The day of the jackal — and pine marten

“Here he comes, here he comes.” I bent in to look at the screen.

A blurry black-and-white photo showed some sort of furry presence. “Wait, the next one is the good one.”

And there it was, clear as you like, the long nose and neat pricked-up ears of a pine marten staring almost straight into the camera. The local red squirrel officer was showing me the photos taken by one of his trail cameras monitoring a squirrel feeder. After an absence from my parish of perhaps 200 years, the pine martens were back.

All across Europe predators are reappearing. Some are returning to places from which they were eradicated or displaced, such as wolves in Germany, white-tailed eagles in England or even the solitary bear that shuffled over the border from Italy into Switzerland.

Others are new arrivals. After wolves were eradicated from the Balkans, the had reached Northern Savonia in Finland.