This night is chilled by ghosts
And the woods are full of werewolves
- Enshrined in Crematoria, Cradle of Filth
I listen to a lot of Cradle of Filth, and sometimes I am driven to ponder the more esoteric (and silly) aspects of their lyrics. The above made me wonder: What does Dani mean by “full of werewolves?” What actually constitutes a forest full of werewolves? What is the size of their territory? Do they hunt in packs like wolves, or as solo predators? What kind of an ecosystem is necessary to support these werewolves? Do they dine primarily on villagers? On deer? Some of these questions I cannot answer, but there is one that I can take a stab at, so to speak.
A quick Google search reveals that a wolf’s territory can range from 13 – 2,400 mi². Let’s use this as a basis. I’ll take the extreme low in an attempt to maximize the number of werewolves in the woods. Too, the median wolf pack size seems to be 5, so we’ll use that too, and assume them to be pack hunters. If the pack spreads out to cover the maximum amount of area in their hunt, this will lead to a werewolf/ mi² value of 0.384615 (repeating, of course) werewolves per square mile.
I don’t know where exactly the song is set, so I’m going to assume it’s in Romania. The website http://www.fao.org asserts that 6.249 million ha of Romania is covered in forest. A hectare is equivalent to 0.00386102 square miles. That means that there are 24,285.8158 square miles of forest. Since we know how many werewolves per square mile there are, we can calculate that there are a total of 9,340 (rounded down) werewolves in the woods.