Danube Rewilding

Producer: Elizabeth Mearns. Video editor: Steve Chappell

While humans have long been the source of environmental damage, through rewilding schemes they are attempting to work with nature to allow ecosystems - damaged by our activity - to flourish.

"It's about the comeback of natural processes, the comeback of species," explained Deli Saavedra, regional manager for Rewilding Europe, when we met up with him in September 2019.

CGTN Europe followed Saavedra, and his colleague Serban Ion, through the reclaimed wilderness of the Danube Delta, while they chased traces of the elusive Eurasian beaver that had recently come back to the region.

The Danube: Life of a River

"If you put all the pieces back into the ecosystem and you have a nice complete ecosystem, let's be relaxed about what nature is doing."

Deli Saavedra, Rewilding Europe

The Eurasian beaver made its spontaneous comeback to the Danube Delta in 2014. /Kurt Kracher/VCG

The Eurasian beaver had disappeared from the Danube Delta. Over 200 years ago, the creatures were hunted to extinction across the region – Europe's largest natural wetland that extends across the borders of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. Their spontaneous return to the winding rivers of the delta was a reason to celebrate for Saavedra and all those working to rewild the area.

Producer: Elizabeth Mearns. Video editor: Ella Parkinson Mearns

The beaver's presence has an exponential benefit to rewilding efforts, as their damming of rivers allows many other animals to thrive in the same ecosystem.

Now, after a year during when human activity was thrown off it's normal tracks by the COVID-19 pandemic, what happened to the rewilding of the Danube?

One year later

Rewilding should support and protect the Danube Delta's natural biodiversity. /Kurt Kracher/VCG

Producer & Video editor: Giulia Carbonaro

The coronavirus crisis stopped or delayed some rewilding projects planned for this year, but the work started last year continued to bear fruit.

"We have especially seen progress in the impact of the last herbivores that we have introduced into the ecosystem, especially in some areas of the new Delta - with the buffaloes, the horses and surely also the Kulan starting to make an impact into the ecosystem, opening areas and giving more space for biodiversity," said Saavedra, who is currently working from home in Catalonia, Spain.

Without firsthand knowledge of what's happening by the Danube Delta, Saavedra mostly has to rely on the information passed on by the locals.

Unfortunately the beavers seem to still be quite elusive. "I really would like to have more news about the beavers, after one year," says Saavedra. "If those families are still there, if they are increasing.

"Some fishermen say that they're still there, but we don't have really new and good information about numbers, about the expansion of the species."

The kulan horse

The herd of kulan horses reintroduced in the Danube Delta. /Rewilding Europe

What we know instead is that the reintroduction of the kulan horses, started in May this year, has already produced encouraging results for the Delta's ecosystem.

"Large heavy horses – and kulan is one of them – are what we say are 'architects of nature,'" explains Mykhailo Nesterenko, executive director of Rewilding Ukraine.

By grazing, the Kulan – a wild relative of the domesticated donkey - creates the perfect environment for other small animals. For example, allowing small birds such as the skylark to nest.

The kulan, like the Eurasian beaver, had disappeared from the region around 200 years ago. "The Kulan is a species that was living in the big steppes, that were big steppes here, big grasslands that they were going from Hungary all the way to Kazakhstan," says Saavedra.

"These bigger steppes disappeared because of farming in the last centuries, and now the biggest species are in Kazakhstan, in Mongolia. But there's a very small piece in Ukraine, close to the Danube Delta. And in this area, we want to restore the ecosystems."

Twenty horses, brought originally from Turkmenistan to the natural reserve Askania-Nova, in Ukraine, have been reintroduced to the Danube Delta region over the past year.

"The experts from Askania-Nova, where the animals come from, believe that in several years, let's say by the end of the project, three to four years, we should have around 50 animals and we will see how successfully they will be able to establish themselves and how fast or how good their population will grow," says Nesterenko.

"There are predators in the area, like wolves, for instance, that prey on Kulan but Kulan are very sturdy animals, they're quite well able to defend themselves. So we will see how they will actually fit into the animal world and ecosystem."

The kulan horses were originally from Turkmenistan. /Rewilding Europe

The kulan horse was declared endangered in 2016. /Rewilding Europe

The eagle owl

The three chicks of eagle owls were born at the Odessa Zoo in Ukraine and they now fly free in the Danube Delta. /Rewilding Europe

Also establishing themselves in the delta are eagle owls, the reintroduction of which to the Danube is an ongoing process. The first eagle owl chick – originally bred in the Odessa Zoo – was released in spring 2019 and was followed in July 2020 by the release of three more juvenile eagle owls.

"Of course, four animals are not making a population, we need to continue the process for the next few years," says Saavedra. "But the ones that we have released, they are doing okay."

Thanks to trackers attached to the birds, Saavedra and his team are able to tell how the owls are settling down in the new environment.

"We know that one of those animals is left of the Danube Delta and is more to the north in some big lagoons, probably hunting rats or maybe even ducks, we don't know exactly, but they are doing okay."

Rewilding Europe expects to keep releasing three to four new chicks bred in European zoos every year to the Ukrainian section of the Danube Delta to restore the population in the area.

One of the rewilded juvenile eagle owls. /Rewilding Europe

The eagle owl is also called European owl or bubo bubo. /Chris Frank|/Getty Creative/VCG

The future

Biodiversity is key to resisting climate change, according to Saavedra. /Rewilding Europe

As the pandemic unfolded this year, Saavedra had hopes it could prompt people to change their behavior and realize we need to act now to fight climate change. But he was soon disappointed when he saw that after lockdown, most people went back to "business as usual."

"Imagine that you are staying on the beach and you are surfing the big wave, but the big wave, which is the pandemic, is very small compared with the new wave that is coming, which is the climate breakdown, the biodiversity crisis. That's the real challenge," he says.

"If we want to have biodiversity, you need to have these keystone species that are creating different habitats, different diversity. In fact, you want to have wildlife. Because with wildlife, you have biodiversity. We have biodiversity, the diversity of habitats. Then you have resilience. And we need this resilience against climate change.

"If everything is exactly the same, it will be affected exactly the same way. If you have different things that are completely different, climate change or other causes that are going to affect maybe one piece, but not everything, because we have a biodiverse environment. And this is exactly what we want with rewilding."