The world’s preoccupation with unwanted arrivals, be they tourists, migrants or armed invaders, usually veers to the ugly side – but when the incomers aren’t human, heroic ingenuity is sometimes possible.
It’s hard to top the recent efforts of Venetian preservationists for sheer grit. A team this year has been abseiling up and down the bell tower of San Francesco della Vigna to spray and later remove tenacious weeds undermining the structure’s stability.
Every gardener knows weeds are intrepid invaders and some, like buddleia, have a liking for masonry and rooflines that borders on evil.
But these Italian weeds have spent the past 500 years displacing brickwork up to an altitude of 69m.
Many cities now safety-net old masonry, but the potential for this tower to crumble was deemed worthy of extreme measures. Drones and lasers helped guide the restoration team in an operation thought more practical than scaffolding the structure.
As for what gloaty super-plant was king of the castle, the culprit was, amazingly, not buddleia nor even its rapacious rival convolvulus but a doughty blackberry bush.
In Germany’s Kassel, the challenge is scarcely less venturesome: an ungovernable raccoon population. The North American migrants are endearing but so bold and dexterous with their primate-like thumbed paws as to even break into houses.
While colonies bred from escaped fur farm animals are reasonably common in Europe, Kassel has an especially intense concentration for a PR nightmare of a reason: they were introduced deliberately in the district by the Nazi Third Reich under the aegis of Herman Goering, who presided over forest and nature policy. They are accordingly commonly referred to as “the Nazi raccoons”.
The city’s solution has been to adapt the common feral cat approach: catch them, sterilise them and let them go forth and not multiply. Alas, two problems have arisen. The initially wildly successful bait, strawberry jam, is no longer working well, so fewer are being caught. Who knew raccoons had food fads?
Also, hobbyist hunters are campaigning to prove the forcible medical treatment is a cruel breach of the animals’ rights, saying it would be more humane to simply shoot them.
So far, the raccoons’ cuteness has prevailed, but wolves are having a tougher time. Russia’s conscription for the invasion of Ukraine has deprived a key reindeer-herding territory, the Russian-Finnish border, of so many of its traditional wolf hunters that the canine packs’ populations are surging, posing risks to livestock and humans. And parts of Spain are relenting on wolf conservation to allow hunting, fearing an imbalance of predator ecology.
Wolf PR suffered a major setback a few years ago when one made the mistake of killing European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen’s beloved pony, prompting her to press for culls.
The fox population is also in the dog box, having delighted in the discovery that some car underpinnings are now sheathed in tasty soy-based coatings rather than the traditional petroleum-based protectant. This has led to vulpine snacking on tyre pressure sensors, electric charging cables and – in a curiously Stephen King twist – brake cabling. Eerily, foxes’ car-chewing seems to come in territorial waves as fox news spreads about the tasting menu available in new-car-dense neighbourhoods, causing dangerous clusters of sudden brake failure.
It doesn’t always end well for the fox, as the brake fluid that can leak out after a good chomp is highly toxic. And the foxes now have competition, British media reporting squirrels, rats and even cats have started car-gnawing.
It might be worth trying a coating of strawberry jam, in case all quadrupeds get quickly bored with it. But if the world’s gulls, surely the most pitiless of scavengers, get in on the act, the automotive industry is doomed.
