Fauna of Europe

The number of wildlife species in decline across Europe increased during the second half of the 1990s. Eleven of Europe’s twelve most urgent environmental problems, including waste, climate change, and stratospheric ozone depletion, remained static or worsened over the latter half of the 1990s. The threat to Europe’s wildlife continues to be severe, mostly in northwestern and central Europe. Farmland birds declined by 36 percent between 1990 and 2020, and house sparrows declined by 50 percent between 1980 and 2020. Around 18 percent of the known vertebrate species populations declined between 1970 and 2018.

In Europe, intensive and subsidized agriculture has devastated the wildlife. Italy is a good example. The extent of animal life in Italy has been reduced greatly by the long presence of humans. The primary locales in Italy where wildlife survive are the Italian Alps, the Abruzzi (east central Italy on the Adriatic Sea), and Sardinia. Only in those areas can one find the Alpine ibex, brown bear, wolves, foxes, fallow deer, mouflon (wild sheep), and wild boar.

Portugal and Spain are somewhat different from the rest of Europe in that their wildlife is a mixture of European and North African species. In Portugal, about two-thirds of the wildlife overall is Mediterranean, but the farther south one is in Portugal, the more North African the fauna becomes. Birdlife is rich in both countries of Iberia because the peninsula lies on the winter migration route of western and central European species. Nevertheless, major species in Portugal and Spain are endangered.

Despite its reputation for pollution, the eastern portion of Europe is the stronghold of Europe’s wildlife. Agriculture in Eastern Europe is starting to intensify, however. One notable exception to the situation of Europe’s fauna is Latvia. Although a small country, Latvia contains a number of species and ecosystems rare in other European nations. As many as four thousand Eurasian otters can still be found in Latvian rivers.

Less fortunate European countries struggle to re-establish their beavers, but Latvia has a population of around 100,000, reintroduced beginning in the mid-1950s. The population has grown so much that each year, landowners are given a beaver quota for hunting between August and April, which helps limit the trouble beavers can cause in rural farmlands. Latvia has over 1,300 wolves and 1,600 lynx, which is nearly 40 percent of the Baltic lynx population. Latvia has over 370 breeding species of birds, some of which are rare elsewhere. These include the white-backed woodpecker, lesser-spotted eagle, and black stork. Estonia, which borders Latvia, is similar in some respects. The moose is the largest animal, along with roe deer and red deer. In the forests of northeast Estonia, bears and lynx are found. Mink and nutria are common along the riverbanks.

The Effects of Humans

Wild animals have been in retreat since Upper Paleolithic times (30,000 BCE to 3500 BCE), when small human groups held their own against such big game as aurochs, a type of bison, and mammoths, now extinct. In more recent centuries, settlers won the land for crops and domesticated animals. As the population increased in industrializing Europe, humans inevitably destroyed, or changed drastically, the wild vegetation cover and the animal life. With difficulty, and largely due to human tolerance, animals have nevertheless survived.

In January 2000, a dike holding millions of gallons of cyanide-laced wastewater gave way at a gold extraction operation in northwestern Romania. The collapse of the dike sent a deadly waterborne plume across the Hungarian border and down the nation’s second-largest river. Two hundred tons of dead fish floated to the surface of the blighted waters or washed up on the Tisza River’s banks. The toxic brew also killed legions of microbes and threatened endangered otters and eagles that ate the tainted fish. Similar occurrences of humans harming animals and their habitats continued through the twenty-first century. Despite thousands of acres of protected lands across Europe, some estimated the animal population had decreased by 60 percent from 1970 to 2020.

Wildlife Preserves

Even when there are parks and preserves, human activities endanger the fauna and environment. Doñana National Park, an area of wetlands and sand dunes on the Guadalquivir River delta in southern Spain, is one of the most important wildlife sanctuaries in Western Europe. More than 600 bird species, over half of Europe’s total, are found there, including the crested coot, the imperial eagle, and the white-headed duck. It is also home to the rare Iberian lynx. The park covers 190,830 acres (77,260 hectares) and is a World Heritage Site. In the 1990s, the park was threatened by falling water levels caused by thirty dams along the Guadalquivir River, but the reserve recovered.

In 1998, the park was further threatened by a flood of toxic waste from a breached dam that was holding back a reservoir used for dumping mining waste. The waste was successfully diverted, but not before the wetlands surrounding the park were contaminated by heavy metals. Those heavy metals may yet poison many of the birds that fly there to feed. The aquifer that supplies the park was contaminated, and thousands of fish and amphibians died. These had to be removed to prevent carrion-eating birds from being poisoned. Despite the constant threat of draining marshes, in the early twentieth century, the national park and its nearly nine hundred species thrived and hosted thousands of visitors each year.

Mammals

Larger mammals are mostly gone from Western Europe, with the possible exceptions of Spain and Portugal. In the tundra of European Russia and of Lapland in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, caribou or reindeer thrive. In the short summer of the tundra, arctic fox, bear, ermine, and wolverine may appear. In the deep forests of Poland, Belarus, and European Russia, one still finds moose, reindeer, roebuck, and brown bear. The brown bear no longer inhabits Scandinavian forests, but the moose is common in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

Finland is the home of one of the only species of freshwater seals in the world—an animal depicted on one of the country’s coins. The Saimaa ringed seal lives in eastern Fineland's Lake Saimaa. The lynx is mostly gone, but wolves, foxes, marten, badgers, polecats, and white weasels survive. The sable, which is much hunted for its valuable fur, only just survives in the northeastern forests of European Russia. In Romania, bears, wolves, wild goats, and even the European bison can still be found.

In much of the rest of Europe, wild fauna are limited to foxes, squirrels, marmots, and other rodents. In higher elevations in France, Italy, and Austria, one can still find the chamois and ibex. Italy’s renowned Gran Paradiso National Park in the Valle d’Aosta saved the alpine ibex from extinction. Alpine marmots and chamois can be seen in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Germany. In the steppes of Ukraine and European Russia, large wildlife is gone except in the semidesert areas north and northwest of the Caspian Sea. There, one can still find two types of antelope, the saiga and the jaran, along with rodent sand marmots, desert jerboas, and the sand badger.

Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fish

Europe’s reptiles are most common in Mediterranean and semidesert areas. In the coastal Mediterranean, vipers and similar snakes, lizards, and turtles are found frequently. In the semidesert areas north and northwest of the Caspian, cobras and steppe boas are found, along with lizards and tortoises.

In Italian waters, freshwater fish are the brown trout, sturgeon, and the eel. Off the coast of Italy, one finds the white shark, bluefin tuna, and swordfish. There is an abundance of red coral and commercial sponge on the rocks of the warm southern seas. Spanish waters contain a diversity of fish and shellfish, especially in the southeast, where Atlantic and Mediterranean waters mix. Species include red mullet, mackerel, tuna, octopus, swordfish, pilchard, and anchovy. Bottom-dwelling species include hake and whiting. The striped dolphin and the long-finned whale are found off southeastern Spain, and the bottle-nosed dolphin off the delta of the Ebro River. In Scandinavian waters, salmon trout, and the much-esteemed siika (whitefish) are relatively abundant in the northern rivers. Baltic herring and cod are the most common sea fish.

Birds

In the short summer of the tundra, seabirds, and immigrant birds such as swans, ducks, and snipes can be found. In the great forests of Eastern Europe, black grouse, snipe, hazel hen, white partridge, owls, and blackbirds are common. The steppes have a more abundant selection of fowl. There are eagles, falcons, hawks, and kites and water and marsh birds such as the crane, bittern, and heron.

Insects

Different kinds of locusts and beetles are common in the steppes of Ukraine and European Russia. In the summer months of 2000, much of the Eurasian steppes was hit by a plague of locusts, devastating Russia’s vital grain crops. In Mediterranean and semidesert areas, scorpions, the karakurt spiders, and the palangid are insects dangerous to humans. From 1990 to 2022, the European Environment Agency reported a significant reduction in fifteen grassland butterfly species. The EU Biodiversity Strategy and Green Infrastructure Plan included hopeful measures to protect these insects.

Conservation Efforts

In a remote part of northwestern Greece, the lakes of Mikri Prespa and Megali Prespa combine to form rich wetlands. The area has more than fifteen hundred plant species, forty mammals, including the brown bear, otter, and wolf, eleven species of amphibians, twenty-two species of reptiles, and seventeen fish species. Since 1974, Prespa has been a national park, but there was no management plan. In 1991, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) helped to establish the Society for the Protection of Prespa (SPP) to intervene at a local level and develop the necessary strategies to maintain the area.

In the early twenty-first century, scientists trying to save the Iberian lynx, the most endangered cat in the world at the time, from extinction began using the latest deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology to track the cat by its droppings. The scientists aimed to put several healthy cats in a captive breeding center in the Doñana National Park. Once the population was located, DNA testing was performed to reveal whether inbreeding was further endangering the dwindling species by producing unhealthy offspring. They captured several cats from different regions and brought them to the breeding grounds. In 2000, there was no stock to breed, and there were less than six hundred lynx in Spain and fifty in Portugal. If the rate of decline continued, the animal would have become extinct by 2010. However, thanks to conservation efforts, the population recovered, with more than 2,000 lynx occupying their natural habitat by the 2020s. These efforts included restoring their ecological niche and increasing the population of their main food sources, like rabbits.

The Mediterranean monk seal was once one of the ten most endangered species in the world. It was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean at the beginning of the twentieth century, but in 1986, it was categorized as endangered. The WWF began a project in 1993 in the eastern Mediterranean to monitor the seal's presence and determine its interaction with the local population. The WWF mounted information campaigns and government lobbying in Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus to pass protective measures to achieve a balance between increasing human use of decreasing marine resources and the basic survival needs of the monk seal. Despite these efforts, the monk seal was downgraded to critically endangered in 2008. It was a rare sight, although still spotted, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean and out in the Atlantic off the Madeira Islands of Portugal. Another conservation effort in 2010, in combination with The Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal, was noted to aid public education concerning the seals. Similar programs continued through the 2010s, and by 2015, the seal was reclassified from critically endangered to endangered. In the 2020s, the seal's population was estimated to be around 700 and increasing. They were removed from the endangered list and were listed as vulnerable.

The monk seal is a shy animal with low reproduction rates. It is thus highly sensitive to changes in its habitat and external disturbances. Increasing pollution from industrial waste, plastics, insecticides, and heavy metals have also affected its habitat, food, and, most its mating ability. More importantly, since the seals are perceived by commercial fishermen to be in competition for limited fish stocks, they have been deliberately killed.

Principal Terms

Endangered Species: A species of animal or plant that is threatened with extinction

Steppe: Arid, loess-rich land, usually experiencing extremes of temperature

Tundra: A rolling arctic or subarctic plain, located too far north for trees to grow

Upper Paleolithic: The era from 30,000 BCE to 3500 BCE, when humans first began to affect European wildlife populations

Bibliography

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Griffiths, Richard A., editor. The Newts and Salamanders of Europe. Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Hayward, Peter J., and John S. Ryland, editors. Handbook of the Marine Fauna of North-West Europe. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2017.

MacDonald, David, and Priscilla Barrett. Mammals of Britain and Europe. HarperCollins, 1998.

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