8th January 2008

Beata, our team co-director and conservationist is currently researching into the reinitroduction of the wolf to the Scottish Highlands. Last Summer, she packed her tent and headed off to Glen Affric in West Inverness, a beautiful remote area that measures up to the romatic ideas of Scotland  and a landscape once thriving with wild boar and the enigmatic wolf. Her time there wasn't spent entirely alone  - she had the company of her dog, Sligeach and the "most welcoming" midges (insect repellent came to be her new best friend).

It was hard for her to focus on the reason of the trip as she sauntered through the lands, passed cascading waterfalls of ice cold mountain water that flowed into  meandering rivers stretching across farmland and trekked from one stunning peak to another. The seeming wilderness of Scotland couldn't help but incaptulate her. But is the Scottish Highlands as wild as we think it is? That is what our conservationist went to find out.

She spent her time doing ecological assessments of the land and talking to the local community of Cannich to learn of their livelihoods, relationship with the land and opinions on the wolf. Her delightful personality inevitably meant she made friends quickly, chatted away to deer stalkers and learned alot about their way of life and their knowledge of wildlife and how to protect it. Meetings were arranged with individuals of the Forestry Commision and Trees for Life. This allowed her to create piloting surveys and a huge report, that is, a waterproof notebook filled with messy notes, mud and squashed midges.

Of course, her work is still ongoing and, at the moment, she is slogging through the boring part of compilling all the data and, if her writing is as anywhere near as bad as mine, trying to figure out what she wrote!

Keep posted with her research.

by Dana

Kucinski Wildlife Foundation News Archives