Helping wolves in Bulgaria

Wolf Study and Conservation Program

Balkan Wildlife Society, Bulgaria
Progress report
July - September 2004


Summertime: For some, summer means beaches, waves, sun, chilled cocktails and dancing at night. For us in Vlahi it certainly meant a lot of sun - the summer is very hot here - but it also meant a lot of early morning and evening howls and I have to say that we danced Ok - but with wolves.

Starting in the first half of July and continuing until early August we did den-site determination surveys, using simulated howling. We covered most of the study area in the Pirin Mountains, doing morning and evening howls in different parts of the area. Usually it takes two or three people from a team in each area to accomplish this - some for howling and some for listening. More people are needed to listen for possible answers by wolves from different places because in the mountains, a slight change in your position can make a big difference to what you hear. By simulated howling we managed to locate one rendezvous site with 100 % certainty.

On 21st of July, early in the morning we howled towards a large valley and after just less than a minute, a whole pack with both puppies and adults started howling back, first a little sleepy and then more and more excited. They were just below us and about 300 to 400m away. It sounded like the whole mountain was howling. This was the clearest answer we received from wolves this summer.

We also determined two other locations which are probably rendezvous sites but the places from where we could howl were always close to rivers and when we heard answering howls, it was difficult to be certain of the directions. It is almost certain that we have accurately located those two sites though, because on many occasions two or us who were doing the survey heard same thing from same direction. However, to be 100% certain, we would like to prove our facts with additional data from tracking, etc.

After some of the rainy days we managed to follow a few tracks on forest roads and to find some more scats.

In August and September we used our time to sit down and analyse a lot of information from the data collected in Kraishte. Now we are close to the end of the survey and we hope that by the end of October the results will be published.

To turn our Large Carnivore Information Centre plans into reality we need to do a whole pile of things we hadn't even dreamt would be necessary. It turns out that, amongst other things, we will have to do a lot of work in the local municipality, from which we must obtain many different documents and permissions to be able to start the building work. We have also been involved with the architectural team. We had to meet the architects and the builder while we were planning the project in order to discuss out ideas and the long term aims of the project with them. Now the completed plans are ready and the most difficult time of all is coming up for us - searching for money. I say the most difficult, because we are not fund-raising specialists and this job is really quite difficult for us. Nevertheless, if we want to realize or ambitions for the centre, we do have to do this ourselves because we have no fundraisers within the society.

Prepared by:
Elena Tsingarska - Sedefcheva
05.10.2004