, or in Moravia near Olomouc – though these might also just be wolves passing through from point A to point B, without necessarily having a pack or living there permanently.

And then there's the bear, which you can only encounter in the Beskydy Mountains, unless it's again some lone migrant passing through a larger part of our territory. So with the bear, it's really just sporadic sightings in the Beskydy Mountains.

**David:** Do any **facts about large carnivores that people don't really know about** come to mind? Maybe you could mention one fact about each large carnivore.

**Jirka:** A few things come to mind, and I hope they're exactly the kind that people don't know much about. Starting with the bear, for instance, people may not know that **bears get around 80% of their diet from plants, depending on the region – everything from forest fruit to apples,** plums, and so on. We often see them grazing directly on grass, so it can also be herbs, various types of grasses, and so on. That's one of the interesting facts – meat is more of a treat for them. For example, if they find a carcass killed by a lynx or a wolf, the bear will come along and eat some of it. But they actively hunt very little, mainly in winter, when they come out of their false hibernation, or if they don't den up at all – then they're forced to rely on meat, because nothing else is available in winter.

For the wolf, an interesting fact would probably be that wolves migrate a great deal. They're real wanderers. There's a great documentary, Wolf Wanderers, that follows a few telemetry-tracked wolves, documenting their movements from Poland to Belarus, or from Slovenia across the Alps all the way to Italy, and so on. Just recently, a record was documented where **a wolf traveled from Switzerland all the way to Hungary,** where it was unfortunately poached. It was shot dead. So they really are incredible wanderers, and Czechia is a kind of crossroads for these routes between various populations and sub-populations. So even if we meet a wolf in the Vysocina Highlands, it could be an individual from Belarus or even Italy. It's fascinating, but it's simply a fact.

And then there's the lynx. For the lynx, we could mention some interesting facts about its feeding ecology – for instance, when a **lynx kills a roe deer somewhere, it returns to it for quite a long time and quite often.** In summer, it often sleeps in nearby thickets and returns intensively to the kill for several days until it's eaten all the muscle meat. That's because meat spoils quickly in summer and decays fast – maggots can finish it off within a week. But in winter we have documented cases where a lynx killed a red deer hind, and once snow falls, the meat is effectively preserved. In that case, the lynx will return to that same kill for more than 14 days, occasionally even a month. It then consumes pretty much everything usable, managing its energy quite efficiently and choosing prey in a way that lets it keep coming back. And if it doesn't return, something has usually disturbed it, or it may have made another kill and simply forgotten about the first one. But even when it makes 3–4 kills in a row, it does a round and comes back to each one, and is really efficient about consuming them. So this actually debunks the myth that lynx hunt or wipe out roe deer for fun. They hunt in order to survive and to eat.

**David:** And they also manage that meat carefully, coming back to it again and again.

**Jirka:** Exactly. It's not that they kill a roe deer somewhere and then never go back to it. That myth might have been reinforced by cases where we flushed a lynx away from a fresh kill that it had only just brought down and was immediately startled from, so it might never have had to go back to it. Older observations like that may have led people to assume that lynx never return to a kill and only eat a kilo or so of meat.

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**David:** It also occurs to me to ask – does something like the **European wildcat also count as a large carnivore?**

**Jirka:** With the European wildcat, there can actually be a similar myth, where a lot of people think it counts as a large carnivore, but **the European wildcat is classed among the small carnivores, alongside the fox, the jackal, the marten, and so on.** It's no longer grouped among the big three carnivores we have here.

**David:** That was genuinely a huge amount of practical, useful information, so thank you very much for that. If any of our listeners or viewers are interested in more facts and information about large carnivores, **where can they follow your work and learn more about it?**

**Jirka:** The internet is definitely the most accessible option. Our **website, which is** [**www.selmy.cz**](http://www.selmy.cz/)**,** has plenty of information and various links. But of course we also have a YouTube channel, and we're on Instagram, and there's our Facebook page dedicated to large carnivore conservation, and so on. So there are definitely plenty of resources – you just need to click through, either via the website or via Facebook. There are definitely options for where to find this information. We also try to share current developments, both here and around the world, and we try to debunk various fakes or viral posts as they come up. Every so often there's some supposedly alarming sighting of wolves, say in the Beskydy Mountains, that turns out to actually be from somewhere in Russia, and so on. So people can find out about things like that there too.

**David:** And I'd guess you also have some fundraising pages or links, in case someone wanted to **support your work in some way.**

**Jirka:** We'd definitely be grateful for any support there. Besides having people follow us, the work itself is fairly demanding, so we're always **grateful for any financial donations too,** and you can definitely click through to some financial support options via the website as well.

**David:** Well, since we value your work and the health of nature isn't something we're indifferent to, we support Hnutí DUHA Šelmy directly and encourage anyone who'd like to get involved to look into supporting their work too.

**Jirka:** We really thank you and truly appreciate this gesture of yours.

**David:** Thanks for watching this video all the way to here. If you found it useful in any way, we'd appreciate a like, or maybe a subscription to our channel. And if you'd like to support us in what we do, we'd be glad if you picked something up from us and got kitted out for your own trips. Take care, and we'll see you in the next video. Thank you.

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