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 […]
Category: rewilding
Understanding Ourselves Through the Land
It is often said that it is since Darwin that we know of our natural history. This is unconvincing, because countless cultures before ours knew very well that they were related to animals and that they were, first and foremost, members of a wider biotic community; they simply did not have testable hypotheses as to […]
Land Abandonment in Europe
We usually think of the American and African continents as the places of big, untouched, wilderness. Whatever the merits of this view (amply and ably disputed), it at least serves to make a negative point: in Europe, the kind of nature that superficially looks untouched doesn’t really exist. What Europeans call nature is a deeply […]
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 […]
Of Bison and Men
A couple of posts back I wrote about the introduction of the European Bison (wisent) to the forests of the Southern Carpathians, in Romania. This is part of a European push towards the rehabilitation of the species, and I explained in that post how the idea of rehabilitation is interestingly and questionably tied to ideas of […]
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 tangle of resurrection
I ended my first blog post by asking what the point of reviving (or trying to) extinct species might be. Here, I want to take this question up and puzzle over it some more. It makes intuitive sense that, in the age of massive human-induced extinctions, the idea of reviving those already gone is gaining ground. […]
Purer than thou
You might have seen articles lately (for example here and here) announcing the return of the European bison (Bison bonasus), a seeming success story for the rewilding movement in Europe. Surely, it is a great thing to have an animal come back from the brink! However, what is less talked about, and what I want to […]
The Civil Animal 