Poland has marked itself, in recent years, as a relative ‘rising star’ on the European city-break scene, and who can argue when you can boast the likes of Kraków, Gdansk and Warsaw in your repertoire? Beautiful as they may be, cities aren’t everything here, and beyond medieval walls, across rivers and heading into the wilds of Poland, the country’s hidden jewels shine.

A raven rasps from behind a thick foggy blanket as we make our way along the logging track. Fresh snow is falling for the first time all week, deepening the drifts that hem us in. Either side, gradually thickening forest stretches without end up and down mountain slopes. We pass a car, abandoned before the winter snows and buried without ceremony. It is still.

Winter fogs added to the intrigue. © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth

We’re in south-western Poland, just a couple of hours drive of the country’s second-largest city, Kraków, and on the trail of some of Europe’s most elusive residents in the Beskid Zywiecki mountains. Grey wolves, Carpathian lynx and brown bears haunt these forests, but you wouldn’t know from just looking. ‘Haunt’ really is an optimal word here, these predators could go years or even lifetimes without allowing you to see them, only small signs of their existence appear.

This ruin was surrounded in animal signs from scratches to prints and scats. © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth

We rise toward the crest of a deeply forested hill, the path forks. Framed by the fork is a footprint, a little smaller than a splayed-out hand. A lack of claw marks in the print confirm its identity, a lynx, and one that passed through not too long ago at that. We follow the tracks as they weave delicately between the trees just off the path. For half a kilometre they are clear as day in the new snow and then, as quickly as they appeared, they are gone, traceless.

Moments like this make you wonder if it’s all a practical joke, a local making fake prints to mess with people wandering the woods. Once you see one sign however, you can’t help but find the next. Suddenly you notice claw marks in dead tree stumps or locks of fur dropped by a hunted deer, nothing as substantiated as the animal itself but the signs are everywhere.

The toil of a woodpecker. © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth

Camera traps we set earlier on in our time in Poland spy a pair of wolves marching in-step along the logging tracks. The melted-in footprints of a waking adult brown bear lazily meander their way downhill from a collapsed den. Not only these three macro-predators but red fox tracks, the unmistakable gait of pine and stone martens, their European brown hare prey tracking just ahead, a rare, three-toed woodpecker chiming against Norwegian spruce, even the remaining scales of an unlikely (and unfortunate) grass snake can be seen in the snow.

Witnessing all this had completely squandered my pre-conceptions of the country, my knowledge of which before visiting was largely influenced by history lessons. The fact of the matter is, however, that Poland sits in the heart of one of the most densely populated continents on Earth and boasts a booming city tourist trade, yet still stands as a wildlife refuge beyond expectations, you just have to know where to look.