Today, conflicts with man still threaten Europe’s large carnivores species, and prevent the full recovery of their populations. In the past, strategies to mitigate these conflicts have varied between different European countries, they have typically focused on keeping large carnivores away from humans, either by eradicating them, or by restricting human access to areas where these carnivores exist.
Field trips in the Oder Delta reveal the potential for restoring fish migration.
Jelle Harms, an expert mapper and spatial analyst currently working with the LIFE Vultures project, tells us about his valuable work.
This year the Danube Delta region experienced one of the harshest winters on record. Temperatures plummeted to -20°C, encasing landscapes in a thick coat of frozen water. Răzvan Crimschi, the Rewilding Officer of our Danube Delta team, lives in the Romanian village of Sfântu Gheorghe. Here he shares with us the experience of life in the delta’s spectacular winter landscape.
Twelve-year-old Zach Haynes, BBC Wildlife magazine’s inspirational junior blogger of the year, describes himself as a “small dude with a big love of nature”. Zach regularly writes about nature and his daily discoveries in his blog Year of Nature. In this blog for Rewilding Europe, he talks to us about his love of wildlife, and reminds us how rewilding can always take place on a small, very personal scale.
Georg Messerer of Rewilding Europe’s Southern Carpathians team is based in the small Romanian town of Armenis. He believes wilder experiences can give everyone an appreciation of life.
On the face of it Scotland is fertile rewilding ground. From a human population of around 5.3 million, around one third of people live in just a handful of major cities, leaving the rest of Scotland’s 80,000 sq.km. sparsely populated by European standards.
In 2014, the wildlife monitoring team in the Western Iberia rewilding area placed a wildlife camera in the Faia Brava nature reserve, next to a carcass of a Maronesa cow that died naturally. The intention was to monitor the use of the carcass by scavengers and other animals. One day, the camera mysteriously disappeared from the location and was recently found intact but without power. The images discovered on the memory card revealed what really happened.
I can easily say that for me September this year was the ‘bison month’. At the beginning of this month, I participated at the annual European bison conference in Poland where we discussed the status and progress on the return of Europe’s largest living land mammal. Then, I travelled all the way to Canada to show the North American bison conservationists what we are doing over here in Europe to support our own bison species, and learn from the work done on the American bison. It turns out that there are quite some similarities between our intercontinental stories about these iconic animals.
Swedish Lapland’s rich natural resources can form the basis for a vibrant and sustainable local economy.