Wolves are making a comeback in many parts of Europe
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Deep in the Polish wilderness, a camera trap has captured a pack of wolves hunting down a juvenile bison.
The rare footage suggests that in Europe, bison might be on the menu for wolves more commonly than previously thought.
“My mind was blown,” says Robin Wijnands at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “I was really surprised because I really didn’t expect wolves to hunt bison, especially when there are so many other prey available in the forest.”
The European bison (Bison bonasus) was once widespread in Europe, but became extinct in nature at the beginning of the last century due to hunting and habitat loss. Conservation efforts allowed the species to be saved from the brink and reintroduced into the wild in the 1950s. There are now around 9000 individuals living in scattered populations across the continent.
Wolves have also been thriving in Europe recently, their numbers increasing by 58 per cent over the past decade. Yet, only a few cases of wolves hunting bison have been documented since bison were reintroduced.
Wijnands and her colleague Tomasz Borowik captured the hunt in September 2025 using a camera trap, while conducting research in the Białowieża Primaeval Forest in Poland, where the first European bison were reintroduced in the 1950s.
At 7.25am, a pack of seven wolves began the hunt, attacking a bison herd of 11 individuals, distracting the adults and targeting a newborn calf. Throughout the chase, the wolves managed to bite and grab the calf by its neck two times, but on both occasions the adult bison fought back, charging with their horns. The herd then surrounded the calf to protect it, while chasing the wolves away.
The skirmish lasted 20 minutes, and it isn’t clear from the footage whether the newborn bison lived to see another day.
“The chance that the camera is placed in a location that captures the wolf-prey interaction is very low. It’s a matter of the camera being in the right place at the right time. So this is a lucky recording,” says Oswald Schmitz at Yale University, who wasn’t involved in the observation.
There have been concerns that excessive bison numbers might damage habitats or farmland and have negative impacts on other animals. In this context, predation by wolves might be a good thing, the researchers suggest.
“We don’t really believe, even if predation occurs more frequently than we think, that it would steeply decline the bison population, but rather, it could potentially help a bit in stabilising the population,” says Wijnands. “It would be very interesting to get a better idea of how often it occurs, and what could potentially be the ecological consequences.”
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