Gossip and rumour must be near-universal features of conservation: every project I have worked on has featured them. My arrival at my PhD field site, a village bordering a small nature reserve in the Dominican Republic, prompted rumours that I was a prospector and geologist working for a secret gold mine within the reserve. Whilst studying privately protected areas in southern Chile, I regularly had respondents recall rumours, widespread during the early 1990s, that the conservation philanthropist Douglas Tompkins was using his privately protected areas as a front for some other agenda, including a CIA-sponsored coup, a sinister Zionist plot, and a plan to steal Chile’s water (Holmes, Reference Holmes2014). During research on a rewilding project in west Wales, we encountered rumours that a lynx, escaped from a nearby zoo, had killed 5–10 sheep before being shot dead.
