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1. Behavioural variation at the individual level has been shown to play an important role in animal ecology and evolution. Whereas most studies have focused on subadult or adult subjects, neonates have been relatively neglected, despite studies showing that neonates can exhibit consistent inter-individual differences during early developmental stages. 2. Steroid hormones, including glucocorticoids (e.g., cortisol) and androgens (e.g., testosterone), play a crucial role in foetal development and maturation and could therefore drive neonate behaviour, although this relationship is poorly understood in wild animal populations. 3. This study addresses these knowledge gaps by investigating the association between neonate fallow deer (Dama dama) fawn inter-individual variability in behavioural response to human handling and hair cortisol and testosterone levels. 4. We found strong evidence that individual neonates display repeatable differences in the way they cope with a risky situation during their first days of life, and showed how these differences are linked to cortisol and testosterone levels accumulated in utero. We showed that, when both steroids are included in the same model, neonates with high cortisol and low testosterone levels coped in a more proactive way with human handling (higher heart rate during handling, shorter latency to leave when released) compared to those with low cortisol and high testosterone levels (lower heart rate and longer latency to leave). These results provide novel insights into the proximate mechanism leading to neonate inter-individual variation in a wild population of large mammals.

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) The Anthropocene continuously escalates the challenges and threats faced by large carnivores in human-dominated landscapes. Given their unique conservation and management requirements, detailed insights into their behaviour in relation to human-induced risks are crucial to designing landscapes of coexistence for people and predators, containing key features such as nature conservation areas. Adaptations like selection or avoidance of areas at certain times reveal the dynamic perception of large carnivores to risk-landscapes and the trade-offs with potential resources. This study investigates these ideas by applying a habitat-selection approach to GPS collared wolves in Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park (Belarus) to quantify fine-scale avoidance of human disturbance. Our results indicate that wolves selected strongly for areas of higher nature protection within the national park. They also avoided human disturbance from settlements and roads, but mediated their behaviour depending on the shifting risk throughout the day and night. They selected for more open areas during darkness. Seasonal and sex-based differences shifted avoidance, such as females being more avoidant of settlements. This suggests evidence of a successful anti-predator strategy against humans. Our study offers some of the most detailed and novel insights into wolf spatio-temporal avoidance of disturbance in the context of protected areas, which is imperative for fine-tuning management measures for continued coexistence and effective conservation of this functionally important species.