Rewilding Rhodopes, Part III
A dramedy in three acts
If you somehow missed it, check out Part I and Part II of the series at the links.
Act III: Goat in a trunk
Tuesday after leaving our fence-building project, my Rewilding Rhodopes hosts Christo and Desy and I drove back to the town of Kardzhali. At the end of 48 hours, the cigarettes had dwindled from 20 packs down to three. They had gone through four to five packs per person per day.
Wednesday morning I woke up to a rainstorm of biblical proportions and a forecast of “severe weather” until the afternoon. Desy texted me that she had some office work to do and that we would check back in after the rain stopped. Around 3pm she notified me that we were going up into the mountains to look for bison. We climbed again into the trusty old 4WD truck and off we went.
We drove up into the mountains, searching for bison or any other wildlife. The path was a rocky off-road trail that shook my kidneys around like an Etch-A-Sketch. This was a different area of the Rhodopes than we’d seen around the hunting lodge. Here the habitat reminded me a bit of Africa: big meadows of tall, dry grass with patches of thorny brush and scrubby trees dotted around. There were even occasional mud wallows, or that’s what I would’ve called them if we were on safari. Which for all intents and purposes we were.
We drove for a couple hours along the track but never saw any bison; we didn’t see much at all, really, for most of the time. Even the bird life was sparse; I saw a couple Hoopoes fly by and one Chukar family on the road ahead of us, the mom herding her chicks into the tall grass as we pulled up. But that was about it. Occasionally Christo would stop the vehicle and get out, walking around to scan the neighboring hills and valleys. Sometimes he would shout into the hillsides – calling the names of the bison I think? Always he would light up a smoke.
Christo talked about bison and it was clear that he really knew his subject matter. He explained that a hundred years ago, they had only about 54 European bison left on the continent, from 12 different genetic lines. Today thanks to a very careful breeding program, there are over 10,000 individuals. Still, due to the lack of genetic diversity they are susceptible to diseases. They are also vulnerable to climate change; there has been an increase in issues such as blue tongue and lumpy skin disease. I don’t know what those are but they sound unpleasant.
Bison tend to have a lot of intraspecies conflict within the herd. There is an average of a 15% mortality rate among male bison, mainly due to fighting during mating season. Females have an 11% mortality rate (particularly teenage females) mostly due to fighting which leads to accidents or injuries. Most of the bison that get reintroduced to new areas come from Poland. As one might expect, it’s easier to receive animals from an established social group rather than to get individuals from different herds and bring them together.
Desy not only knew all the names of the bison that had been reintroduced to the Rhodopes, but each of their personalities as well. Her eyes lit up when she described the calves that had been born to the local herd. She was also familiar with many of the native plants in the region and their uses. While we stopped to scan the mountainsides with our binoculars for signs of bovids, she harvested mushrooms for eating or St. Johns wort for its medicinal properties.
Eventually we came to a trail by a stream where two camera traps had been set up, and we checked the memory cards. That very morning a fallow deer and her fawn had ambled past, and the night before a wolf was caught slinking across the frame. There were wild horses (Koniks) and bison around recently, too. We weren’t seeing much of the wildlife but it was definitely out there.
Dusk was settling in when we came to an open field and saw the shapes in the distance – a herd of Koniks! The wild horses were moving up the track toward our vehicle. There were about a dozen of them, including a couple adorable foals. Desy and Christo stopped the truck, tore open a bag of white substance and started sprinkling the contents on rocks lying around the field. It took me a minute to realize what it was: salt. The horses came up to lick it. They would swallow big tongue-fuls of raw salt and it was still probably less than Christo had put on his tomatoes the other day.
Koniks are a Polish heritage breed developed to approximate the Eurasian wild horse (Tarpan) which went extinct around the turn of the 20th century. These small, hardy horses have been reintroduced to fill the niche of grazing equids in rewilding projects across Europe. A dozen were first introduced to the Rhodopes in 2011; today there are around a hundred individuals.
The two explained that this herd was accustomed to people and that they sometimes provided salt for them so that they would be more amenable to coming around and being seen by tourists. They didn’t want me to post any photos of the salt because “it wasn’t really rewilding.” I don’t think it’s particularly bad to have some horses getting salt in exchange for some photo ops. It provides minerals for the horses and can generate interest (and potentially future revenue) for the rewilding work. It’s not like the horses were getting fed grain or anything.
The Koniks were small ponies of a grey dun color . . . with one noticeable exception in this group. I realized that there was an imposter in the herd. A tall chestnut mare had evidently been enticed away from domestic life to join the Koniks in the mountains. Apparently no one had ever come looking for her and now she was living her best rewilded life.
The sun was setting on the Konik herd so after leaving them we returned to town. The next day Desy and I walked over to the Saturday market. Every Saturday there is a big open-air market under a covered hall where local farmers bring in all their produce from the countryside. There were piles and piles of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, various other fruits and vegetables, local plants and herbs, including the St Johns wort that I’d seen in the mountains the day before. When steeped in a tea it is said to be good for “female problems,” and if infused in olive oil for several months it is good for skin issues when applied topically, or problems like depression when ingested.
Outside and around the corner people had spread blankets on the ground to lay out tools, car parts, clothing, antiques – whatever they could find, whatever you could imagine, someone was selling it. And behind all that, down an alley in the back, the Muslims had come to sell their animals.
It was the day before Bayram, the Muslim holy day I mentioned in my last post. Animals were to be sacrificed and the bounty shared with friends and neighbors. Some of the local Turkish Muslim farmers had brought their beasts to sell to others of the faith who didn’t have livestock of their own.
The market was full of goats, chickens, rabbits, a couple sheep, and even some ducks. They had come by farm truck, trailer, and even in cars – we saw one goat sitting in the trunk of its owner’s hatchback, looking slightly bewildered. It was kind of funny but mostly just sad. The day was blisteringly hot and those animals were sitting all day in the sun, without any water, waiting to be sold and murdered. What a horrible species we are.
After leaving the market, Desy and I met up with Christo and we set off to – finally! – look for sousliks – the project I’d thought I would be doing all along.
Sousliks, also known as European ground squirrels, are tawny rodents that live in burrows underground and form colonies. They are similar to prairie dogs in the U.S. They aren’t as showy as the bigger wildlife but are key in healthy grassland ecosystems. They are a prey species of carnivores; their burrows, when abandoned, provide shelter for other ground-dwellers such as toads and snakes; and they control the spread of invasive plants with their grazing.
We drove outside of town a short distance to some hilly pastures where we got out and walked across the slopes, looking for holes in the ground. We found one on the first knoll but it didn’t seem like a very fresh or active souslik tunnel. Still, Christo marked it in his GPS with a big demonstration of showing me how to use the recording device, as if I would be doing that myself at some point. It was my last day of the volunteer week though so I knew I was unlikely to need the information again.
Having no further luck on that hill, we next drove to another spot and wandered around, finding nothing. Then one of his colleagues sent him the GPS coordinates of a known historical souslik colony and we canvassed that slope. Here we found several holes with fresh dirt and scrapings at the entrances, indicating an active burrow. Christo didn’t mark a single one down in the GPS.
I have no idea, ultimately, what the point of this exercise was. I guess we did conduct a count of the colony holes but Christo didn’t mark any of the “new” ones in the GPS. Had they all already been mapped? Did they not need to be mapped? Did Christo just lose interest? I don’t know. I felt a little like the goat in the trunk: slightly bored, a bit confused, with a tiny spark of vague existential dread. Desy sat in the car smoking most of the time.
It was a rather anticlimactic end to an anticlimactic week of volunteering. Overall, my experience volunteering with the Rewilding organization was . . . mixed. I do feel like I helped with the bison fence, but on the last couple days I didn’t feel like I was contributing much. I learned a lot about the key wildlife species that the organization works with from Christo, and I learned about the local communities and culture and wild plants from Desy. I inhaled a lot of secondhand smoke. I may try to volunteer again with a different Rewilding chapter in a different country sometime, but I haven’t decided yet.
I'm curious why they don't put out mineral blocks or mineral salt rather than pure salt?
The gray dun color is called grulla.
And yes, we are a terrible species.😪