You may get your woolly chums, Ceri, as scientists in Siberia have found a preserved woolly mammoth, including liquid blood! In theory, and in a Jurassic Park sort of way, they could reproduce a mammoth using the DNA. Rightly, a scientist on the news said it would be much better to use that kind of science to preserve creatures living today.

Hilarious! "Listen, we're circus elephants! We've seen men and women with giant feet, bright red noses, enormous locks of yellow, ratted, teased-up hair. We've seen ravenous men who are fire breathing, fire belching, fire eating and even high flying, high jumping, and high perching birds that look like men--but we AIN'T NEVER seen no other elephants that LOOK like THAT! We're out of here..."

I haven't seen any woolly mammoths lately. That did remind me of the film Quest for Fire (it won an Oscar for make-up); elephants were used to portray mammoths in the movie (set 80,000 years ago) and were given hairy wigs but no one had taken into account that elephants do not normally see each other wearing wigs and the poor animals took fright. I really enjoyed the film and must look to see if there's a DVD of it.

I like the mammoths in Ice Age - so cute.

I forgot to mention that we have a sizable population of hyenas too--but they tend to gravitate towards politics.

I worked hard as a lad to get funding for the Missouri Conservation Department. At one point the deer herd had dwindled in number to an estimated 750 statewide. Now the deer herd is larger than it was in pre-Columbian times. How is that possible? Because of the mixture of wilderness and agricultural lands. Wild life benefits from food sources not available before. Year to year the numbers change but in some years a single deer hunter can harvest as many as 12-25 deer. The black bear also has returned and their numbers are growing. Wild turkey are bountiful. Bobcat, lynx and now even the occasional cougar is documented.

All in all, I think wildlife is crucial and serves as a barometer for the health of the land.

Wolves? No way.

I'm not sure about the rest of his plan.

Is he joking about elephants or talking aboutwoollymammoths?

Hippos? They h ave bullet proof skin ( impenetrable by most firearms) and kill more humans in Africa than any other animal apart from machete bearing men. The good thing is: Hippos are vegetariansso they spit you out after they bite you in two. Rhinos have to literally be face-to-face before they can see you.

What about woolly mammoths??

George Monbiot, the environmental campaigner, has published a book called "Feral" to introduce the reader to the concept of "rewilding". He lives in Wales and has a particular dislike for sheep which he calls "the white plague". He also says he loves variety: "it's one of the reasons I think the Welsh language is worth preserving".

Ideally, he wants to re-introduce lynx, wolves, wild boar, moose, dalmatian pelicans, blue stag beetles, grey whales and forest bison. He'd also like to see elephants roaming the Highlands (wouldn't we all?),

Something I didn't know is that apparently the birch tree evolved to resist attacks by elephants. When you break or coppice its branches near the bottom, as elephants do, new shoots sprout almost immediately.

It may well be that sometime in the future, walkers on the Wales Coastal Path will find themselves face-to-face with a hippopotamus or a rhino.

updated by @gaynor-madoc-leonard: 11/11/15 10:38:53PM