The reintroduction project for the Apennine chamois, which was practically extinct at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been recognised by the European Commission.
The story of the Apennine chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica ornata) has all the characteristic topoi of a fairy tale, as outlined by the Russian anthropologist Vladimir Propp. There was once an initial equilibrium: during the Holocene, chamois thrived in the mountains of the central Apennines, from the Marche to Calabria, as peaceful and unreachable lords of the crags. Then that equilibrium was broken, and chamois faced extinction several times between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to relentless hunting and the impact of livestock farming. What Propp classifies as the "hero's trials" can be seen at the beginning of the last century, when our heroes — the chamois — were literally staring into the abyss of extinction. At the start of the twentieth century, barely thirty chamois survived, in Abruzzo, in an area renamed la Camosciara, protected by its forbidding peaks and jagged ridges. A single epidemic or a particularly harsh winter would have been enough to wipe this magnificent species from the face of the Earth for ever. Fortunately, the decision was taken to protect this tiny and precious chamois population by establishing the Parco nazionale d'Abruzzo in 1922. This brings us to the final stage of the general fairy-tale scheme: the restoration of equilibrium.
Since then, Apennine chamois numbers have grown exponentially, and today there are over two thousand individuals, distributed across five parks: the Parco nazionale d'Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise, the Parco nazionale della Majella, the Parco nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga, the Parco nazionale dei Monti Sibillini and the Parco regionale del Sirente-Velino.
The return of this rare ungulate, endemic to central Italy, is the result of the extraordinary reintroduction project Life Coornata, launched in 2010 by the five parks mentioned above in collaboration with Legambiente and carried out thanks to the European Union's Life+ financial instrument. The population growth of what zoologists describe as "the most beautiful chamois in the world" is the fruit of coordinated work by all the parks of the central Apennines, through the creation of new colonies and the protection of chamois and their habitats.
That the rescue of the Apennine chamois was an extraordinary undertaking was already clear; now, however, it has also been officially recognised. On 31 May, the chamois conservation project was awarded a prize by the European Commission, which included it among the 27 best conservation projects — the Best Life of 2015.
One of the cornerstones of the project involved taking a number of chamois from Abruzzo and releasing them in the other Apennine parks to establish new colonies. Here too the project demonstrated its excellence by employing advanced techniques for capturing the animals, never previously used on this species. Rather than taking and releasing individual animals, group captures were carried out, allowing the chamois — animals that live in herds — to adapt more easily to their new environment.
The reintroduced chamois settled in quickly and began to breed regularly, giving good reason for optimism about the species' future. The Apennine chamois cannot yet be considered out of danger, however: the threats are low genetic variability (it is worth recalling that all existing individuals are descended from those thirty Abruzzo survivors) and the still limited number of populations. The chamois, however, with the lightness with which it leaps from one crag to another in defiance of gravity, has defeated extinction, returning to populate our mountains, making them a little less empty and also representing a major eco-tourism attraction.