Animals of Europe

Europe has been farmed, logged and settled for longer and more thoroughly than any comparable landmass, and its wildlife map is the record of that. The aurochs is gone, the wisent survives only because it was rebuilt from captive animals, and the large predators were pushed into the mountains and the eastern forests by centuries of deliberate extermination. What remains is a fauna of survivors, most of it adapted to landscapes people also use.

The map divides along an old fault line. The western and central plains hold a fauna of deer, foxes, badgers, small mustelids and bats that has learned to live alongside agriculture. The Carpathians, the Balkans and the boreal forests of Fennoscandia and European Russia kept the animals the west lost — brown bear, wolf, lynx, wolverine — in populations continuous enough to act as a source. The Mediterranean basin behaves like a separate region altogether: its peninsulas and islands were refuges during the glaciations, and they still hold endemics found nowhere else, the Iberian lynx and a long list of island shrews and mice among them.

Europe is also where the clearest recovery story is playing out. Wolf, lynx, brown bear, beaver and several raptors have expanded their ranges over the past three decades, driven by legal protection and by farmland being abandoned faster than it is replaced. The distribution maps for those species look markedly different from the ones drawn in the 1980s — one of the few places that is true.