Postcards from the wild: Chapter 35

In 2019, I published a book about my experience doing fieldwork in the remote Selvagens Islands. The book, titled “Postais das Selvagens” is a blend of travel journal, science communication and love letter to the islands, written in my native Portuguese. I am currently translating it into English and will be sharing the translation here on Substack, one chapter per week. I hope you enjoy it!

Link to Chapter 34

Seven years have now passed since my time on the Selvagens Islands. In seven years, many things change1. I’ve kept in touch with several of the colleagues and friends with whom I walked every corner of Selvagem Grande, and I know that, just as for me, much has changed for them as well.

Maria Dias now lives in the United Kingdom, where she works for BirdLife International, involved in several projects dedicated to the conservation of seabirds and to mapping the regions of the ocean that matter most to them. She continues to visit the Selvagens Islands regularly, having been there again just this past summer. As for Cristóbal Pérez, he returned to his native Galicia and left scientific research — at least in its more academic form — moving instead into the world of clinical trials and the pharmaceutical industry. As the Spanish say, la ciencia está bien, pero hay que comer (“science is all well and good, but one still has to make a living”), and working conditions for university researchers are far from comfortable on the Iberian Peninsula.

Maria Pinto completed her master’s thesis on Bulwer’s petrels and is now a doctoral student at the University of Vienna, in Austria, where she continues to conduct research in the field of marine biology, particularly on the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans. She also runs an engaging YouTube channel about her work, which she named Sea&me. The other student, Federico de Martino, finished his biology degree and then headed to Denmark for a master’s in environmental management. After completing his degree, he did an internship at the European Commission in Brussels, where he still works today in the area of environmental safety.

Not long after our time on the Selvagens Islands, Joana Rosa travelled to India to volunteer in a project that brought acupuncture to the favelas of Mumbai. After that, she returned to Portugal, where she continued working in her Chinese medicine practice. While in that line of work, she began to feel that the source of the pain she treated in people was the agony of our planet itself, and so she started taking an interest in permaculture and in the regeneration of human impacts on the Earth. In 2015 she became a mother, and she realised how increasingly dehumanised childbirth was becoming, and how little emotional support mothers received. Since then, she has devoted herself to her daughter and to a few projects linked to permaculture, while also trying to learn more about how to support women in the postpartum period.

As for the wardens of Madeira Natural Park, Lourenço Alves and Jaques da Mata, they continue to provide that essential service to all of us: keeping watch over and caring for the small paradise on Earth that the Selvagens Islands truly are. That leaves me to mention Selvagem, the island’s canine resident. Maria Dias assures me that she is still there and in good health — slightly older now and with less energy to accompany the biologists on their expeditions to the plateau, yet always alert to the arrival of new visitors and eternally unable to stop the endless lizards from stealing her food.

And what about me? A great deal has changed over these seven years. After returning from the Selvagens Islands, I continued working as a researcher at the Museum of Natural History and Science and later at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. I was mostly involved in projects studying the migration of waders between Europe and West Africa. These birds, long‑legged and long‑billed, prefer to stay close to continental margins, gathering in large numbers in estuaries and other wetlands, and then migrating to the distant Arctic tundra where they nest. This work allowed me to visit extraordinary places such as Banc d’Arguin, in Mauritania, where the Sahara desert comes to bathe in the Atlantic Ocean, or the picturesque islands of the Bijagós Archipelago, in Guinea‑Bissau, where the sea is embraced by lush tropical vegetation in the form of mangroves, palm groves, and majestic kapok trees. These journeys brought me enough adventures to fill another couple of books like this one.

But the greatest adventures came through my family life. In October 2012 my son João was born, and in June 2015 my daughter Teresa — and they turned my whole world upside down2. It was largely because of them that, after much deliberation, my partner Ana and I decided in 2017 to emigrate to the Netherlands, where we found firmer ground on which to anchor our roots. We now live here a family life more complete and healthier than the one we knew in Portugal. With the change of country came a drastic professional shift as well. I left scientific research to embrace teaching, and today I am a lecturer at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences, where I teach biology, physiology, research methods, and ethics to engineering students.

And what about the Selvagens Islands? There have certainly been changes on the islands as well. Today, on Selvagem Grande, there is telephone coverage and internet access, and the facilities of the Nature Reserve have been expanded to accommodate the now permanent presence of the Maritime Police. The islands also gained some visibility through the media coverage of the President of the Republic’s visit in the summer of 2013 — he even went so far as to ring a Cory’s shearwater, which struck me as a rather distasteful political exploitation of those majestic animals.

Speaking of Cory’s shearwaters, as well as Bulwer’s petrels, Madeiran storm‑petrels and the other seabirds, they continue to survive in an ocean increasingly victim to human excesses. Overfishing is, year after year, decimating the stocks of many fish species, some of which are essential for the birds’ survival, and many birds fall victim to fishing gear themselves. Meanwhile, pollution of the marine environment shows no sign of abating; in recent years, the problem of plastic in the ocean has become particularly worrying, as seabirds and other marine animals ingest it with severe consequences for their health. These are serious problems affecting our oceans as a whole, and the Selvagens Islands, despite their isolation, are not immune to them.

But I will not end this narrative on such a negative note. I prefer to focus on all that we still have to preserve, on the endless wonders that the Earth has to dazzle us with, and on the thousands upon thousands of scientists, wardens, students, nature lovers, concerned citizens, responsible politicians, visionary entrepreneurs, and charismatic leaders who — whether men or women, young or old, with darker or lighter skin, with greater or lesser faith in their diverse creeds, beliefs and passions — fight, day after day, to protect this blue planet that is the only home we have in a Universe that may be marvellous, but is also, for the most part, dark, cold, and inhospitable to life.

The full book is now available on Amazon, both in paperback and eBook format, but you can also support my work by buying me a coffee.

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