The day of the jackal — and pine marten

As long-absent predators return to our countryside, we can learn from how other nations deal with the conflicts that arise, says Matt Cross

- Matt Cross

Here he comes, here he comes.” I bent in to look at the screen. A blurry black-and-white photo showed some sort of furry presence. “Wait, the next one is the good one.”

And there it was, clear as you like, the long nose and neat pricked-up ears of a pine marten staring almost straight into the camera. The local red squirrel officer was showing me the photos taken by one of his trail cameras monitoring a squirrel feeder. After an absence from my parish of perhaps 200 years, the pine martens were back.

All across Europe predators are reappearing. Some are returning to places from which they were eradicated or displaced, such as wolves in Germany, white-tailed eagles in England or even the solitary bear that shuffled over the border from Italy into Switzerland.

Others are new arrivals. After wolves were eradicated from the Balkans, the golden jackal population boomed and spread. In the 1980s, they reached Italy. In 2019, the same species that obsequiously followed Shere Khan in The Jungle Book had reached Northern Savonia in Finland.

Some have had human help; that teenage Swiss bear came from a population in Italy that had been reinforced with Slovenian bears. For others, all that was needed was for us to stop doing something. Otters were once confined to England’s fringes, now they have been filmed in Middlesbrough and photographed in London. The key to their return was reducing the pollution of our rivers and streams.