text: Intermediate 
  Robert Mys_ajek stops. Between two paw prints on a muddy mountain track, the scientist  nds what he is looking for. Droppings! he says happily. It is so rare to see a wolf that seeing faeces makes it a good day.
  But it is getting easier. There are now about 1,500 wolves in Poland. The number has doubled in 15 years. Wolves are  along with the brown bear, the lynx and the wolverine  Europes last large predator carnivores. Conservationists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are coming here to  nd out how the country has saved wolves who are criticized even in fairy tales.
  Bits of bone and hair stick out from the black faeces. It ate a red deer, says Mys_ajek, the University of Warsaw biologist. In my lab, I can tell you all about this wolf  not only its diet but its gender, sexual habits, age, state of health and family connections.
  DNA tests have shown that Polish wolves are travellers. One wolf reached the Netherlands, where unfortunately it was hit by a car. They have a very big range. They need space. The average territory required by a Polish pack is 250 square kilometres, says Mys_ajek.
  Can we ever reintroduce wolves to Scotland? asks student Alex Entwisle, 23, on a study trip to southern Poland from the UK. He and other animal science students have spent the day looking for droppings and paw prints in the Beskidy mountains of the Polish Carpathians.
  Their hot discussion topic is whether to reintroduce wolves to the British Isles for the  rst time since the 18th century.
  Mys_ajek toured the Scottish Highlands in 2015 for the Wolves and Humans Foundation and answered questions from villagers about the Polish experience. The big difference between Scotland and Poland is that we eat pork. We do not have many sheep here.
  The similarity is that we have a lot of animals  300,000 red deer and more than 800,000 roe deer. In Poland, we also have too many wild boar  about 200,000  and these are eating and destroying farmers cereal crops. Here, wolves are part of the solution, he says.
  The scientist says wolves can move up to 30 kilometres during a single hunt. The Beskidy pack is a strong unit, eight or nine animals. This year, we have recorded  ve cubs, two young wolves and two adults.
  We track them using motion cameras in the forest and by following their prints in the mud and snow. In each family group, only one pair of adults has cubs each year. All pack members care for the young.
  Mys_ajek, the son of a shepherd, doesnt understand wolves bad reputation. Why did we have to have the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, with its big bad wolf?
  He is fascinated by these aloof animals who remained in the wild 33,000 years ago when others decided on a much more comfortable life as domestic dogs.
  Mys_ajek says only scienti c arguments  the need to regenerate forests and control the wild animal population  can save Europes wild carnivores, especially the unpopular wolf. Natural predators balance the ecosystem. They reduce the number of herbivores, which allows trees to grow tall for birds to nest in.
  The ban on wolf hunting in the western Carpathians became law in 1995 and in the whole of Poland in 1998. There are now wolf packs in nearly all the countrys major forests where the wolves coexist with humans.
  The Polish government pays compensation for farm animals killed by wolves. Mys_ajek advises farmers to put up electric fences. He has helped bring back the use of two deterrents that, for reasons no one understands, wolves  nd very scary: strings of small red  ags (that you hang around sheep pens) and the Tatra Mountain Sheepdog.
  Polands wolves have been helped by the countrys late infrastructure development. In 1989, when the communists left power, Poland had only one motorway. Major road projects began after Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and they are required to consider wild animals.
  Attitudes have also changed. For many years, hunting was cultural. In 1975, there were fewer than 100 wolves in Poland. From the 1950s, hunting wolves was encouraged by the authorities. They paid a reward for killing a wolf worth a months salary. It was carnage.
  Mys_ajek says that Polish wolves are much safer now but they are not completely safe. Packs of wolves cross country borders and hunting still happens in neighbouring Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia.
  He says Polands new government, elected in October 2015, doesnt like wolves. The Environment Minister, Jan Szyszko, is a hunter. There are 120,000 licensed hunters in Poland and they have a lot of in uence.
  Being a wolf advocate is not easy. You cant argue to the politicians that wolves are a big tourist attraction. Most tourists want to see the animals but wolves stay away from humans. They have a very sensitive sense of smell.
  The 12 British animal science students leave the Polish Carpathians without seeing a wolf. Entwisle does not believe that Scotland will ever be able to match Polands success.
  It would be amazing for the environment to have wolves back in Scotland because of the problem of too many deer. But it would just not be possible because of the roads and sheep.
  There would be problems with farmers, too. In Britain, we like predators to be far away and to watch them on television, said Entwisle.