The capercaillie – or Tetrao urogallus – was a common breeding bird throughout most of our history. Essentially a relic from the Ice Age, it was common in our early pine forests throughout the Stone and Bronze Ages. However, it clearly became less common during the Iron and Middle Ages, when widespread deforestation and heath formation took place. In Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the Alps, Appenines, and other mountainous areas, the capercaillie was a luxury item avidly hunted by the elite. Cooked like any game bird with onions, apples, berries, wild mushrooms and roots, wine, and honey would be added to the spiced sauce. According to the Irish Vikings, it tasted good with mead. Together with gannets, storks, herons, sparrowhawks, grey partridges, pheasants, and cranes, the capercaillie would grace the tables in the lord’s hall.

The capercaillie is a true giant. The male bird can reach up to 100 cm and weigh 6 kg, while the females only reach 2.5 kg; about the size of a goose and a small duck. The most exciting thing about the capercaillies is, of course, the males’ plumage. With a green breast, brown wings, and white spots on its spread-out tail, it’s easily recognizable by its dance and its marvelous cackling and croaking call. While its closest relative, the black grouse, prefers heaths and boggy areas, capercaillies are fond of pine forests with bogs and older pine woods. However, these forests should ideally be grazed by large ungulates to create the varied and open landscapes providing both shelter and open “ballrooms,” as biologists tell us (Ludwig 2023).

The Bavarian Alps and The Schwarzwald are home to the last remaining metapopulations of Capercaillies in Germany.

In a new study, long-term data from the Bavarian Alps was brought together to answer the primary question about the long-term trend development of the Capercaillie population in the Alps. More precisely, the scientists evaluated spring censuses from a total of seventy courtship sites from the Werdenfelser Land, the central Mangfallgebirge, and the transition between the eastern Mangfallgebirge and the western Chiemgau Alps over almost 40 years. The average trend across the three areas studied corresponded to a significant annual decline of 1.86%, or 60% for the whole period. For the first 25 years, the dwindling numbers were gradual. After 2010, however, a continuous annual decline of 6.57% set in. The results coincide with many deserted courtship areas. These results correspond to continuing declines in Capercaillie ranges elsewhere. Although the capercaillie is not redlisted worldwide, it is a fine barometer of the combined stress induced by climate and outdoor tourism.

According to Ludwig and his group of researchers, silvicultural changes associated with rising temperatures are the primary cause, but also strongly increasing recreational pressure on the last Capercaillie refuges is likely related to the observed trends. In Bavarian research, the impact of “off-piste” winter sports is mentioned. Also, the public support of these sports, augmented by websites marking our off-piste trails, seems to have pushed the consumption of the wilderness to new heights. Despite prohibitions against people staying overnight as well as e-mountain biking, which are deemed to disturb the fowls in wintertime causing their premature death, these conclusions are confirmed by the results from Cairngorm in Scotland.

Mountain biking in Cairngorms

The Capercaillie is primarily associated with conifer woodlands in Scotland, especially mature Scots pine forests with an understory of heather, bilberry, and cowberry. In the 18th century, the capercaillie became extinct in Scotland, Ireland, and northern England, following extensive felling of pinewood habitats to establish grazing enclosures. However, in the 19th century, the bird was reintroduced in Scotland by landowners with an interest in shooting. In recent years, though, numbers have decreased.

The reasons for the recent reductions in numbers and range are poorly understood, but habitat deterioration, increased predation, fence collisions, and insect shortages in June seem to cause poor chick survival. Since the recent reduction in numbers, there has been a voluntary moratorium by landowners on shooting. However, as in Bavaria, there has been no sign that this has reversed the decline.

To a large extent, the experience of the capercaillies in Cairngorm National Park matches those from the Bavarian Alps. Here, the impact of outdoor activities on their “playgrounds” or “dancing grounds” serves as a reliable indicator that birds do actually inhabit a place. However, the conclusion is that capercaillies avoid mountain bike trails up to 500 meters on each side of a trail, while they only avoid 150 meters from a hiking path. In Cairngorm, this means that only 39% of the forests and 45% of the scrub areas are actually used by the birds, which have contributed to the region’s famous whisky, Capercaillie Scotch Whisky. Half of all dancing grounds were within these untouched areas, and 95% were less than 200 meters from the center of these untouched places. Hiking paths were deemed only half as disturbing.

Capercaillies in Croatia

Croatia is another location, where the Capercaillies are being helped along. In 2019 the Central European Breeding Centre Tetrijeb was officially opened, and in 2022, the project joined Rewilding Europe’s network.

SOURCES

Deutliche Rückgänge des Auerhuhns Tetrao urogallus
in den Bayerischen Alpen
Tobias Ludwig, Florian Bossert, Anton Kling, Franz Weindl and Helmut Ellrott
In: Ornithol. Anz. (2023) Vol 61

Mapping the distribution of outdoor activities to assess their impacts on capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus). Evidence from user-generated geographic information
By Leonie Schulz, and Martin Price
In: The 10th MMV Conference: Managing outdoor recreation experiences in the Anthropocene – Resources, markets, innovations
Red. Af: By Øystein Aas, Monica Breiby, Sofie K. Selvaag, Per-Ambjørn Eriksson, Brigithe og Børrestad)
Norwegian University of Life Sciences Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Oslo 2021
ISSN 2535-2806

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Apocalypticism seems to have become increasingly fashionable in the last decade. One reason is, that the idea of the End of the World has once again been fed to foster a political movement fuelled by the angry disenfranchised and seemingly oppressed people of the rural heartlands – the farmers, the males, the uneducated, and the other hopeless, fat trash and rabble circulating on the peripheries of the cities and their privileged meritocracies. As many have noted, this is a powder keg skilfully manipulated by modern despots and wannabee dictators like Putin, Orban and Trump. Apocalypses appear among the oppressed and are harnessed by the oppressors.

Unfortunately, disregard for the concerns of ordinary people among the elite tends to be the order of the day, leaving the little people with the choice of opting for either tragedy: passivism or dictatorial prevention. From this point of perspective, freedom and liberation form a phantasmagoria or utopia, while mushroom clouds and flooded landscapes invade our dreamscapes.

Positive Apocalypticism

Most political scientists and meritocrats will claim that the best way forward is to disregard the apocalypses floating around. By continuing to micromanage the system, we shall overcome the resistance and the uproar, they claim.

However, modern politicians who disregard this apocalyptic thinking are in danger of missing out on the point of the profound fright voiced by the people on the periphery. The question is not so much whether apocalypses are floating around and how to dispel them, but rather, which kinds of apocalypses (or concerns) are being floated. This is not the right way forward, argues Joe P. L. Davidson in a new article published in the American Political Science Review.

He claims that studies of various apocalypses – or worldquakes – are important to carry out. Concrete apocalyptic thinking offers valuable insights. He writes: “First, the end of the world is a means of interpreting the historical situation of oppression. It demonstrates the limitations on possibilities within the contours of current society, highlighting the fact that oppression is bound up with the social order in its totality… Secondly, the apocalypse from below functions as a “possibility-disclosing practice” aimed at keeping “the possibility of a different future open, resisting resignation and accommodation to what is”.

He argues that a scrutiny of the apocalypses floated from below – but not those from above – will reveal in what manner the present system oppresses the disenfranchised by identifying the hidden structure of the oppression. Unfortunately, he does not present examples of how this has been done in the past or present. By not supplying such examples, he miscalculates the need to analyse both types of apocalypses – those presented from below and those presented from above. One example may suffice.

The Sixth Extinction

One of the current apocalypses floating around is “The Sixth Extinction”, summarised as the imminent breakdown of our nature caused by the rapidly accelerating extinction of species of flora and fauna. Often claimed to be more threatening than the climate crisis, this particular apocalypse has its own circle of UN CUPs with appended herds of educated masses of NGOs, green politicians and business entrepreneurs vying for the development of the new market opportunities invoked by nature restoration, rewilding and the invocation of sustainable practices.

As with the climate crisis, this has created a widespread uproar among “little people”. Balancing between denial and anger, they lobby for their continued right to harvest and hunt, to uphold their free right of ways, and to inhabit nature with everything from musical festivals to huge sports events. In the bleak future where 30% of the globe is set aside for nature, they imagine being players in a kind of hunger games where only the well-situated, clever, and skilled people will survive – eating their pounder-burgers on the way – while the rest are left behind. As such they instinctively seem to know that there is a fundamental difference between the apocalypses imagined by the oppressed and the oppressors. For the former, they have already happened, while for the latter, they present a potentiality. While the former doom scroll, the latter prep themselves to weather the storm – or, alternatively, colonize Mars.

In this situation, the right wing of “Trumpist” European leaders have formulated a response to the ramifications of this particular apocalypse by voicing their fear for the future lack of food in a world where eight billion will grow to ten within the next 25 years. Currently, in Europe, political right-wing leaders have used the EU Nature Restoration Law to recruit European farmers to rebel in the streets of Brussels. Of course, this recruitment has been staged by the multi-corporal companies currently owning huge tracts of farms in Europe and living well off the subsidies paid out by the EU. As an example, the land in the former DDR Mecklenburg was farmed by cooperatives. After 1989, the workers on these cooperative farms were offered the opportunity to buy the land. Unfortunately, lacking funds, the land was taken over by large Western landowners. Today, 75% of the land is farmed in a highly industrialised fashion with a marginal rent per hectare but not per capital investment. This is a big business which would suffer significantly if the EU cut their CAP (the annual subsidies).

A careful examination of the challenges, however, shows that the future solution to this impending apocalypse – officially floated by the right-wing faction in the EU parliament – has already arrived. By harnessing futuristic tech – from vertical farming to stem cells, the technologies are already there. Yes, it demands a lot of clean energy and as yet a substantial technical innovative effort. Nevertheless, the possibility is there to free up significant tranches of land in Europe – and at the same time secure food for all. For instance, in Denmark, 15% of the land is farmed to produce fodder for cattle delivering milk to the dairy industry. This is more than 3000 times the amount of land needed to set up factories delivering the same amount of milk protein produced by yeast cells.

By literally looking at ONLY the apocalyptic discourse from below – and not how the professional doomsayers join up with the malcontents – we may miss the practical solutions to the fear and anger voiced by the people who seem to imagine the possibilities from a peasant perspective – framing their world as an “image of the limited good”, where the answer becomes one of providing more equity, more balance, and more respect through land-sharing. However, this will – emphatically – not solve the challenge of the impending and very real apocalypse called the Sixth Extinction. Looking at technical solutions, instead, it becomes possible to free up to 15-30% of land for nature restoration and rewilding while at the same time cleaning up the unhealthy system of subsidising a small handful of huge agricultural businesses. Suddenly a viable future of both restored ecosystems and room for other nature pursuits becomes possible.

However, this point of perspective does not surface without looking at the structure of the apocalypses wielded from both above and below. The trick is, as Davidson rightly writes, to unveil or reveal what apocalypses are about. However, we need to study the apocalypses voiced from both above and below to envision real solutions in a post-apocalyptic world. Neither, however, are defensible in their own right. The future calls for practical solutions to surmountable challenges. Not doom scrolling nor prepping.

Karen Schousboe

FEATURED PHOTO:

The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The first three novels are part of a trilogy following teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, and the fourth book is a prequel set 64 years before the original.
The novels in the trilogy are titled The Hunger Games (2008), Catching Fire (2009), and Mockingjay (2010). Each was adapted for film, establishing The Hunger Games film series, with the film adaptation of Mockingjay split into two feature-length motion pictures. The first two books in the series were both New York Times best sellers, and Mockingjay topped all US bestseller lists upon its release. By the time the film adaptation of The Hunger Games was released in 2012, the publisher had reported over 26 million Hunger Games trilogy books in print, including movie tie-in books. © Murray Close

NOTES:

In anthropology, “limited good” is the theory commonly held in traditional societies that there is a limited amount of “good” to go around. In other words, the amount of land, money, etc. available is held to be finite, so every time one person profits, another loses.
Societies that subscribe to this philosophy tend to display strong levels of equality among members and to be strongly resistant to social change. The term was coined by George M. Foster in his 1965 article, Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good. Foster, George M. (1965) Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good, American Anthropologist New Series, Vol. 67, No. 2, Apr., pp. 293–315

SOURCE:

The Apocalypse from Below: The Dangerous Idea of the End of the World, the Politics of the Oppressed, and Anti-Anti-Apocalypticism
By Joe P. L. Davidson, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
In: Americal Political Science Review (2024) p. 1 – 13

Abstract

The apocalypse is frequently deployed by political movements, especially contemporary climate activists, to advance their causes. This article develops a framework for defending such invocations of the end of the world. With many other political theorists, I suggest that the apocalypse is a dangerous concept, not least because of its association with authoritarian accounts of history. However, we should not reject the apocalypse. I argue for a form of anti-anti-apocalypticism, using the criticisms directed against the concept as a launchpad to rethink it in viable terms. While acknowledging the value of different ways of defending the apocalypse, I highlight the importance of the causes of apocalyptic movements. Simply put, apocalypses from below are defensible because they have the capacity to clarify the political position of the oppressed and open new political possibilities for the group. By contrast, apocalypses from above, because they fail to fulfill these functions, are not.

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The return of a spectacular wild fauna and flora at Chernobyl has for a long time acted as one of the paradigmatic showcases for the resilience of nature, when people have to leave overnight following a catastrophe. Today, wolves, wild horses, and bison roam the former villages together with a group of Danish cattle, which had just been imported to a farm before the explosion took place. Today the herd of cattle has gone native and thrives with its feral living conditions. As does the rest of the fauna and flora.

Albeit the wanton destruction of the the Kakhovske Reservoir in June 2023 was a similar tragic and catastrophic event, also this is rapidly turning into a situation which may in time come with a natural bonus, writes Ukrainian scientists.

The reservoir was a dam with a surface area of 2155 km2 on the river Dnieper, which the retreating Russian forces blew up in June 2023. At the time, the event was considered a ecological catastrophe.

However, it now appears that the destruction has led to a fast and fascinating spontaneous restoration of semi-natural ecosystems. New research by Ukrainian scientists, Yuliia Spinova and Vasyliuk Oleksii, has shown an almost immediate recovery of native vegetation. By the end of the year, this recovery led to the natural young forest appearing on a large area freed from the artificial reservoir. Currently, the event is bringing about a restoration of more than 1,800 km² of natural ecosystems of which more than half will be forested. Such a large ecosystem restoration can become a decisive Ukrainian contribution to the European Union ecosystems revival by 2030, claim the scientists involved in monitoring the natural processes. This development is furthered by the Ukrainian government which a few weeks back banned any settlement in the area of the reservoir for other purposes than the reconstruction of the dam. Before that happens, nature will surely have taken over, and thus the question is, whether it will ever be reclaimed by anything but nature?

These processes mirror what is happening elsewhere in the occupied warzones, which people have left. It is calculated that about one million ha are mined to the extent that any cleaning-up of the injured and degraded land will be impossible. Especially since mines rapidly will be buried beneath the roots of shrubbery, trees and vegetation, making a recovery in time will be nearly impossible before the roots “hide” the explosives for good. Currently, the estimate is that the warzone will be inhabitable for at least 70 years.

Thus, spontaneous ecosystem restoration can become a powerful contribution of Ukraine into state tasks on preservation of degraded lands, as well as international obligations in the field struggle from climate change, Spinova and Vasyliuk argue.

SOURCE:

The results of their research is to be presented at the EGEU general Assembly 2024 in Vienna (Se: Spinova, Y. and Vasyliuk, O.: Post-war rewilding as a decision-making influence-factor, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-21661,

FEATURED PHOTO:

The Kakhovske Reservoir after the destruction. Source: Glavcom.ua/Open Source

l

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Rewilding is all about setting nature free to further its own natural processes by reintroducing lost species, setting the hydrology free, and bringing back habitats, tells Rewilding Britain. While the science is clear, some farming communities are hesitant pointing out that it does not make sense to take land away from agricultural production. Experience shows, however, that local economy flourishes as rewilding produce free range food of high quality and at premium prices, crates jobs and boost local ecotourism. Basic food production should not take up as much land as hitherto. Instead, agritech, should take over, claims rewilder enthusiasts.

Accordingly, supporters are pleased that rewilding plays an official role in the British Government’s policy to reform farming subsidies making room for large-scale projects which might include rewilding. Also, the new policy requiring entrepreneurs to enhance the biodiversity on their building projects with 10% or pay a premium for local or national projects will involve rewilding projects carried out on more marginal lands.

A snapshot of 58 rewilded sites, show that one quarter are carried out as large projects, while the remaining three quarters are on public land often taking the character of community project and engaging local people in bettering their natural surroundings.

Large projects included the Knepp Estate.  Another large project in the north is Wilder Doddington at the Elizabethan manor Doddington Estate with more than 250.000 visitors enjoying glamping or shopping at the cafes. Launched as a 400-year project, the plan is to letting nature recover while letting people connect to nature and the sturdy Lincoln Red Cattle and the Hungarian Mangalitza pigs (so-called Wollen Pigs) which are charged with the mission to further the natural ecosystems.

However, Rewilding Britain is not just working on dry land. New important projects include the creation of the “Arran Seabed Trust”, establishing the first no-take zone in Lamlash Bay on the West Coast of Scotland. Another recent project supported by Rewilding Britain is the creation of a healthy marine ecosystem at Sussex Bay, an extensive seascape that encompasses 160 km. The project aims to restore kelp beds, oyster beds and saltmarsh and bringing together scientists and too local groups along the shore. The project links up to the Weald to Waves project aiming to connect the ancient High Weald landscape with the coast.

FEATURED PHOTO:

Isobel Wright, Graham Warnes and Luca Mao at Wilder Duddington © Duddington Estate

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Rewilding Britain

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