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REWILDING is such a popular topic – there is a steady stream of books about returning habitats to a more “natural” version of themselves – that it could almost become a separate literary genre. But Millie Kerr’s Wilder: How rewilding is transforming conservation and changing the world stands apart from the pack.
Rather than following the outcome of returning wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the US, herbivores to Dutch marshes or beavers to British waterways, Kerr (a lawyer-cum-journalist) largely focuses on the return of once-lost species to African, Asian and South American ecosystems.
This enables her to introduce the challenging interplay between conservation and the devastating events of, say, Mozambique’s civil war. That war was partially funded by elephant poaching, and, by the end of the conflict, the country’s Gorongosa National Park had lost 93 per cent of its mammalian biomass to hunting.
Kerr explains how the definition of rewilding is up for debate. She raises interesting ideas, such as whether simply turning the lights out in human environments is a form of rewilding, creating what conservationist Varun Goswami calls “dark corridors” – connections between habitats through which animals are happier to move.
It is clear that Kerr’s own definition of rewilding is largely synonymous with complex reintroductions. The historical stories she tells are particularly captivating, such as the chapter on Richard Henry, a rewilding pioneer who relocated 572 kākāpōs and kiwis to Resolution Island in the 1890s. Sadly, all the birds died due to the influx of introduced predators (New Zealand’s enduring scourge), but it did establish a model for more recent attempts to save the country’s threatened birds using island arks.
The focus on the people and events involved in animal translocations means that little space is given to the specifics of what happened once key species were returned to their former ranges, and I would have appreciated reading more about the ecological consequences. But the projects Kerr covers are engrossing and each one could have been the subject of a book, dealing with social outcomes, politics and animal personalities.
Kerr makes each story personal, primarily exploring projects she is connected to, often ones she has visited. But she didn’t need to travel to North Africa to see scimitar-horned oryx – the poster species for the reintroduction of animals that were extinct in the wild. She had spent her youth among them on her grandparents’ ranch in Texas, where oryx, zebras and ostriches roamed free.
The last wild scimitar-horned oryx was probably shot in Chad in 1989, but 12,000 may live on private land in Texas today, for hunting, safari-like experiences or just for their owners’ personal entertainment. I found this hard to comprehend, but perhaps I should be less surprised by the captive animal industry in the US after watching the true crime documentary series Tiger King, about the life of former zookeeper and convicted felon Joe Exotic.
Kerr explains how zoo historians pieced together the genetic origins of the captive oryx involved in the global breeding programme. This programme returned the species to the wild in Chad in 2016.
Despite the fact that those animals came from zoos across the world, most of the oryx alive today (including those at Kerr’s grandparents’ ranch) are descended from between 40 and 50 animals from Chad. The fact that they originated from just two capture events in the 1960s means that they aren’t quite as diverse genetically as might have been expected from the geographical distribution of the founding animals in zoos around the world. Nonetheless, there are now 400 oryx back in the wild.
Wilder is overwhelmingly dedicated to sharing the positives and successes of animal reintroductions, and Kerr’s personal narratives are just one reason why it is a very readable and enjoyable tale.
Jack Ashby is a zoologist at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, UK, and author of Platypus Matters: The extraordinary story of Australian mammals
