Nature's Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring It Back by Sophie Yeo

Author:Sophie Yeo [Yeo, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ecology, Ecosystems & Habitats, Environmental Science, General, Natural History, Natural Resources, Nature, Requested
ISBN: 9780008474126
Google: iyXYzwEACAAJ
Amazon: 0008474125
Publisher: HarperNorth
Published: 2024-05-22T22:00:00+00:00

Not only have we forgotten the old abundance of the natural world; we have also lost sight of how wildlife behaved before their habitats were decimated by humans. The preferences we witness in the wild today are not those of animals with the luxury of choice: they are those of survivors that have been backed into a corner, making do with what little remains.

We tend to think of species as having a fixed abode, their guts tailored to a particular diet and bodies honed to a certain terrain. The working assumption among ecologists has been that, to reconstruct an animal’s historical range, all you have to do is figure out the past extent of the habitat in which it lives today: more swamps would have meant more swamp dwellers, more woodland meant more woodland specialists, and so on. It has only been in the last decade or so that this belief has started to unravel. It was in Poland, at the margins of Europe’s wildest forest, that the questions first began.

Bison have long been considered the arch-herbivores of the forest. There are no written records of the species ever having lived anywhere else. Hulking and hairy, so large that its bones are sometimes mistaken for aurochs’, the bison looks almost incongruously primeval, as though it ought to have been wiped out with the rest of the megafauna. Yet, somehow, it escaped the onslaught, and continued to haunt the forests of Eastern Europe long after its Ice Age companions had been exterminated. In his Poem about the Size, the Ferocity, and the Hunting of the Bison, published in 1523, Nicolaus Hussovianus depicts the animal in its supposedly natural habitat: young calves leaping over fallen pines, lustful males trampling the ground and trembling the oaks, rotten wood threatening to trip the horses of those who dared to hunt them.

For, despite their size, hunted they were. Bison were the favoured quarry of royal hunting parties. Beaters would drive the animals into netted enclosures, whereupon the noblemen would take aim with long-barrelled harquebuses – the predecessor of the musket – after which servants would haul away the corpse by sleigh.23 Accounts tell of medieval banquets where sixty bison were served at a time for days on end.24 Such excesses, alongside exploitation of the woodlands for timber and potash, took their toll: one by one, populations began to fall from the map. By 1717, bison had vanished from Moldova. In 1755, they went extinct in Eastern Prussia. The last herd in Transylvania disappeared in 1790.25 Soon, there were just two wild populations remaining, the most famous of which was in the Białowieża Primeval Forest in Poland.

The survival of bison in Białowieża did not happen by chance. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, peasants were entitled to take hay from the meadows to feed their own livestock. The remaining stubble, and any leftover haystacks, provided unofficial fodder to the bison, keeping them fat and healthy when times were lean. Populations expanded in response to the ready supply of food.

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