Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 108

rollers and bee-eaters, waders, geese and grebes of many species, hoo-
poes, orioles, ire-bellied toads, giant catfish, sturgeon weighing
almost a tonne. But the native mammals have been hunted nearly to
extinction.
The great forests and floodplains of the eastern Carpathians, div-
ided between Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine, still contain bison, lynx,
wolves, bears and beavers. As farmers have moved off the land, their
fragmented ecosystems are beginning to reconnect. In Poland over a
million people - most of them Polish - travel to these mountains every
year to walk and watch the animals. In Slovakia, however, the
old-growth forests are still being logged, as the potential for generat-
ing money by other means has not been fully grasped.
The southern Carpathians, in Romania, through which I once
walked and camped for three enchanted weeks, still possess in many
parts a natural treeline. The great beech forests of the valleys give way
to firs on the slopes, which diminish into scrub, then high alpine pas-
tures, where, as the snow retreats, crocuses, saxifrages, pinks and
primroses spring up. The clearings in the lowland forest were, when I
visited, so thick with butterflies that it was sometimes hard to see the
path. There are wolves, boar and bears in these mountains, large parts
of which are already well protected. The rewilders want to reduce
hunting to raise the number of chamois and red deer, and to reintro-
duce bison, beavers and griffon vultures. In 2012, the first five bison,
which had been extinct in Romania for 160 years, were released into
the Vanatori Neamt reserve. 36
The Velebit Mountains, which rise almost 6,000 feet from the Adri-
atic coast, already support lynx, wildcats, wolves, bears, chamois and
boar, as well as a magnificent variety of birds and snakes and butter-
flies. In the dehesas and montados of Spain and Portugal, the Iberian
lynx, extinct across much of its former range and now the world's
most endangered wildcat, is slowly recovering, through the reintro-
duction of animals bred in zoos. The governments of the two countries
have set aside over a million hectares of this land for conservation, to
protect the lynx, the Spanish imperial eagles, the vultures, Iberian ibex
and other rare wildlife that lives there.
In each of these places, Rewilding Europe is seeking to demonstrate