Saturday 1st June 2019

Bags packed and off to Manchester Airport to catch my evening flight to Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg, an airport on the Swiss/French border. Unfortunately, my blog doesn’t start with the standard selfie out of the airport window with the plane in the background as the departure room windows had some sort of security meshing on them.

Anyway, the EasyJet flight was very smooth, with friendly staff and arrived early! I made my way through security and baggage pick up quickly only at this point to make a minor error and exit on the French instead of the Swiss side. I quickly corrected my ‘faux pas’ and headed to the taxi’s, a quick taxi journey later (which gave me the first opportunity to practice my German; though his English was of course excellent and he was eager to discuss the Champions League football with me) and I arrived at my hotel.

Sunday 2nd June

Up early to head to Basel SBB train station to make my way across the border and into Germany. So, in my best German ‘Eine einfache Fahrkarten nach Kaiserslautern bitte’ (a single ticket to Kaiserslautern please), I was responded to in perfect English! Slightly crestfallen a quick breakfast followed by a couple of relatively straightforward train journeys and a short walk to the hotel and I’ve made it.

Tomorrow, the project starts. I’ll be meeting up with Sylvia Idelberger and the rest of the team at Stifung Natur und Umwelt (SNU) who work on the EU Life funded Lynx reintroduction project, which started in 2015 in the Palatinate Forest. After a few days with the team I will move on to Mainz to visit Charlotte Reutter and the team at the BUND offices (Rhineland Palatinate). BUND; our equivalent to Greenpeace, who manage the Wildcat Leap Project and are responsible for a significant proportion of the monitoring work that is undertaken for the species as well as managing the EU Life Project to re-establish a vast forest biotope network of 20,000km.

The following day I will move on to the Senckenberg Research Institute in Gelnhausen to meet up with Dr Carsten Nowak, who is head of Conservation Genetics with research interests in both lynx and wildcat.

From here it will be back down the country to Freiburg im Breisgau, to meet and spend a few days with, Dr Michael Herdtfelder and Dr Sabrina Streif of FORST, where there are advanced plans to reintroduce lynx into the Black Forest. I also hope to learn from Sabrina’s experiences in the EuroWildCat Project, which is a data sharing exercise to investigate the movement ecology of European wildcat in different habitats and management regimes.

Then, I move on to Bonn for a few days to take part in the Expert Meeting on the Conservation of Lynx in West and Central Europe. Hopefully, I will learn a great deal from leading lynx experts across Europe.

Next stop, the Harz Mountains for a few days, to meet up with Ole Anders the Co-ordinator of the Luchs Project in the Harz Mountains and his team. This site has a particular focus around ecotourism for lynx. I’ll also be meeting up with Dr Malte Gotz and Dr Saskia Jerosch who have carried out wide ranging telemetry studies for the wildcat with the aim of understanding more about their ecology and habitat needs.

And with that, that will be the end of my first phase of travels until phase two commences in January 2020, when I head off to Switzerland. Exciting times, can’t wait to get started.