The spectacular sight of Europe’s largest land animal running wild  is set to become more common in Romania’s Țarcu Mountains. After a long journey from the Avesta Reserve in Sweden, a group of nine European bison arrived at Rewilding Europe’s Southern Carpathians rewilding area on April 22 and 23. The group will eventually join free-roaming animals that have been released here over successive years since 2014.

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.

Ten days ago, one of the females from the founder herd of the European bison roaming the Tarcu Mountains for over a year now, gave birth to a healthy calf. The now 7-year-old female bison arrived in the Southern Carpathians rewilding area in Romania in May 2014 as part of the reintroduction and rewilding initiative led by Rewilding Europe and WWF-Romania.

How about roaming with European bison in the wild Țarcu Mountains, in the Southern Carpathians in Romania? Or five days to enjoy Abruzzo, one of the most interesting wildlife areas in Italy, where bears still live and are frequently seen? Or go for birdwatching in Grande Brière, the second largest marshland in France and a land of unspoilt salmon rivers, scrub land, heath land and forest, surrounded by warm emerald-coloured oceanic waters. These are the top three quality offers for the first draw of the Rewilding Europe Travel Club in 2014.

European bison, or Wisent, were brought to the Studen Kladenets Game Reserve in the Eastern Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria at the end of October. This is the first step of the first reintroduction of European bison into the Rhodopes, an area which is one of the first members of the European Rewilding Network.