Co-author Irina Rotenko
This May we succeeded in obtaining more than one hundred 20‑second video clips of a mother wolf with her pups in an open couch‑den situated in a treefall. Over three consecutive days (19th–21st May), our camera trap recorded almost three full 24‑hour cycles of the family’s life.
In brief, the sequence of events was as follows:
Evening — nursing for 16 minutes
Absence — 58 minutes
Late evening — nursing for 70 minutes
Early night — absence for 141 minutes
Night — nursing and sleeping with the eight pups (about two weeks old) for 353 minutes
Morning — absence for 324 minutes
Afternoon — nursing and sleeping with the pups for 233 minutes
Relocation phase I — both mother and father relocated pups from this den somewhere for 74 minutes; after each pup was taken, the mother returned and stayed with the remaining pups for up to 9 minutes to calm them
Relocation phase II — over almost five hours, the pups were again relocated one by one through the former den but in the opposite direction; both parents continued this relocation for nearly 17 hours since the afternoon
The second relocation led the family far away, approximately 2.6 km from the initial den. There the pups were placed in raspberry bushes on a clearcut with early reforestation, near an abandoned red fox burrow. This is the same area where the wolf pair denned in late March 2025. Interestingly, that both parents checked the initial den several times after the second relocating of the pups.
Zoology by Vadim Sidorovich 