I was woken by howling below my bedroom window, instantly transporting me from fully asleep to fully awake. All senses primed, the realisation soon came that this was not a wolf, but a Malamute, the husky-like dog owned by my hosts, and one which was used for tracking wolves in the winter. It seemed to prefer this ancestral form of communication to barking!
This summer I had the chance to take a fascinating train journey to wild and mysterious Transylvania, in central Romania. Tales of Dracula may spring to mind, but I was far more intrigued by the true stories I’d heard of its wild forests, teeming with wildlife. With over half of Europe’s brown bears, and over a third of its lynx and wolves, Romania was calling!
I had lots of questions: What is it like to walk through healthy European forests, complete with their predators and other large mammals? What is it like for people living alongside them, and how are these affected? What might be the real issues we would have to tackle if we consider restoring missing wildlife in Scotland? After a three-day train journey, I arrived at my destination in Piatra Craiului National Park in the Carpathians. A beautiful landscape of jagged limestone peaks, beech, spruce and fir forests and a farming system that has changed little in centuries.
Our local guide had an in-depth knowledge of the wildlife, and particularly the large carnivores, in the area, and we were treated to glimpses of a fantastic array of animals (including a bear and a boar!), plants and other life (he also patiently, and expertly responded to my barrage of questions!). After a steep walk through the forest one day, we emerged at a shepherds’ camp - one of many scattered through the alpine meadows in these forests. The sheep are guarded by fierce dogs, which protect them from wolves and bears. It seems that while these predators occasionally kill livestock, I encountered a surprising amount of tolerance towards them.
It got me thinking that while I personally that feel wolves and bears should return in the future, we would need to do a lot of work on methods of livestock protection and compensation to make sure that farmers’ livelihoods are not adversely affected. Wolves pose no real threat to humans, but bears can attack if provoked (as rare as these attacks are), and we would need to learn how to avoid conflicts with this magnificent creature. So time and public education (as well as space) are essential.
During my stay I was also taken to see a very successful beaver re-introduction project, which left me in no doubt that their return to Scotland is long overdue. But what about lynx? The question burned in my mind. This beautiful and elusive cat is no threat to humans, and in the area I visited, caused virtually no problems for livestock, partly because of the guard dogs. In fact my guide told me that these cats are so secretive that some shepherds weren’t even aware that they existed in the forests they’d worked among all their lives! Experts believe that in Scotland there is already enough prey and habitat for lynx, and that because sheep live out on open ground, and lynx would stay very much within woodland, there would be very little conflict. So maybe lynx could be with us again sooner rather than later!
It was awe-inspiring to look over vast areas of forest, knowing that somewhere these animals were living their lives. While the large predators, as well as beaver and wild boar are very secretive, there was plenty of tantalising evidence of their presence in the forest: fresh footprints of huge red deer, fresh wolf scat filled with fur, the territorial scratchings of a bear, high up a tree trunk . . . all this and more told of the presence of other, wilder forms of life.
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