It wasn't a situation in which I expected to find myself: crouched in a meadow, listening for bison footsteps. You spread out and triangulate the area where you know the bison have recently been, listening to the sounds of insects, birds and wind-rustled flora. I heard a noise behind me, the crunch of fallen foliage, and a flash of a red deer, most likely a red deer.
It was my second day in the Tarcu Mountains and I had yet to see a bison. I knew how to read their movements. When local farmers could no longer compete with the low-cost German supermarkets that colonized the market after Romania joined the European Union, I knew where to find the abandoned orchards they favor. The orchards were overgrown and reclaimed by the bears who come out at night to plunder the fruit trees and the bison who devour their branches, leaving rain-filled prints for yellow-bellied toads.
The process of rewilding is a progressive approach to conserve that aims to restore the environment by stripping away human interventions, like dams and dikes, in places that have been depopulated and economically marginalized. The reintroduction of keystone species like wolves, vultures and bison, which have an outsize influence on their habitat, is essential to rewilding.
Over the past nine years, more than 60 bison have been released from captivity in this part of the Southern Carpathians, also called the Transylvanian Alps, a densely forested mountain range in southern Romania that holds some of the highest concentrations of animal and plant species on the continent. The Southern Carpathians are managed by Rewilding Europe, a nonprofit that was founded in the Netherlands in 2011. The concept exploded in popularity, inspiring organizations like Rewilding Britain, Rewilding Scotland and Rewilding Australia.
The rewilding movement was criticized after an early experiment at a Dutch reserve that turned into a wasteland of animal corpses. The number of wolves, bison, and bears is growing again across the continent. Rewilding was acknowledged by the United Nations last year.
One of the major surprises is how resilient nature really is.
The idea of rewilding is that it will create new economic opportunities in rural areas. The European Safari Company was founded in 2016 by Rewilding Europe, a travel enterprise that partners with local guides and tour operators to provide wilderness experiences in rewilding areas, with a percentage of profits going toward local conservancies.
The Greater C4;a Valley of northern Portugal has a landscape of river gorges, rocky cliffs and oak forests where the reintroduction of wild horses has helped reduce wildfires and improve conditions for other wildlife. Marsican brown bears can be tracked in Italy's Central Apennines, which are an hour and a half from Rome. In Swedish Lapland, there are vast herds of reindeer and elk that traverse snow-capped mountains, glaciers and the taiga forest.
Five years ago, the idea of a European wilderness experience with a positive environmental impact seemed like a long shot, but in a world shaken by Covid and threatened by climate change, the prospect of a wilderness experience with a positive environmental impact in a remote, beautiful part of the world in need I felt that way as I set off in September with my partner for a bison hunting trip in the Southern Carpathians.
The rewilding area in the Southern Carpathians is more than 400 miles from the Ukrainian border and 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 The war has not had an effect on operations there, according to a representative from the EuropeanSafari Company.
I traveled by train from our home in Berlin to Timi, a culturally vibrant city in western Transylvania with a profoundly unpleasant Soviet train station. After waiting for more than an hour for our driver, who eventually showed up speaking not a word of English, pantomiming for us to follow him to his car parked half a mile away, I got a sense of why the agent from the EuropeanSafari Company kept warning me.
We were waiting in the courtyard for a local guide and a bison ranger who would accompany us for the rest of the trip. Matei was raised on a farm in a nearby village. He explained that his parents used to support themselves through farming, but now travel for seasonal work and farm only for sustenance. A small child, his wife and his grandmother are living with him. His mother spends most of the year in Austria caring for the elderly, while his father works for the railroad.
When the rewilding program first came here, there was a lot of skepticism. After the ecotourism project began, the locals accepted the bison that were released into the wild and now they have to give them back.
A middle-aged couple pulled foil-wrapped ceramic dishes from their car when they arrived after Matei left for the evening. We sat at a long wooden table in the courtyard as they showed us a steaming spread of grilled meat, local cheese, tomatoes in vinegar and a delicious local specialty similar to matzo ball soup. They told us to take shots of their homemade plum brandy and waited for us to signal our pleasure, a not-unpleasant procedure that would be repeated at virtually every meal we had in the Romania countryside.
We were picked up by a driver and taken to the base camp where we were greeted by about 100 sheep and a few sheepdogs. We dropped our bags and chatted with the shepherd, a youngish, tough-looking chain-smoker who was leaning on a wooden walking stick. We headed into the mountains.
Many of the huge beech trees and pines are hundreds of years old. The largest area of forest on the planet, as well as the highest concentrations of wolves and brown bears, can be found in the Carpathians.
The European bison, a close relative of the American bison, lived in the mountains for thousands of years. The cave paintings of the steppe bison date back more than 35,000 years.
By the turn of the century, the bison had been hunted to near extinction because of the expansion of human populations. The last wild bison in Europe was killed in 1927. Only 50 remained, all in zoos. The first bison reintroduction took place in a forest in Poland in 1952. There were more than 2,000 free-roaming bison in Europe by the year 2010.
When the rewilding initiative arrived in the Southern Carpathians, bison were thought of as mythical creatures. Rewilding Europe and the World Wildlife Fund received support from the European Union and the Dutch Postcode Lottery. They purchased bison from zoos, but few of them survived.
The stress was too much for the bison and they would not go to zoos anymore.
Looking ahead. The travel industry hopes this will be the year that travel comes roaring back after governments loosen coronaviruses. What to expect.
There is lodging. Travelers discovered the privacy offered by rental residences. They hope to compete by offering stylish extended-stay properties, sustainable options, rooftop bars and co-working spaces.
Rental cars. Travelers can expect higher prices and older cars with high mileage since companies still haven't been able to expand their fleets. Are you looking for an alternative? Car-sharing platforms might be more affordable.
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Experiences. Sexy travel options include couples retreats and beachfront sessions with intimacy coaches. Trips with an educational bent are becoming more popular with families with children.
We were visiting in the peak of the season when we made our way up the mountain pass. Like elephants and lions, bison are matriarchal, living in large, mostly female herds led by one alpha female. A brutal face-off can end in death when the males fight for dominance. The winner stays with the herd.
The reintroduced bison have impacted the environment by creating corridors through thick undergrowth and eating the bark off young trees, which allows meadow to form. The bison had wallowed in the dirt, a process that cleans and protects their fur, and creates surfaces for insects and reptiles to sunbathe and lay eggs.
"Bison being the biggest mammal in Europe, of course there's a huge impact, much more than we can see."
These nature tours are just a small part of the job that Matei does, the bulk of which is tracking bison, taking samples for a DNA project in collaboration with a German university, reading gps data and reviewing footage from cameras hidden throughout the woods. The most important task is to inspect their dung. We certainly did a lot of it, to the point where I began to wonder if I'd traveled across Europe to look for feces.
In the afternoon, we crossed barefoot through an ice-cold stream and ascended on the other side of a ravine, hiking until we reached a summit and looked for bison on the opposite massif. We heard the sound of the shepherd screaming at his flock in a deranged singsong that was filled with profanity, but we saw only vast blue-green peaks stretching out for miles. He explained that there used to be many shepherds, but now there is only one responsible for the sheep of all the families in the area.
We saw the ruins of the old way of life everywhere we went. The people of the Southern Carpathians lived off the land for a long time. The big game was hunted to scarcity or extinction because of globalization. Rewilding could be used to create new ways to live off the land, such as establishing a community kitchen and a shop.
The locals will take care of the bison and their habitat in the future.
We shared a bottle of local red around a campfire as the sky filled with stars after dinner at the base camp. We decided to set off before dawn the next day, a decision we regretted all through our breakfast in total darkness. It took us a while to come alive after hiking up the mountain.
We followed the route from the day before, but pushed farther until we reached an older part of the forest. The sunlight trickled down to the forest floor, which was thick with vegetation and lushly decaying fallen trees. The air smelled of moss and fog. The three of us were lost in our own worlds.
He gestured wildly and motioned toward a clearing as the forest thins. We hid in the brush at the edge of the meadow, where we could see into the clearing.
There is a herd of 15 bison, shaggy and magnificent, grazed on tall bushes in the meadow, not 20 feet in front of us. One of them was probably the alpha. She stood motionless, staring directly at us as the others, all female except for a calf and two young males, continued to eat. We hid in the bushes and watched them for an hour. The herd stampeded away in a cloud of dust when the alpha called out in a deep bellow.
Charly is a frequent contributor to the Travel section. You can follow her on social media.
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