Legendary Conservationist Simona Kossak Lived Her Life in a Forest Hut With a Lynx, a Boar and a Terrorist Crow

The locals thought she was a witch because she understood the language of animals.

Deep in the ancient Białowieża Forest, Europe’s oldest forest on the border of Poland and Belarus, lived a most unusual woman – Simona Kossak. To some she was a witch, to others a fairy or simply a madwoman. But Simona was in fact a renowned biologist and ecologist who dedicated her life to protecting one of Europe’s last remaining primeval woodlands.

Simona came from an illustrious family of Polish painters going back generations, including her great-grandfather Juliusz Kossak, grandfather Wojciech Kossak, and father Jerzy Kossak. As a Kossak, she was expected to follow in their artistic footsteps. However, Simona’s true passions lay elsewhere – in the natural world and studying the behavior of mammals like wolves and lynx.

Rather than pick up a paintbrush, for over 30 years Simona made her home in a rustic wooden hut called Dziedzinka, set deep within the Białowieża Forest’s ancient oak groves. Her humble dwelling had no electricity or running water. But to Simona, this simple way of life among the flora and fauna was paradise.

Dziedzinka became Simona’s base camp for immersing herself in the forest’s ecology. And she was not alone – the hut’s cohabitants included a terrorizing yet beloved pet crow named Korasek, a female wild boar, and even a tamed lynx that shared Simona’s bed. Her rapport with the forest’s creatures was truly extraordinary.

The boisterous crow Korasek earned a dread reputation among the human residents of Białowieża. He would steal valuables, attack cyclists, rip apart documents, and generally terrorize anyone who crossed his path.

Stanisław Myśliński, who still bears scars from the bird, recalled:

He would even steal workers’ pay in the woods. He once stole my permit for entering the woods. He pulled it out of my pocket and notoriously tore it apart. He loved to attack people who rode bicycles, especially girls. It was very impressive – he would attack the rider’s head with his beak, the person would fall off, and he then would sit on the seat triumphantly, looking at the spinning wheel.

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Another witness, Bożena Wajda, also shared his story:

Once, I was walking around the reserve without a permit, and the guard saw me, he followed me to Dziedzinka and started to fill in a fine penalty. When he was handing the print to me, the crow appeared. He took the paper in his beak, flew onto the roof of Dziedzinka with it, and tore it up with his leg, on top of that roof. I had such a laughing attack that I couldn’t control myself, the guard didn’t know what to do, and finally, he just shrugged his shoulders at the whole thing. When I told this story to Simona, I thought she would die of laughter.

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While feared by humans, the forest creatures clearly saw Simona as one of their own. She described a profound experience where a herd of deer she had raised frantically tried to warn her away from venturing into danger, barking urgently to protect “their mother” from an unseen lynx. In that moment, Simona felt she had transcended the barrier between the human and animal realms. The deer saw her as part of their family pack.

From then on, Simona fostered ever closer bonds with Białowieża’s wildlife. Deer would give birth on her doorstep, she raised moose calves in her hut, and cared for injured or abandoned creatures as a sort of zoologist Mother Teresa. The forest had become Simona’s true home, more so than any dwelling among humans.

Battling for the Old Forest, in 1993 Simona waged her first major battle to defend Białowieża’s wolves and lynx (besides coming up with clever inventions such as the UOZ-1 repeller, a device that warns wild animals of passing trains). Researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences wanted to capture the endangered predators and fit them with radio collars for study. Their method, however, involved using cruel steel leg-hold traps – illegal under Polish law.

When Simona discovered the traps in the forest, she confiscated them, refusing to return the “research apparatus” that posed a lethal threat to the very animals it ostensibly aimed to conserve. She was even taken to court by the outraged scientists, charged with theft. But Simona stood her ground, driven by her fervent belief in protecting Białowieża’s flora and fauna at all costs.

Her activism put her at odds not just with researchers, but hunters too – despite her family’s own aristocratic traditions of hunting as sport. To Simona, the forest’s creatures took precedence over old human customs and bloodlines.

For decades Simona sounded the alarm about threats facing the primeval Białowieża, ranging from logging and hunting to climate change. Tragically, her worst fears are now being realized, even after her death in 2007 at age 63.

In 2016, the Polish government approved widespread logging in the ancient forest, ostensibly to combat a bark beetle outbreak but likely also for profit. This kicked off a firestorm of protest from environmental groups like Greenpeace and the European Union itself, which sued Poland for violating conservation laws.

While the logging was temporarily halted by 2018, it has now resumed with updated quotas allowing increased felling of trees, except those over 100 years old. With climate change already stressing the ecosystem through drier summers and milder winters, the renewed deforestation could prove catastrophic for the irreplaceable habitat.

Simona’s life’s work – along with the forest she adored and its wild denizens – is in dire peril. The witch, fairy, or madwoman of Białowieża, as she was variously known, foresaw this crisis coming. But having transcended the human-animal divide, perhaps Simona’s spirit now walks alongside the very creatures she fought so hard to defend, sharing their anguish at witnessing the unraveling of this ancient paradise.

Sources: 1, 2, 3