If you traveled back 250-500 years what #wildlife could you see near you? After a four year research project, I can tell you the answer in Britain and Ireland and it is quite exciting! (🐺🐆🐰🦈🦐🐍)!
My Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife will be published in June, but I have special permission to share some of my findings before that, so I will be releasing one map each month here. Here is a list of previously released ones: https://historyandnature.wordpress.com/2022/12/21/atlas-maps/
#gis
December's historical wildlife map is of the (harbour/grey) #seal! According to my research, seals were widespread around Britain and Ireland 250-500 years ago! 🐕🧜♀️
Interestingly, seals started to decline after the end of the #EarlyModern period due to increased hunting. Around 1900 they had become so rare that they had to be legally protected. They have recovered pretty well since, and it's now pupping season, so look out for them if you walk on the coast this winter! 🌊🔭 #histodons #mammals
Happy #SaveTheEaglesDay!
Where I live now, eagles seem impossibly mythic birds, but according to my research, just 250-500 years ago White-tailed Eagles (or Sea Eagles) were widespread around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. The last native White-tailed Eagle was only shot in 1918! 🌬
But this is not the end of the story. The eagles are reintroduced on Mull, Wester Ross and Fife in Scotland, Killarney NP in Co Kerry and now the Isle of Wight in England. Please post pics if you see one! 🦅💚
The Burbot is a sinuous fish with chunky pectoral fins. It was never widespread in Britain and Ireland but I have collected records showing it was found in the east of England 250-500 years ago. It seems to have only gone extinct there around 1970!
In recent years there has been talk by the Norfolk Rivers Trust of reintroducing it, so perhaps it will be back soon!
#EarlyModern #histodons #extinction #fishing #fish #reintroduction #rewilding
250-500 years ago, I have found #frogs were recorded across #earlymodern Britain, but interestingly not Ireland. This is surprising because we normally consider frogs to be native in Ireland! 💚
Frogs also seem to have been reintroduced to Orkney and the Isle of Man in this period. Unless someone made a mistake, this happened multiple times - it is possible there have been multiple waves of frog #extinction and #reintroduction on these smaller islands! 🐸
After the Norman Conquests in Britain and Ireland, Rabbits were commonly kept in artificial warrens for meat and fur. 🐇
By the period that I study (250-500 years ago) Rabbits were widespread in England. Strangely though, they still had a mainly coastal distribution around Scotland, Ireland and Wales until much later. 
Map from my forthcoming book. 
#Rabbits #mammals #AnimalHistory #EarlyModern #Histodons #ecology
Amateur naturalists still recorded wolves in the early modern period around Sutherland, and in the west of Ireland, but not England or Wales where they seem to have already gone extinct. 🐺💔
But of course, there are legends of wolves living much later than that, and in very different areas! And I have a bit of research coming out later this month which describes what happened when they went extinct in England 
#AnimalHistory #EarlyModern #wolves #histodons #ecology #mammals
Three maps from my ATLAS OF EARLY MODERN WILDLIFE showing where wild animals were recorded in Britain and Ireland 250-500 years ago... 
I found loads of records of Pine Martens and Otters. So why no records of Beavers from early modern England..?
John Ray (1693) says 'These animals have been cut down by hunters all the way to the final extermination, and their stock in England and Wales is thoroughly extinct...'
Were they already gone?😿
#beaver #earlymodern #extinct #envhistodons
@LeafyHistory No they're not, all bustards being dry country specialists. According to Feduccia, the misunderstanding that bustards are gruine, derives from an appellation as 'grassland rails'.
What is recorded of their microhabitat preference? Little to nothing, I imagine. But I can't see why they'd persist there.
@CFoix Fields, plains, heaths and wolds which I suppose makes sense. - It sounds like they liked the big open, hedgeless fields of the champion countryside. Maybe I am stereotyping early modern Lincolnshire and Norfolk and Cambridge too simplistically, I suppose they can't have been made of entirely wet fields. Perhaps the bustards might have migrated out to drier land in winter too. 🤽
According to my research, the Great Bustard was still pretty well recorded in Britain 250-500 years ago. It was hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century, but has since been reintroduced in Wiltshire.
I wonder if all the birds in the eastern Fen counties got soggy bums! - I don't think they are very waterproof birds! 😹🦃
(Map from my Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife)
#extinction #Britishbirds #bustard #ornithology #animalhistory #histodon