Malo Libinje is a rugged, stony part of the Velebit Mountains in Croatia, that borders the Paklenica National Park and overlooks the sea. It is also the home of the Knežević family. I was there to observe the behaviour of the Istrian Boškarin cattle that they received earlier this year through Rewilding Europe. The Knežević family kindly and graciously accepted me as a guest from America.
Finally, He came. It had been already five or six afternoons with me there waiting, lurking under a juniper in the anonymous valley at the edge of the beech forest. I was feeling the fatigue from the many hours of waiting, but I really didn’t get bored.
There is a growing demand from society to cover the costs for nature conservation in more efficient and sustainable ways. Meanwhile, there is also a demand for new jobs in the often depopulating agricultural regions in Europe. To meet these demands, new education is needed to help develop a new breed of entrepreneurs who can start up and run new businesses based around wildlife, nature reserves and other wild or natural areas.
At the end of May, three vans took off from The Netherlands for a study trip for the ARK Nature foundation team to the Oder Delta, an area at the very northern end of the border between Germany and Poland. Here, the Oder River flows out into the Baltic Sea via the Szczecin Lagoon and its surroundings are becoming wilder and wilder by the day.
Early this spring we were the guests of the Faia Brava Reserve and of Campanários de Azaba Biological Reserve, Rewilding Europe’s two local partners in Western Iberia, right on the border between Spain and Portugal. Campanários de Azaba Biological Reserve, the two partners of Rewilding Europe in Western Iberia. Five fantastic days in the wilds.
Anyone who has seen the film ‘Dances with wolves’ with Kevin Costner could easily get the false impression that wolves are cosy animals that you can even hug or dance with. Our young Boskarin bull, recently released in a small herd in the wild Velebit mountains in Croatia knows differently by now.
Romania, the name of this country has always had a mythical sound in my ears. I had wanted to visit Romania and the Carpathians for many years, I so didn’t have to think too long about going there when I was asked to.
35 students and 15 lecturers from universities in Bulgaria, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands took part in the second edition of the ‘European Wilderness Entrepreneurship’ school from 20/3 to 4/4, a part of the Erasmus Intensive Programme. Indulging in a unique learning experience in Western Iberia.
The cowboy profession has changed dramatically. I consider myself as a modern one. I live in the city and I am now travelling by train, plane and car from the Netherlands to Croatia. On the train, the women next to me proudly show their new bags to each other. The brand is called ‘Cowboys bags’. They look nice, but don’t quite look like the saddle bags of Clint Eastwood or Old Shatterhand.
Was Europe once dominated by closed-canopy forests, or instead rather by a mosaic landscape with a mixture of open and wooded areas, shaped by large numbers of wild large herbivores? This has long been debated but a recent study of beetle fossils in Great Britain, indicates that both opinions are probably right.