“Many so-called specialists thought this would be impossible,” he said.
“The eagles had a different opinion.”
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| Red deer (elk) and tarpan (horses) in a new wilderness, sort of. |
Franz Vera was speaking of the Oostvaarderplassen – an ecosystem reconstruction on 15,000 acres in the Netherlands, 30 minutes from Amsterdam. Vera and colleagues are building a Paleolithic landscape that includes great herds of mega-fauna including extinct aurochs (giant cattle) and tarpan (original horses), or at least their ghosts, bred back to something like wildness from the most ancient strains that survive.
The white-tailed eagle narrowly escaped extinction. They were said to need mature, tall trees to nest and hadn’t bred in the Netherlands since the Middle Ages. A pair showed up at Oostvaarderplassen and built a nest “nearly the size of an armchair. It seemed ready to topple the scrawny tree it was perched in,” according to an engaging December 24, 2012, New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert.
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| Experts said they wouldn't show. |
It feels peculiar for a North American restoration ecologist to read about the Oostvaarderplassen – even though the whole project has its roots here. The “re-wilding” concept was developed by American conservation biologists Michael Soule and Reed Noss, who in turn drew some inspiration from the prairie restoration movement of the Midwest. But what’s so peculiar is the lack of any discussion about plants, in either Kolbert’s article or any of the top Oostvaarderplassen choices on Google.
Many North American ecosystem restorations have been rightly criticized for not paying enough attention to animals. The Oostvaarderplassen work seems all animal. Of course, the Europeans have no counterpart to “natural area” in the American sense. Their original, high-quality plant communities were grazed, plowed, and cut out of existence millennia ago. In some ways the Oostvaarderplassen is a big farm. By winter there’s no grass left, and the charismatic grazers are fed hay.
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| Restoring the aurochs to wild Europe is much like restoring the mammoth to the ancient wilds of North America. |
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| Oostvaarderplassen has about 1,000 tarpan (horses), 300 aurochs-like cattle, and about 3,000 red deer (elk). They've been joined by huge numbers of geese, egrets, and other birds. Notice the possibly nervous heron, below left. |
No one speaks of restoring the wolf, lion or bear – all wiped out in most of Europe long ago. Of course Oostvaarderplassen, about the size of the Palos forest preserves, is too small for big carnivores.
Enter "Rewinding Europe" – launched by “two Dutchmen, a Swede, and a Scot.” As of 2012, they had raised six million Euros to pursue five rewilding areas - each fifteen times bigger than Oostvaarderplassen.
2026 Update
Oostvaarderplassen failed in one big way. Without predators, the assumption was that the large animals would just die of old age or starvation, as if that were good and natural. But in the absence of predation, during the winter of 2017-2018 of the reserve's 5,200 large animals, almost 3,300 cattle, horses, and deer died or were shot in badly emaciated states to reduce their suffering. There was public outcry and a consensus that something was wrong.
The Dutch Forestry Service now manages and has expanded the reserve. Following studies, they removed all the horses and regularly relocate or shoot other large animals to reduce the populations. The reserve remains a hugely successful habitat for birds and other animals. It's popular with visitors. Efforts to connect it with a park in Germany have terminated.
Inspired by early successes at Oostvaarderplassen, related Rewilding Europe initiatives now cover large areas around Europe, from Sweden and Scotland to Romania and Ukraine, reporting many successes, especially for birds.
Two Notes
This post (thought-provoking?) is an update on a 2012 post in our predecessor/partner blog, Vestal Grove.
The better-managed bison reintroduction to Nachusa Grasslands is an interesting comparison for people who want to wrestle with what these issues mean about nature and its conservation.
"Of course, the Europeans have no counterpart to 'natural area' in the American sense. Their original, high-quality plant communities were grazed, plowed, and cut out of existence millennia ago." - True. Europe has no areas that were not impacted by Europeans. However, there are surprising & impressive crumbs of diversity (but significantly less tree diversity due to geography and glacial action). See, for example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281435492_The_most_species-rich_plant_communities_of_the_Czech_Republic_and_Slovakia_with_new_world_records
ReplyDeleteOr the Kalkalpen.
Europe's human density is more intense. Very few remnants of the scale of Białowieża (350,000 acres across Poland and Belarus) remain. But sprawl is also more confined, which may allow for more niches and some sort of sustainable equilibrium if the worst excesses of agriculture and industry could be somehow contained.
The biggest rewilding experiment (if one could call it that) in Europe began in 1986 inadvertently in the 1100 square miles of the Chernobyl [Radiation] Exclusion Zone located in the Ukraine and Belarus. All manor of plants and animals survive within this gigantic area, with on-going studies being pursued by a variety of scientists and scientific disciplines. Without the pressure of human activity some animal species, such as the brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos, not present for a century), are flourishing.
ReplyDeleteWedin (1992): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311664224_I_Grasslands_A_Common_Challenge
ReplyDeleteI will point out that eastern Europe's grasslands are on par with the best tallgrass prairies in their small scale richness and are comprised largely of plants within similar conservative strategies. They are old-growth, but they are old-growth (like ours) in large part due to role of people. They are have grazing history, but it is moderate. Very long ago some open and wooded habitats in Europe were also routinely burned to maximize their bounty. Fire has really been used that way worldwide, but the development of repressive social and economic systems has tended to extinguish it.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in this but know little. Yet there are reasons to suspect that the North American grasslands may have something unmatched elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteWhat's unique here is that, prior to Europeans, there are millions of years of grassland evolution without overgrazing. Yes, the prairies moved south during the glaciers. But we know that many of the species are vastly older than fifteen thousand years. Prior to people, the grasslands were ignited by lightning. When Native Americans started burning, they likely expanded the extent of the grasslands (and the equally fire dependent oak communities), but the species and interdependencies are much older.
Overgrazed prairies lose most of their biodiversity. Relatively commoner plant species take over. That's also true for animals and probably fungi, bacteria, and other biota. These ecosystems may harbor genetic resources of significance, for example for the future of agriculture on rich soils. They are worth studying for many reasons.