by Tim Flannery
CHAPTER 40
Animals of Empire
The next big wave of migrants would arrive from across the Atlantic. Ever since the Vikings had planted settlements on the coast of Labrador in the tenth century, Europeans had been incrementally opening a connection with the New World that had last existed before la grande coupure, 34 million years ago. The establishment of the new Columbian maritime highway in 1492 meant that Europe again became the lands at the crossroads of the world, for it lay at the confluence of a global trade network encompassing Asia, Africa and the New World. In the sixteenth century Montaigne described the catastrophe that came with the European expansion:
So many goodly cities ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinite millions of harmless people of all sexes, states, and ages, massacred, ravaged, and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest, and the best part of the world topsy-turvied, ruined, and defaced for the traffic of pearls and pepper.1
But the impact was felt within Europe as well, for such was the flood of plants and animals into Europe that its ecosystems would be thoroughly topsy-turvied. And some European species would be driven to the brink of extinction.
One of the most pervasive products of the Columbian highway was yet another influential European hybrid—the London plane tree. Ancestral plane trees, you may recall, flourished in Europe 85 million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs. As such, they are one of Europe’s living fossils. A family of just one genus and a dozen species, the plane tree’s nearest living relatives are the proteas and banksias. The hybrid London plane, which lines city streets worldwide, is by far the most familiar species. Referred to by the botanical writer Thomas Pakenham as that ‘mysterious bastard’, its precise origins remain obscure. But among its parent species are the oriental plane tree (Platanus orientalis) and the American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis).2
The oriental plane tree has a most strange history. It is native to southeastern Europe and the Middle East; expanded into western Europe at about the same time that the grapevine, olive, chestnut and walnut were brought west by early farmers. But while these species are important food plants, plane trees produce nothing useable, not even timber. Perhaps Neolithic people enjoyed their beauty, and the shade they offered in summer.
The parent species (oriental plane and American sycamore) occur naturally in eastern Europe and eastern North America respectively, and have probably been separated at least since the Arcto-Tertiary Geoflora was disrupted by the onset of the ice ages 2.6 million years ago.3 The London plane first appeared through hybridisation in the seventeenth century, and soon became valued in heavily polluted, early industrial Europe, both because it tolerated air pollution, and because its bark fell away in flakes, self-cleansing the trunk in the sooty air.
The Romans valued the sweet chestnut for its shiny brown fruit, and so spread it widely in Europe. And, since the age of empire, garden escapees have been enriching European forests. Among the most able colonisers are those whose seeds are spread by birds: this is why Asian windmill palms and camphor laurels sprout in the foothills of the European Alps. Even the Australian eucalypts are managing to establish forests in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. In fact, Australia’s most widespread eucalypt, the river red gum, was named from specimens growing in the grounds of the Camaldoli monastery, west of Florence, some time prior to 1832.
For centuries the trans-Atlantic traffic of animals had been one-way—from Europe to the Americas. It’s only during the last 200 years that American creatures have begun to establish in Europe. The fur trade has a lot to answer for. In the 1920s American mink escaped from fur farms and became established in the wild. More recently they have been joined by American mink released by animal rights activists. The species has become established throughout much of Europe, and it has displaced the European mink, which is now critically endangered.
American beavers were released into the wild in Finland in 1937. At the time it was wrongly thought that American and European beavers were the same species, and the American beavers were brought to Finland as part of a reintroduction program and as a source of fur. But they proved competitively superior to the natives, and by 1999 it was estimated that 90 per cent of beavers in Finland were the American species. Eradication efforts to preserve the native species are ongoing.
The muskrat is a medium-sized aquatic rodent from North America that is now found throughout much of temperate Eurasia. It, too, was introduced a century ago as a source of fur, and quickly escaped. Muskrats damage dykes, levees and crops, but almost all efforts at eradication, or even control, have been given up as hopeless. I watched one swimming in the new European ‘wilderness’ at Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, pleased at least that there was no European version of the muskrat for them to outcompete.
The coypu is a large South American rodent with the habits and appearance of an oversized muskrat. Coypus were first brought to Europe in the 1880s for their fur, and like the mink and muskrat, soon escaped. Because of the damage they do to semiaquatic vegetation, eradication programs were instigated in many countries, including the UK, where, after an expensive and arduous campaign, eradication was finally achieved in 1989. However, coypus remain widely distributed throughout continental Europe, and are likely to increase in number and distribution in the warming climate.
The Allied victory in Europe in 1945, in which the Americans played a central role, ushered in its own influx of American invaders. Perhaps this was because, for a few decades following the end of World War II, it seemed that America could do no wrong. With tens of thousands of American troops stationed across the continent, a motley array of American military mascots and pets were poised to find their own homes in Europe. The North American grey squirrel had already been introduced into Britain, in 1876, and today it dominates many areas of England, where it displaces the native red squirrel. In Ireland, grey squirrels drove out red squirrels for decades following their introduction in 1911. But as the native pine martens recovered from human persecution, grey squirrels began to vanish.4 It may be that grey squirrels lack defences against pine martens, while red squirrels—which had evolved with the predators—are better able to evade them. Perhaps in future a balance will be struck in which pine martens, red squirrels and a much-reduced population of grey squirrels coexist.
Grey squirrels did not arrive in continental Europe until 1948, when two pairs were released at Stupinigi, near Turin. In 1966, five more were imported and released at the Villa Gropallo near Genoa. Finally, in 1994 a third introduction was made at Trecante, again in Italy. The Stupinigi population flourished, and by 1997 it had spread across 380 square kilometres. Today, for various reasons (including a rule set by the Bern Convention, which is the most important treaty on wild species conservation in Europe) the Italians are attempting to eradicate this American intruder.5
In the 1950s, the North American cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) was also introduced and has thrived, particularly in parts of Italy.6 How it is interacting with native rabbits and hares is not known. There are now populations of white-tailed deer—another American—in several countries, including the Czech Republic. And in the aftermath of World War II the raccoon became firmly established. Despite their previous enmity, Americans, Russians and Germans (who know it as Waschbär) have all done their bit to aid the raccoon’s colonisation of Europe.
The rise of the raccoon began in April 1934, when a soft-hearted German chicken farmer beseeched a forester in the north of Hesse to release his pet raccoons into a nearby forest. Despite lacking official approval, the forester obliged, and today the area around Kassel in Hesse has one of the densest raccoon populations of Earth—with between 50 and 150 per square kilometre. A second release—this time of 25 raccoons—occurred in 1945 when an air strike damaged a fur farm at Wolfshagen, east of Berlin. By 2012 it was estimated that more than a million raccoons roamed Germany.7
In 1958 the Russians released 1240 raccoons across t
he Soviet Union, to be hunted for their fur. As a result, the Caucasus is today riddled with the masked beasts. In 1966 American air force personnel stationed in northern France released some mascot raccoons, creating a new plague. With the end of the American century, Europeans are looking at many animal immigrants with a jaundiced eye, and some pests are being exterminated. But others look set to become permanent members of a new European fauna.
A few Asian species have made their way into Europe, including the east Asian Sika deer, a near relative of the red deer. It has populated much of Europe and begun to hybridise with red deer, so is considered by some to be a danger to the native species: yet Europe’s rich history of hybridisation should warn against simplistic thinking. A few muntjac, or barking deer, escaped from Woburn Abbey in England in 1925, and their descendants now flourish in England and Wales. Tiny deer with simple horns, and long canines in the males, they are reminiscent of the deer that abounded in Europe more than 10 million years ago.
The raccoon dog is yet another Asian species that has found a home in Europe.* More than 10,000 raccoon dogs were released into the wild at various locations in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1958, as a source of fur. They were first noticed in Poland in 1955 and in East Germany in 1961. They have now reached central Norway and are expanding into Central Europe. Among the many small creatures they prey on are frogs and toads, which makes me worry about the fate of Europe’s most ancient survivors, the midwife toad family. The Danes, at least, have had enough of the raccoon dog, and are exterminating it.
Marsupials may seem like unlikely invaders. Europe’s last native marsupials were rather like American opossums, and their lineage died out around 40 million years ago. But the descendants of wallabies that escaped from a zoo in about 2000 thrive in forest west of Paris The French seem to like them, the Mayor of Emance saying that they ‘have been part of our daily life for twenty years’.8 The species has made an even greater success of it in Britain. In the 1970s red-necked wallabies escaped from various wildlife parks, and populations now roam wild on the island of Inchconnachan on Loch Lomond, and in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. A successful wild mob can be found in the Curraghs, a wetland nature reserve on the Isle of Man.
Just one amphibian—the African clawed frog—has become an invasive species in Europe. This tongueless, toothless and entirely aquatic African creature is among the oddest of amphibians, renowned for its ugliness and gluttony. It would surely never have left African shores but for the fact it is very easy to keep alive in the laboratory, and so is ideal as an experimental subject. It was the first creature ever to be cloned, and the first frog in space (in 1992 a few were taken on the space shuttle Endeavour).
But more than anything else, the species owes its spread to a strange phenomenon discovered in 1930 by the biologist Lancelot Hogben. Heavens knows what led him to do it, but Hogben found that if you injected an African clawed frog with the urine of a pregnant woman, within hours it would lay eggs. Before chemical pregnancy test kits became available in the 1960s, African clawed frogs were kept in labs and hospitals worldwide for confirming pregnancies. Many escaped, or were released, including the founders of a population that became established in South Wales.
It is curious to reflect that the Pipidae (the family to which the African clawed frog belongs) is thought to be closely related to that ancient and extinct European amphibian family, the Palaeobatrachidae. It certainly is similar in its ecology. Perhaps we should overlook its grotesqueries and consider the clawed frogs in Wales as ecological replacements, to some extent, for the venerable European palaeobatrachids.
Last century, Europe’s fresh waters were colonised by a large number of invasive species, including the red-eared slider (a terrapin), five kinds of freshwater crayfish, the pumpkin-seed fish, rainbow trout, black bullhead catfish and largemouth bass. All are from North America, though it must be said that the killer shrimp (originally from the region of the Black Sea) has also colonised western Europe.* Between 2000 and 2012, California and Louisiana exported more than 48 million red-eared sliders around the world.9 Unsurprisingly, the creature is now listed as the world’s worst invasive species.
After a gap of many millions of years parrots are again winging their way across European skies. Since the 1960s, the rose-ringed parakeet, whose original distribution covers large areas of Africa and south Asia as far as the Himalayas (which has inured it to the cold), has been seen in downtown Rome and the suburbs of London, sometimes perched comfortably in gum trees. The monk parrot, a native of Argentina and adjacent countries, is cold tolerant. It was first seen in the wild in Europe around 1985 and has become established across a vast area. Authorities in the UK have recently become alarmed at its success and may act against it. But new invasive birds continue to arrive, including the Indian house crow, seen at the Hook of Holland in 1998 after stowing away on a ship.* I have also been told that a small population of white cockatoos has become established on the Côte d’Azur. I love cockatoos, despite their propensity to destroy houses by tearing apart wooden windows, doors and lead flashing. Were I a European, I would act against them—more in sadness than in anger—before it’s too late.
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* Although superficially similar to raccoons, raccoon dogs are canids.
* North America has much larger freshwater habitats than Europe.
* Four kinds of goose have become invasive in Europe—the Egyptian, bar-headed, Canada and swan goose.
CHAPTER 41
Europe’s Bewolfing
Nature abhors a vacuum, and given half a chance it fights back against extinctions. Almost 10,000 years after the lion and striped hyena arrived in Europe, another carnivore is making its way west, all alone and without any conservation support. Until half a century ago the golden jackal occurred only east of the Bosphorus, in Turkey. Somehow, a few managed to enter Greece and the lower Balkans. The most recent sightings (and killings) occurred in Estonia, France and the Netherlands. It seems that soon golden jackals will be strolling Europe’s Atlantic shore.
Is this blitzkrieg-like spread the result of a low density of wolves in Europe? The rise of the golden jackal and eclipse of the wolf may be no more than coincidence. For most of the Pleistocene, Europe was home to both a wolf-sized and a jackal-sized canid, the jackal-sized creature being restricted to the Mediterranean region before it became extinct about 300,000 years ago. The golden jackal may be filling the ecological role of its extinct relative. In any case, the golden jackal is an important new meso-carnivore in Europe and it is here to stay.
The arrival of the golden jackal comes at a unique time in European history. After millennia of war, starvation and relentless expansion of the human population, a new prosperity arrived in the decades of peace following World War II. Europe’s human population began to stabilise, and to concentrate in the cities and coastal plains. Villages in the more remote and hard-scrabble regions, including some mountain areas, are being abandoned, and nature is starting to creep back. But this time there are no royal decrees demanding renewed efforts to persecute wolves and other wild creatures. These animals are now seen as curiosities to be tolerated, or even cautiously welcomed. Seals cavort at Canary Wharf in London, wolves are seen in the Netherlands, and wild boar wander the streets of Rome. The ecology of Europe has, in just a couple of generations, shifted so dramatically as to usher in a bewolfing (and perhaps a bewitching) of the continent.
By the 1960s the wolf was on the brink of extinction in Europe. Only in Romania was it present in any numbers. But by 1978 wolves were once more in Sweden, the result of a pair that travelled from Finland. The Swedish population really took off when another migrant arrived with a batch of fresh genes. As of 2017, there are more than 430 wolves in Sweden and Norway. Norway aims to maintain a national population target of four to six litters per year and is trying to restrict wolves to a small area along the border with Sweden.
South of Scandinavia, wolves are growing in number almost
everywhere. Some of the increasing populations, such as that in France, face intense opposition from farmers. But on the whole, the expansion is, so far at least, uncontroversial. In Germany in 2000 there was just one wolf pack. Now there are now more than 50, and nobody seems to mind. The same attitude prevails in Denmark, where the first wolf litter for several centuries was born in 2017.
In early 2018 a wolf was seen in the Flanders region of Belgium, the first in more than a century. Belgium is the last continental European country to be re-colonised by wild wolves, so, at a national level at least, the bewolfing of Europe is complete. Environmental attitudes, the legal protection given to wildlife by European laws, the increasing densities of deer and wild boar near cities, and the sudden depopulation of mountain and hilly areas, have all aided the wolf’s expansion. There are now more wolves in Europe than in the United States, including Alaska!
The bewolfing of Europe is bringing wolves and humans into a proximity not seen since the stone age, and some escalation in wolf–human conflict seems inevitable. With animal liberation movements on the rise, some will call for saving the life of every wolf. Others will seek a compromise between wolf and human needs. As they expand, wild-living wolves are encountering the descendants of wolves who threw their lot in with us 30,000 years ago. Since that time the descendants of those human-loving wolves have been shaped by intensive evolutionary pressure into dogs. And today feral dogs far outnumber wolves. Romania, for example, has 150,000 feral dogs and just 2500 wolves, while Italy has some 800,000 free-ranging dogs, and about 1500 wolves.