Over the last four months, I have been doing my internship in the Southern Carpathians rewilding area in Romania. This internship was part of my Master study of Biology at the Wageningen University in The Netherlands. One of my professors connected me with Rewilding Europe where he suggested to me to check out their rewilding project in the Southern Carpathians. After being in touch with the Romanian rewilding team, it became clear that they could really use an intern student this summer, so I went for it!

Being one of two Regional Managers for Rewilding Europe, Deli is a key figure in making rewilding a reality in five areas stretching from Portugal all the way to Bulgaria on Europe’s eastern fringe. As the main point of liaison between the central office and local teams across the continent, it is his job to ensure that rewilding manifests itself as real action on the ground, and that local communities are going to be better off as a result.

Faced with economic and environmental pressures, the Sami people of Swedish Lapland are abandoning their traditional way of life. By developing partnerships that unite nature, culture and business, Rewilding Lapland is now working to offer them a more sustainable future.

On Threatened Species Day (7^th September) 2016 Rewilding Europe’s Managing Director, Frans Schepers, gave a keynote address at an event that we hope will turn out to have been an important moment in the history of conservation in Australia. The National Rewilding Forum, held at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, aimed to bring together academics, practitioners, government and non-government to discuss the relevance of rewilding to Australia. It was the first such gathering of its kind but potentially the first of many!

Portugal, or at least the region in which we stayed, was far richer in wildlife than most if not all of Denmark. The diversity and sheer number of bird species we witnessed far outcompeted anything I’ve seen even in the largest nature reserves in my country. Even so, when we entered the Faia Brava reserve, the difference was immediately noticeable. While the towns and arable fields of the surrounding landscapes had been home to a great number of animals, the reserve was in a league of its own.

Rewilding Europe places high value on education programmes and activities for kids, students, volunteers, activists and other nature enthusiasts. We believe that an essential part of our work is to communicate and share our passion, knowledge and enthusiasm for the natural world, and the philosophy of rewilding with the generations to come. In May, the ‘Black Vultures Nature Camp’ for children and Earth Day celebration in the Bulgarian Rhodope Mountains successfully empowered a new generation of young Europeans to share this vision further.

To regain ground and confidence nature conservation needs policies that support rewilding. Rewilding is the biggest, most exciting idea to emerge in conservation since the 1970s. The challenge now is to create the spaces within conservation policy and politics where rewilding ideas can find expression, gain traction and be tested.

Ulrich’s journey towards becoming the Team Leader of the Oder Delta German team began in the legal realm. As a lawyer specialized in Environmental Law, he was directly involved in the set-up of the Lower Oder Valley National Park. During his work, he has experienced resistance of local residents to new legislation if they felt excluded from the process; an experience that has strongly shaped his views on conservation and community involvement.

The dramatic landscape of Western Iberia in Portugal where the Côa river is carving its deep path through the mountains is home to a vast variety of wildlife. Animal species of all sizes, shapes and colors inhabit land, skies and waters of the Côa Valley, however a great number of them are hard to spot. Anyone can see large herbivores from afar, but many other species are only visible through lenses of wildlife cameras – the invisible eyes in the wild.

In April 2015, Rewilding Europe offered two internship positions for a desk study to collect information about wildlife in rewilding areas, in particular on the larger mammals and birds. Out of many applications received, one student and a volunteer were selected: Anna Luijten and Jelle Harms from The Netherlands. The goal of the study was to obtain an overview of the key species, their numbers, distribution, trends, habitat preferences and populations estimates. In this blog you can read how it is being an intern at Rewilding Europe.