Last week the kids and I found a wolverine
track in the snow, just a few kilometres from my home. The sun was shining, the
air was crisp and life suddenly felt different. The silent forest around me
became transformed, from a bland backdrop to a dynamic living ecosystem. The
encounter was unexpected, a rarity, a treasure; something that transformed just
another family outing to "the day we saw that wolverine track".
As both a scientist and a conservationist I
have worked with large carnivore related issues for almost my entire professional
life. Studying their prey (roe deer),
studying the predator species themselves (including Eurasian lynx, leopards and
jaguars), and studying their interactions with people has taken me to study
sites all across Europe, from the Barents Sea to the Adriatic, and beyond to
India and Brazil. Large carnivores are not an easy career path. For the
scientist part of me they are difficult and expensive to study. Working on
rodents would certainly have allowed me to gain more scientific kudos. For the
conservationist part of me they are associated with a constant round of
challenges and conflicts. So why do I do it?
Fascination is clearly part a major of the
answer. The more I learn about how these animals live their lives the more I
appreciate them as masterpieces of evolutionary adaptation. They also trigger
some emotional responses deep inside. The combination of grace, power, silence,
resilience and adaptability in such a beautiful packaging can only induce a
sense of awe. These animals demand your respect simply by looking at you. They
are also truly wild. Completely independent of us humans, unapologetic about
their actions, their persistence in our modern urbanised world provides a
refreshing reminder that there is still some wildness left in nature. Predators
above all other species remind us that nature is still something of a dynamic
process and made up of interactions rather than just being static scenery. The
idea that nature is something bigger than us humans and that it still not tamed
provides a refreshing tonic to human arrogance and egotism.
However, many of these characteristics are
also the source of conflicts. The sources of my fascination can easily become
another person's frustrations or fears. Predators don't always make easy
neighbours, and many rural people living in their proximity experience very
real problems. Working for the conservation of these species involves
confronting these conflicts and trying to find ways to minimise them. And the
challenge of responding to this is probably my second motivation to work with
these species. The challenge is even greater considering that most of my work
is in Europe. Europe is a crowded continent, with 500 million people, and no
true wilderness areas. There is no "over there" with more space. If
we want large carnivores, they have to be "here"; in the same
landscape where people live, work and play. Integrating these species into the
fabric of our modern landscape is probably the greatest example of land sharing
that has ever been attempted in conservation. The Large Carnivore Initiative
for Europe, of which I am a member, is trying to find ways to facilitate this
integration of large carnivores into multi-use landscapes that simultaneously
provide for the needs of human food production, recreation and biodiversity
conservation. It is
also very positive that the European Commission has invested considerable
resources in recent years to help facilitate a dialogue between stakeholders as
they work together to try and find ways of balancing these competing demands
that are being placed on the limited space that our landscape provides.
And judging by present trends the carnivores are
succeeding, although there is still a long way to go. Many conflicts persist,
and some are escalating. Finding solutions is going to require patience,
ingenuity and a willingness to make compromises. Although research can provide
some guidance, there is going to be a lot of trial and error because quite
simply this experiment has never been tried before. For almost the entirety of
human history we have been at a state of war with these species. We are now
trying to find a way to coexist with them, although nobody knows how this
coexistence is going to look in the end. Who could resist being a part of such
a process?
John Linnell