Rewilding the Pyrenees

Here’s a book about na­ture that is nei­ther an im­pas­sioned rant nor a lec­ture. In­stead, over a pe­riod of years, Steve Crack­nell spoke di­rectly to the horses’ mouths and with great em­pa­thy and bal­ance, he lets us learn about the var­i­ous sides of the is­sues. His cen­tral ques­tion in a new re­lease ti­tled The Im­plau­si­ble Rewil­d­ing of the Pyre­nees is whether na­tive an­i­mals should be rein­tro­duced to these moun­tains, along with se­lected non-na­tive an­i­mals.

Ac­cord­ing to Crack­nell, rewil­d­ing comes from the idea that tra­di­tional con­ser­va­tion has failed to slow or even stop a de­cline in bio­di­ver­sity in Cat­alo­nia, parts of Aragon and the bor­der coun­try across Spain and France. This is a trend that could be re­versed by rein­tro­duc­ing key species ‘and cre­at­ing suit­able habi­tats for them. “What is most im­por­tant,” he says, “is not the pres­ence of the an­i­mal but the ef­fect it has on its en­vi­ron­ment” and here the most con­tro­ver­sial preda­tors are the bear and the wolf.

With the fit­ness of a young goat, the au­thor climbs up to iso­lated sum­mer pas­tures, freez­ing his ex­trem­i­ties in the quest to see a bear for the first time. He also spends hours and days with farm­ers doing the sea­sonal ‘tran­shu­mance’ where cat­tle or sheep are herded over­land to new feed­ing grounds.

He in­ter­views shep­herds, ecol­o­gists and wild boar hunters, among oth­ers. In the process, he’s not afraid to get dirt under his fin­ger­nails and also (I sus­pect) end up reek­ing of sheep dung. The sad­ness and gore of sheep who’ve been at­tacked by bears is also some­thing he doesn’t avoid.

He asks all the best ques­tions to gen­tly test the claims and ex­pe­ri­ences re­lated by those who have a lot to lose and those who take an in­ter­est for non-eco­nomic rea­sons. I was happy to see he never made the ap­palling choice of call­ing any­one “stake­hold­ers in the de­bate”.

The de­tails in the book are often exact and sur­pris­ing. For ex­am­ple, bears are known by the name across the re­gion. One of them named “Goiat” (mean­ing boy or lad) is a 10-year-old, 205 kg male (born in Slove­nia) and the only bear to have been re­leased in the south­ern part of Cat­alo­nia in Pal­lars Sobirà in 2016. A re­mark­able cam­era trap photo shows an­other (pos­si­bly scratch­ing his belly) against a tree in Vall d’Aran. (The au­thor men­tions that wolves from Ital­ian stock ar­rived in Cat­alo­nia in 2006 after a cen­tury’s ab­sence.)

One shep­herd who Crack­nell spends time with is Mustapha, orig­i­nally from a sheep farm in the Atlas Moun­tains of Mo­rocco. With his legal sta­tus now fully reg­u­larised (and with wife and young child who joined him later) he had pre­vi­ously crossed over the sea to the Ca­nary Is­lands from West­ern Sa­hara. Thanks to fund­ing grants from the EU’s Pro­ject Catalunya PirosLIFE pro­gramme, con­di­tions for those like Mustapha have greatly im­proved in the past four years.

He has a young as­sis­tant named Josep, when in the past he’d had to exist for over three months with only his dog for com­pany. As well, he’s been lucky enough to enjoy the rel­a­tive com­fort of portable cab­ins he­li­coptered into his area at the start of sum­mer.

Steve Crack­nell is the au­thor of two other ti­tles on na­ture but apart from his ex­ten­sive wildlife knowl­edge and deep af­fec­tion for the Pyre­nees, what comes across in this book is a gen­uine re­spect for in­di­vid­u­als who work and live up there. As a long time res­i­dent, his final words sum it all up bet­ter than I could: “Exit pur­sued by a bear.”