Bears and wolves return to the Beskydy Mountains after a 100-year absence

The Carpathian Mountains dominate much of Eastern Europe. Originating in Romania, they arch round into Ukraine, passing through Slovakia and Poland, before finally fizzling out in the Czech Republic, where they're known as the Beskydy. The Beskydy - like the rest of the Carpathians - were once teeming with scary beasts, including bears and wolves. A hundred years ago they'd been hunted to extinction. Now, they're starting to come back.

European brown bear

I've begun my journey at the very westernmost tip of the Carpathian Mountains. We're standing on a mountain called 'Spruce', and somewhere, around us, in these beautiful woods, live a handful of bears and a handful of wolves, which have only recently come back to the Beskydy Mountains. With me is zoologist Dana Bartosova, and she is going to take me into the woods now, and we're going to try and see if we can find some traces of those bears and those wolves.

We've been walking for about half an hour up this mountain track and we've come to what looks like evidence of a bear. It's a tree trunk and it's been ripped to pieces - huge chunks of this tree have been ripped down to the ground and shredded into pieces of wood. So Dana you say this was the work of a bear?

"It is. We don't know exactly how many bears there are in the Beskydy, but we believe there are at least five. All of them are bears who've come across the border from Slovakia, following the natural route of the Carpathians. At the turn of the 20th century they'd been hunted to extinction, now - thanks to a strict ban on hunting and the growing population in Slovakia - they're coming back. And that goes for wolves too - they started coming back here in 1994, now there are around half a dozen."

Of course not everyone shares Dana's enthusiasm for the return of the Beskydy's native wildlife. Certainly not these rather nervous lambs at this sheep farm near the town of Jablunkov, 40 km east of Spruce Mountain. Miroslav Lach's been raising sheep in these green pastures for the past 12 years. And he doesn't like wolves one bit:

"I've seen one attack one of my sheep with my own eyes: it was like watching a fox kill a chicken. The wolf crept up on the sheep and then jumped at it, ripping it to pieces. I know the conservationists are delighted that the wolves and the bears are coming back to the Beskydy, but I don't share their enthusiasm. Wolves and bears might belong to this area, but what are us sheep farmers supposed to do? The government has to decide whether it wants people to farm sheep, or whether it wants to support a support a tiny population of wild animals. You can't have it both ways."

The sheep farmers might be angry at losing valuable livestock, but conservationists like Dana Bartosova are adamant. These mountains, she says, are simply not complete without the animals native to them: and that includes predators such as bears and wolves.