PERTISAU: With tender care, Sepp Rieser adorns the bulky heads of his reluctant cows with flower wreaths, adds some more fir twigs, and adjusts the large bells around their necks.

“I’ve been doing this since I was a little boy,” Rieser says of the ancestral tradition in which cattle are decorated for their journey from the high Alpine Gramai pasture in Austria’s western Tyrol state, where they graze all summer long, to the valley below where they’ll spend the harsh winter months.

To Rieser, the festivities surrounding this journey to the village of Pertisau in the Karwendel mountains are as important as his birthday or Christmas.But it could soon be a relic of the past: Sweeping economic changes as well as climate change are taking their toll on the landscape and threatening the future of the tradition as well as its bovine stars.

The small-scale farms that dominate Tyrol have become economically unviable, forcing thousands of farmers to pivot to more reliable sources of income.

As a result, more than 25,000 cows have disappeared over the past decade, and with them the pastures they used to graze on, according to figures from the agriculture ministry.

Within the past two decades, around 1,250 pastures in Tyrol alone have been left to revert to nature, a development that is also affecting other regions of the Alps, from southeastern France through Switzerland, as well as parts of Italy, Germany and Slovenia.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2020