Of Lions, Bears and an “Italian” meal

This story goes back some time. I’ve been lucky enough to go trekking in the Canadian Rockies. It has to be said it was a few years ago now. I still have very fond memories of my one and only experience of horse riding. Once one has sampled a gentile trot, occasional gallop and a bit of grazing in the foothills of the Rockies, repeating the exercise elsewhere seems mundane to the point of ...well pointlessness.

A piece of Rocky granite now sits on a shelf on the other side of the room. If some future geologist or archaeologist ever finds it, they may be puzzled how a piece of the Canadian Rockies came to rest close by the river Thames on a completely different continental plate. The Rockies were, and with dedicated Canadian care and attention still are, a beautiful and serene place. It was my one experience of horse riding. I’ve never really felt that I wanted to dilute that equine relationship.

Whist driving back from the horse ridding camp, we spotted a brown Bear was exploring the side of the road. We stopped an watched from a safe distance. Evolution has trained Bears that, it if comes to a fight , they simply take a swipe at your head. They are easily strong enough: your body will stay in one place and your head will do a passable impression of a tennis ball served by Rafa Nadal. It’s true to say that everyone and indeed every animal works better when their head is firmly attached. Bears have, it seems, an innate knowledge of this. No messing, they go for your second favourite organ and play pate-cake.

A little further south, in Yellowstone national park Bears compete with Wolves as the top predator. Since Bears hibernate for the winter, the Wolf packs have it all their own way during this snow laden, freezing period. It seems that a twenty years ago, the park was in quite a stressed state. The Elks were destroying the trees by over grazing and north of the park was turning into a barren wilderness. Man had wiped out the Wolf population 70 years earlier. Wolves were reintroduced and started cutting the grazing population, which actually became more healthy because the wolves inherently knew how to spot the weaker members of the herd and naturally singled them out for attack. The biologists discovered this from analysis of the remaining bones. Simply, Wolf packs chose the easier prey to catch. In much the same way as Bears have evolved to know that a quick decapitation stings the prey. They use decapitation quite a lot and solve the food supply problem in one single easy to use process. A sort of built in Ursine swipe card for easy shopping.

But what of the Wolves I hear you ask? Well by common acclaim they performed their task of top predator with astounding success. The grazing Elk population was cut by 10%, bushes and willow saplings started grow, reaching a couple of meters after previously being gnawed off at nearly ground level. This in turn allowed the Beaver to bounce back (and who does not approve of a bouncing Beaver?). Numbers increasing 10 fold. Streams became much slower as the dams built by the Beavers created large pools and meandering brooks as opposed to fast flowing torrents. Associated fauna and flora transformed the landscape. Fish stocks recovered in the larger and more varied waters created by the Beavers. More...

Further south, emboldened by the unusual success of this manmade intervention in restoring bio diversity, a similar exercise has been carried out in the retirement state of Florida. Here the top predator was a big cat. The panther to be precice. This animal whist not extinct, had sufficiently small numbers that its gene pool was too limited. Pumas from Texas which are closley related to Panthers were intoduced to improve genetic diversity.  Rather than the caldera of Yellowstone national park, naturally restricted by surrounding high terrain: in Florida the reintroduction was in grass and swamp land adjacent to actually quite sizable populations. I think we can all agree this is a much more exiting prospect. How much has been accomplished in weeding out the old, overweight, infirmed and more vulnerable of Florida’s residents is at this point uncertain.

What is known is that a similar experiment in Italy has met with significant opposition when Bears (preferring more substantial German cuisine to an Italian meal) hopped across into Austria and were promptly dispatched by the somewhat upset Bergermeisters.