Europe
Page 24
In Roman times the aurochs was still widely distributed, but by about 1000 CE it had become restricted to a few parts of east-central Europe. By the thirteenth century it is likely that just a single population survived, around Jaktorów, in the Polish province of Masovia. Today, Masovia is the most populous of Poland’s provinces, but 700 years ago it was remote and heavily forested. While other large mammals were often hunted by the nobles, the local monarchs, the Piasts, were acutely aware of the value of the aurochs, and reserved the hunting of the creatures for themselves. The penalty for infringement was death.
According to that Boswell of the Polish aurochs, Mieczysław Rokosz:
The local princes of the Piast dynasty, and later on the kings of Poland, made no concessions of their exclusive right to hunt that animal, not even to the greatest magnates, both ecclesiastical and secular. They themselves never abused the hunting law as far as the aurochs was concerned. Considering the situation of the aurochs in the light of that regale and of the hunting law, the conclusion is offered that the fact of excluding the aurochs from the hunting law and extending to it ‘a sacred privilege of immunity’ which, according to an old custom, only the king was not obliged to obey, was the major factor which contributed to such a long period of survival of that species. This exceptional and almost personal care of the Polish sovereigns for these animals and their intentional will to save them for posterity caused the prolongation of the period of survival of that magnificent species.2
Despite this exceptional protection, by the end of the sixteenth century the aurochs survived only in a small region near the Pisa River. A report by inspectors of the aurochs herd, made in 1564, gives a clue as to why royal protection was not enough:
In the Jaktorówski and Wislicki primeval forests, we found a herd of about 30 aurochs. Amongst them were 22 mature cows, 3 young aurochs and 5 calves. We could not see any mature males, because they had disappeared into the forest, but we were told by the old gamekeepers that there are eight of them. Of the cows, one is old and skinny, and will not survive the winter. When we asked the keepers why they are skinny and why they do not increase in number, we were told that other animals kept by village people, horses, cows and so on, feed at places for aurochs, and disturb them.3
Being the king’s beast was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because nobody could kill you, but a curse when it came to whether you or the villagers’ cows got grass. When feed was short, villagers’ self-interest won out, and by 1602 there were just three male and one female aurochs left. In 1620 just one female remained, and when the king’s inspector returned to see the aurochs in 1630, he discovered that she had died three years earlier.
The decline to extinction of Europe’s wild horses is less well documented. During the Palaeolithic, wild horses had abounded, yet a few thousand years later they had all but vanished from the European central lowlands. In Britain, horses were extinct by 9000 years ago, and 5000 years of horselessness ensued. A similar situation prevailed in Switzerland, where horses became all but extinct 9000 years ago, and remained absent until about 5000 years ago, when the domestic horse arrived.4 In parts of France and Germany wild horses returned from the brink of extinction between 7500 and 5750 years ago, perhaps the result of forest clearance by humans, which opened more habitat.5 Yet a different pattern is seen in Iberia, where open habitats persisted naturally, allowing the horse to thrive until about 3500 years ago, during the early bronze age, by which time domestic horses were present.
Herodotus recorded seeing wild horses in what is now the Ukraine, and reports of wild horses in what is now Germany and Denmark continued until the sixteenth century. Wild horses may have survived until the seventeenth century in the part of East Prussia known as ‘the great wilderness’ (today’s Masuria, in Poland). Within a century, however, the great wilderness had been emptied of its horses and only a few captives survived in a zoo set up by Count Zamoyski in southeast Poland, where they persisted until the late eighteenth century.6 It’s possible that wild horses, known as tarpans, survived in southern Russia until the nineteenth century, but these may have been hybrids, with genes from domestic horses. The last tarpan, which bore some resemblance to a domestic horse, died in a Russian zoo in 1909.
Following the tragic loss of the aurochs (and setting aside the wild horse) Europe managed to avoid another extinction for precisely 300 years. The largest wild mammal in Europe was the wisent—bulls occasionally exceed one tonne in weight, with females typically half as heavy. A hybrid between the steppe bison (from which the American buffalo is descended) and the aurochs, the wisent had always been more abundant and widespread than the aurochs, which no doubt favoured its survival for centuries after the aurochs vanished.
Nobody who has spent a moment studying ice-age art could mistake a wisent for any other creature—except perhaps Europe’s extinct steppe bison. Their distinctive shape, dominated by massive forequarters, shaggy beard and fringe of fur in the underside of the neck, seems to me to embody the ice age itself. Meeting a wisent face to face, and taking in its distinctive smell, incredible bulk, the steaminess and deep sound of its breathing, conjures a presence most prehistoric.
The wisent is on average a little lighter than the American bison, though it is taller at the shoulder and uniformly brown, with longer horns and tail. Some of these characteristics are seen in the aurochs—one of its ancestors. Dwindling genetic diversity, resulting from small populations and disjunct distributions, reveals that both the wisent and the aurochs were slowly headed towards extinction by about 20,000 years ago.7 Small, isolated wisent populations survived in the Ardennes and Vosges mountains in France until the fifteenth century, and in Transylvania until 1790; the very last wisents existed in two small, isolated populations—one in the Caucasus, and the other in the Białowieża Forest in Poland.
The extinction wave finally broke upon the wisent as Europe’s human population was thrown into a period of unprecedented butchery. The period 1914–1945 was Europe’s darkest hour. After a thousand years of tribal wars, the Europeans, armed with weapons of unimaginable destructive power, set upon each other with horrifying ferocity. All law was set aside, and all care for nature forgotten.
The Białowieża wisents were the legal property of the Polish kings and were strictly protected. But in the turmoil of World War I German soldiers shot 600 for sport, meat and trophies, and by the end of the war just nine remained. Poland was famine-struck in 1920, and the last wild wisent in the country was killed in 1921 by Bartholomeus Szpakowicz, a poacher.8 Meanwhile, the wisent population in the Caucasus limped on. It is estimated that there were about 500 Caucasian wisent in 1917, but by 1921 only 50 survived, and in 1927 the last three were killed by poachers.9
The wisent was not, however, entirely lost. A single Caucasian bull had been taken into captivity, as were fewer than 50 individuals from Białowieża, and the small captive herd was dispersed between various European zoos. It was only the deep sense of loss felt by the Poles that saved the wisent. In 1929 a Bison Restitution Centre was established at Białowieża, and the captive animals were gathered and divided between two breeding groups, one of which was descended from just seven cows, the other coming from twelve ancestors, including the Caucasian bull.
Despite the care taken with herd management, the wisent’s genetic diversity has continued to decline, with all males alive today being descend from just two of the five bulls surviving in 1929. Thankfully, the genetic bottleneck appears to be having only a minor deleterious effect on fitness. More than 5000 healthy wisent now live scattered across the Netherlands, Germany and many countries in Eastern Europe. After the closest of shaves with extinction, and barring more human chaos, the future of the wisent seems secure.
CHAPTER 37
Survivors
The next-largest European mammal, after the wisent, is the moose, which in Europe can weigh up to 475 kilograms. Like the wisent, it was in severe trouble a century ago. Long extinct in France, Germany and the Alps,
where it had flourished 1000 years earlier, its last stronghold was in Fenno-Scandinavia where, amid the fastness of northern fens, it had survived the butchery that raged to the south. Today a secure, if limited, population continues to thrive in the far north. After the moose comes the red deer, a hardy survivor with flexible food and habitat requirements. Males weigh about 300 kilograms, and females half that. Maturing at two years old, and able to produce a fawn every year, its rapid rate of reproduction has helped it endure intense hunting pressure. Yet, as Europe’s human population expanded, even this most resilient of species was pegged back. By the nineteenth century, red deer had become extinct in most of Britain, except Scotland, and where it survived in western Europe, it depended on a degree of protection. When law and order broke down, and hunting laws were disrespected, such as during World War I, its populations suffered. One instance occurred in Germany during the revolutionary years of 1848–49. DNA recovered from antlers collected as hunting trophies by the princes of Neuwied over a period of 200 years reveal a declining genetic diversity of the red deer herd, with a big drop during the 1848 revolution.1
The Italians have excelled in preserving vulnerable large mammals in their royal hunting reserves. European ibex, smaller than the other threatened species included here, are a distinctive and vulnerable element in Europe’s large mammal fauna.* Once widely distributed in alpine habitats across Europe, they reached their nadir in the early twentieth century when just a few hundred survived in what is now Italy’s Gran Paradiso National Park and the adjoining Maurienne Valley in France. The Gran Paradiso was originally the Riserva Reale of King Vittorio Emanuele, established in 1821. It is the only reason we still have ibex today.
During its battle for survival, the ibex had to deal not only with poachers and out-of-control soldiers, but with international piracy by—of all people—the Swiss. The ibex had long since been exterminated in Switzerland when, in 1906, the Swiss decided they wanted to restock their Alps. They applied to the Italian authorities for permission to capture some ibex, but were refused. Undeterred, a few wealthy Swiss privately funded a clandestine group that managed to bribe the guards of the Riserva Reale and steal almost 100 of the animals. These were transported to the pocket-handkerchief-sized Peter und Paul park in St. Gallen canton, where they succumbed to a tuberculosis epidemic.
One hundred years later, in 2006, in a belated act of reparation, the Swiss donated 50 ibex (whose ancestors had been acquired legally) to three Italian protected areas where efforts were being made to build ibex numbers. For all their drama, the Swiss thefts were small beer compared to the ravages inflicted by German soldiers and Italian poachers during and after World War II. Such was the devastation that by 1945, the reserve’s guards could find just 416 ibex. With poaching unabated, the last wild-living ibex looked set to follow the aurochs and wisent into extinction in the wild.
The ibex escaped extinction because of the almost superhuman efforts of Renzo Videsott. He was working in the Riserva Reale during World War II, trying to protect the last ibex. But he was also leading a double life as a member of the clandestine, anti-Fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà. As he strived to prevent German troops from shooting the last ibex for sport and trophies, his own life often hung in the balance.
Between the end of the war and 1969, Videsott was Commissario Straordinario of the Gran Paradisio, which was still officially a hunting reserve. He opposed all applications to hunt the ibex, and organised an efficient system of guards, some of them former poachers. In effect, he was commander in a war against poaching, overseeing battles in which people were often killed and wounded. Brave enough to stand up to German soldiers, corrupt Italian politicians and armed poachers, Videsott withstood huge political pressures and considerable personal intimidation in his job and was forced to live under continuous armed guard. Both poachers and guards came from the park’s villages, and within each village the guards and poachers were often related, making it difficult for a guard to act against a poacher from his village. But there was fierce competition and hostility between the villages, and Videsott used this to his advantage, posting guards in villages where they had no alliances.*
To avoid detection, the guards would travel by foot across country (not easy in winter in the Alps) and would ambush poachers returning from a kill. But often poachers would bury the ibex in snow, expecting the guards to be alerted by the shot. So the guards sometimes waited days or weeks in the dead of winter until the poacher returned to his kill. Due to such actions the ibex survived, and today they are the pride of the European Alps, with more than 20,000 individuals distributed from France to Austria, with introduced populations in Bulgaria and Slovenia.
We are often appalled at the tragic prevalence of wildlife poaching in Africa, where only a resolute if underfunded band of park guards works to prevent the total elimination of rhino and elephant.* But 70 years ago things were even more desperate in Europe, for Europe had lost its megafauna, and even its wisent had been driven into extinction in the wild. Its largest surviving wild creatures were antelope-sized, and even some of them were being exterminated by the most determined poaching. The lessons of history should make the world more helpful to the dozens of unsung African Renzo Videsotts working today. With a little help, they may succeed in conserving some of Africa’s fauna.
While Europe’s largest herbivores survived by the good grace of kings, and often suffered during periods of human upheaval, the opposite was true for Europe’s carnivores. They were relentlessly persecuted almost everywhere, but whenever humans suffered, or chaos reigned, they thrived. Without doubt, the most hated and feared of all Europe’s carnivores was the wolf. As human populations grew, and with them the numbers of domestic sheep, goats and cattle, the wolf was persecuted with the utmost determination, and in its history can be read the fate of Europe’s carnivores as a whole.
Charlemagne was a great wolf hater. Between 800 and 813 CE he established a special corps of wolf hunters known as la louveterie, whose only task was to persecute wolves with hunting, traps or poison. La louveterie was organised as a military corps, and its salaries paid by the state. It worked pretty much continuously for more than 1000 years—except for a brief break during the French Revolution—which is almost as long as any institution, bar the Catholic Church, has operated in Europe. And it was highly efficient, in 1883 alone accounting for the deaths of at least 1386 wolves.2 After 1000 years of effort, the louvetiers finally put themselves out of business when they killed the last French wolf, in the Alps, at the end of the nineteenth century.
Italy had its own traditional wolf hunters, the lupari. They were local farmers who received no prescribed compensation for their work. In a custom called la questua, whenever they killed a wolf they would put the body on a donkey and tour the local villages with it, asking for a reward for the service they had done for the community. The la questua is probably the reason that wolves were never exterminated from the Apennines. The lupari always left a few to ensure they had future income.
By the middle ages wolf persecution had become systemic in Europe. Organised hunts and drives accounted for the extinction of many populations, while overhunting of wolf prey by humans, along with removal of vegetation, made life hard for the survivors. The English got rid of the wolf in the fifteenth century by cutting down most of their forests. Scotland followed with complete eradication through hunting in 1743, as did Ireland in 1770. Persecution continued into the twentieth century. Yugoslavia set up a wolf extermination committee in 1923 that nearly succeeded in its goal—with only a few individuals surviving in the Dinaric Alps. Sweden’s last wolves were pursued by snowmobile and systematically shot until the last perished in 1966. In Norway, the last wolf died—again at human hands—in 1973. Had it not been for their long border with Russia, which wolves disrespected, those expert hunters the Finns also might have succeeded in eliminating their wolves.
Despite the persecutions, the wolf had its good times too. When the Black Deat
h ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing an estimated 30 to 60 per cent of Europe’s human population, the wolf was on easy street. In Sweden, for instance, many farms in marginal areas were abandoned to the encroaching forest, and wolf hunting ceased. Consequently, wolf depredations became so extensive that in 1376 the king sent a letter to his subjects explaining that bears and wolves were damaging livestock, and demanding that citizens bring in their skins.3
Europe’s bears suffered as severely as its wolves, though their persecution was not as systematic. Prior to about 7000 years ago, brown bears were widespread in Europe, their remains being present in 27 per cent of the more than 4000 archaeological deposits examined. But with the growth of agriculture and a warming climate, the human population increased and the bears declined. The temperature increase was detrimental because winter temperatures increased faster than summer ones, and high winter temperatures make it harder for bears to hibernate. Starting in the southwest, Europe’s bears began to disappear.4
The real crisis did not hit, however, until Roman times. Perhaps the Romans hunted the bears to protect their livestock, or captured and killed them for public entertainment: whatever the case, Europe’s bear population fragmented. The brown bears of Scotland were prized by the Romans for their pugnacity, but by 1000 years ago they were extinct. Throughout central and western Europe, brown bears were banished to remote strongholds, with tiny populations holding on in rugged mountain areas in Italy and Spain and a small number in the far north—in Sweden and Finland. The decline continued until the late twentieth century.