I
had been holed up in the hide
for a couple of hours and
almost given up on a sight of
wildlife. But I was continuing to tiptoe
about the wooden cabin, binoculars still
dangling around my neck, camera
poised. Still nothing.
I’d trekked here after a drive along a
road so rutted it had been dicult to
stay upright in the car seat; at one point,
we’d had to alight and drag away a tree
crashed across our path. It felt remote,
deep in the Făgăraș Mountains, the
southern reaches of Romania’s
Carpathians. Through the trees I had
caught sight of the blue of Pecineagu
Lake, the only lucidity, hemmed in by
the darkness of old-growth forest.
Then, as I was ddling with my
camera settings, I noticed a movement
behind a bush. Could this be my rst
European bear? It snued at some
roots, then moseyed into the open
ground, before opping on to its side,
having an itch. I smiled to myself, glad
to be watching a wild animal this way,
seemingly undisturbed, untroubled.
My sighting was a telltale sign of one STEFANO UNTERTHINERNational Park, a European
“Yellowstone”, as they call it.
With the support of The European
Nature Trust, the EU and individual
philanthropists, the Foundation has
been buying hundreds of small farms
and homesteads to jigsaw together the
dream of the National Park, securing
22,500 hectares already and with the
aim of a quarter of a million. “I’m
optimistic,” she said. “We’re getting
more funding, more grants, more
opportunities.”
The following day Barbara and I took
a helicopter ight to gauge the scale of
the landscape targeted for
safeguarding. The mountains are
staggeringly beautiful: sharp rock faces
thrusted and folded with snow gathered
on the lee sides, and alpine pastures at
higher altitudes where we spotted a
small herd of chamois, a mountain goat
with short hooked horns. Barbara
pointed out healthy virgin forest: a
disparate tableau of colours, textures
and diering heights of trees—beech,
birch, r, sycamore, elm, mountain
ash—oering the richest of habitats.
Over a ridge, we saw the scarring of a
logged zone, a total shredding of the
forest and everything that lived there.
But then we headed north and Barbara
gestured at the expanse of green ahead,
perhaps expecting to impress me with
the size of what they hoped to save. I
didn’t let on, but privately I was
saddened if that amounted to about all
we have left in Europe...
Yet if anyone has written o the notion
of wilderness on this continent, it is still
here in glory. How long we will keep it
depends on how acutely we listen and
respond to the call of the wild.
The European Nature Trust
(theeuropeannaturetrust.com) can
organise four-night trips, staying at
Amteatrul Lodge and Bunea hide,
full-board from £1,950, including airport
transfers and a donation to Foundation
Conservation Carpathia (carpathia.org).
Flights to Bucharest with WIZZ Air.of Europe’s most ambitious
conservation projects. A few hours’
drive north of the capital Bucharest lie
more than half of the continent’s virgin
forests, a third of its plant species and its
biggest populations of large carnivores.
As well as brown bear, there are wolves,
wild boar, lynx and soon, bison. The last
bison was shot in the Carpathians about
120 years ago, but this month 10
animals are being reintroduced to
Romania in the hope their ospring will
go on to roam these woods.
Until recently, the southern
Carpathians were being logged and
hunted into extinction. It took a couple
of outsiders, academic researchers
Barbara and Christoph Promberger,
who originally came here to study wolf
populations, to highlight what locals
didn’t realise was so exceptional. “This
is the largest unfragmented forest area
in Europe,” Barbara told me, “and we
have to save it.” Ten years ago they
created the Foundation Conservation
Carpathia to try to halt illegal logging,
while purchasing forest and hunting
rights. Their ultimate goal is to create aCall of the Wild A journey
deep into Europe’s greatest
wilderness in Romania
Travel Changing Your Mind
By Michelle Jana ChanVANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 201911-19-Travel-Changing-your-mind.indd 56 17/09/2019 15:45
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