Everything that lives must live somewhere. The idea of habitat, at its core, is nothing more than the designation of a home for a particular form of life. In theory, everything that finds appropriate conditions for its own life requirements has found its habitat. If we are thinking along Darwinian and ecological lines, then chance […]
Category: Perceptions of wilderness
Gratitude
I have spent the last three months in New Zealand, immersed in a world very different from the one that defines my usual daily life. I have had the luxury of time-to-think, something that, even though I became an academic for it, is rarer by the day. I have also had the opportunity to start […]
Knowing the Jackal
The year of following the activity of Golden Jackals in the Danube Delta has sadly come to an end. I say sadly because it was great fun getting fresh batches of videos and seeing how the animals behaved. It was equally nice to be asked by people in the community of Sfântu Gheorghe (in the […]
Multiple Bosses
In early July I visited the Varaita Valley of the Italian Alps, in the Piedmont region, on the border with France. Some days earlier I had met a resident of the valley, Denis, who shepherds his own flocks in the area, grazing them on the beautiful mountain slopes overlooking the massive Viso peak (3.841m). The […]
Cohabitation and Mutual Adaptation
At the beginning of March I visited the Sfântu Gheorghe community of the Danube Delta in order to gather the latest material on the jackal study I’ve presented here in the past. To recall, I have set up seven different camera traps to record jackal activity in key areas identified by locals. I have also conducted […]
Wild Immigrants
The other day I had the pleasure of attending a symposium on wildlife – humans interactions. It was organized by the Centre for Nature and Society of the Radboud University, and gathered academic and practitioner voices for a very interesting discussion of the ethical and social dimensions of interacting with wild animals. The symposium was called Invasion […]
The Jackal Returns
Jackals roaming I was in the Danube Delta again last week, talking to locals of Sfântu Gheorghe about the golden jackal and downloading what our camera traps recorded in the last couple of months. Fall had just started to roll in – the first smell of burnt wood, the first cold rain – and with […]
Who’s afraid of the big bad jackal?
For the past year, I have been doing field-work in the Romanian Danube Delta. Everybody in Europe knows of the Danube river, but very few (outside Romania and the Ukraine) know that it forms a sprawling delta before reaching the Black Sea. This area, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a Biosphere Reserve, is one […]
The Civil Animal 