Grazing - THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY

A Landscape Shaped by Gentle Giants

A human lifetime is too short to remember the primeval landscapes of the Weinviertel, but in geological terms, we are only a blink of an eye away. Whether we imagine traveling 20,000 years back to the last Ice Age, 120,000 years to a warm interglacial period, or even further into the past, one thing remained constant: the presence of large herbivores!

The thought of water buffalo wallowing in the swampy valley floors near Ernstbrunn or big cats like lions and leopards hunting wild donkeys in what is now Mistelbach’s main square might seem unbelievable. However, when we combine current fossil evidence from across Europe with the ecological requirements of species that still exist today, these ideas make perfect sense. Throughout both cold and warm periods, Central Europe was home to large predators similar to those found in Africa today. This, of course, required a sufficient number of prey animals - just like the ones we see in nature documentaries. And they were abundant!

Ice Age tundras were home to well-known species such as mammoths and woolly rhinos, but also musk oxen and caribou. Warm periods had their own equivalents: European elephants, broad- and narrow-nosed rhinoceroses, water buffalo, wild donkeys, wild horses, and even hippopotamuses. Many of these species were wiped out in their Ice Age refuges around the Mediterranean by early Stone Age hunters before they had a chance to recolonize the north. In more recent times, the aurochs met the same fate, though the wisent narrowly escaped extinction. Aurochs, competing with humans for grazing land and valued as a food source, disappeared by the High Middle Ages (around the mid-13th century). Wild horses vanished even earlier, during the Neolithic period, while the wisent survived in the Waldviertel region until around the year 1000, when it was still hunted occasionally.

With the disappearance of these key species, many of their ecological companions vanished as well. Large herbivores were not just prey for carnivores; they played a much bigger role in shaping ecosystems. By grazing, they maintained open landscapes and flower-rich meadows. Their trails provided nesting areas for wild bees, thorny shrubs formed diverse hedgerows where tree seeds could germinate safely, and their dung supported countless dung beetles and flies, which in turn fed birds and bats. Even carcasses of dead animals supported an entire ecosystem of scavengers and decomposers.