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.
A subadult Iberian imperial eagle (Aquila adalberti) visited the Campanarios de Azaba Biological Reserve on March 14. This was the first time in many years this happened and a landmark wildlife comeback event for the Western Iberia rewilding area, in which Fundación Naturaleza y Hombre (FNYH) works as partner of Rewilding Europe.
Traveling across the USA you can stop to have a hamburger and a coke (or pepsi), then drive 1000 km and stop to eat a hamburger very similar to the above in a town very similar to the previous one. However, if you drive 1000 km across old Europe, you will probably cross 3–4 country borders, pass 4–5 language zones, 7–8 architectural styles, a couple of religions and dozens of distinctively different delicious dishes …
During my pre-mission research I realised that the chance of meeting a sturgeon in the delta was close to zero. Unfortunately. So I took the chance to dive with the sturgeons at the Danube Delta Eco-Tourism Museum Centre in Tulcea before setting out in the delta. They have a special sturgeon aquarium including the largest and most sought-after species of them all, the great beluga.