Wilderness: The Wilding
Chapter 7: In which we turn back time and learn about rewilding
This is the seventh chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. This is my story, about my search for belonging and about seeking solace in nature by rewilding a forgotten fragment of Somerset. You can read the earlier chapters here.
We walk through an arch built of bone-grey antlers. The dried heads of teasels knock against the tines and clouds of thistle-down drift on the breeze. It is as if we have stepped back in time, to an era before we were born: flocks of goldfinches shrill and twitter; turtle doves coo and nightingales sing from the depths of dense blackthorn hedges.
The light is the colour of syrup; we enter what feels like an African savannah, sun-gold with fleabane and the yellow-brick-road yellow of ragwort. Heads snap up from the bleached-blonde grass: a herd of fallow deer, the males with impressive, flat-bladed antlers. A little further and there’s an extended family of Tamworth pigs, the same rust-ginger as the stalks of dried sorrel seeds they’re rooting beneath, their snouts coated in mud. We squeeze through a gap in a hedge and come face to face with a Longhorn cow, chocolate-brown and white with monstrous horns, set slightly askew. It snuffs and backs away in fright.
I had booked Jaimie and me on a Small Scale Rewilding Workshop at Knepp in Sussex, the former dairy estate originally run by Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell. It’s August 2020, and miraculously, for a brief window, lockdown has ended and we’re allowed to travel. It’s the first course that will be held in person. Children aren’t allowed, so we’ve just done a mammoth round trip from Somerset to drop our daughter off with my brother’s family in London, before heading to Knepp. We’ve carted our luggage from the car park in a wheelbarrow through a field to ‘Exmoor’, a military-green shepherd’s hut tucked into a small wood. But instead of settling in, we’re taking a sunset stroll through the fallow fields.
Semi-wild herbivores - Exmoor ponies, Longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs and three types of deer roam the 3,500 acre estate. We hadn’t expected to see them so soon or so close to the camp site. We walk further, through a mosaic of habitats: swampy green streams, flower-rich fields, thick scrub, ancient woodland, and emerge in a wide, flat meadow with a giant oak tree in the centre. Circling the tree are great white birds. Storks.
Storks once bred in Britain and have been here for over 360,000 years. In fact, there’s a village nine miles from Knepp, originally called Estorchestone (now Storrington) meaning ‘the village of the storks’ in Saxon. in 2016 Knepp started a reintroduction programme and this summer was the first that the storks had flown free and begun to breed. As the sun starts to set, we sit in the long grass and watch the storks’ messy, bundle-of-sticks, nests, as the parents bring worms and insects back to the chicks, clattering their red bills, before flying low over the canopy. It’s if we have returned to the Jurassic.
It might be no coincidence that Knepp feels savannah-like. Charlie Burrell grew up in Africa, and this kind of open grassland and wood pasture is familiar to him. After the death-knell sounded on his dairy business, he wanted to encourage nature to return to Knepp, but with a less-goal oriented approach than conservationists traditionally adopt.
Knepp, could, for instance, be a prime habitat for corncrakes, cranes, osprey, hedgehogs, and red-backed shrike, and normally conservationists manage land specifically for a particular species. But as Isabella quickly realises and points out in her book, Wilding, we don’t really know what habitat is suitable for certain species because we’re seeing them, not thriving, but clinging on, where and how they can.
Instead, Charlie and Isabella wanted to try, ‘letting go - allowing nature to take over. It’s about sitting on your hands, with no expectations, and seeing what turns up’ And as they say:
‘The arrivals are often surprising. No one could have predicted at the outset of the project, for example, that we would become one of the most important sites in Britain for turtle doves and nightingales. Or that we would have ravens, peregrine falcons, and Bechstein’s and barbastelle bats here within just a few years…
Nature, we are learning, is often far more resilient than we give it credit for. Hedgehogs disappeared in our last decade of intensive farming but recently seem to be making a comeback on their own. Ospreys have not bred here yet, but are occasional visitors. Rare beetles are on the increase and water-violets have already begun to spread through our watercourses. We believe it will only be a matter of time before we see our first greater horseshoe bat here, flying in from territory not far away in Midhurst.’
That night I take a bath. It’s a regular bath with hot water and scented hand wash. It’s just that it’s outside. There’s a door and a willow screen all the way around, a wooden chair for my clothes, and smooth round pebbles on the ground. It feels Japanese and strangely luxurious. I lie in the warm water and look up at the stars in the midnight velvet sky. Pipistrelle bats flit overhead - little flickers of black in the darkness - and I listen to the soft, throaty murmur of owls.
In the morning, we meet our fellow Small Scale Rewilders in the cow barn. It’s a 16th century clapper board building, with a long wooden table. We help ourselves to coffee and chocolate brownies. Ivan de Klee explains what rewilding actually is. Perhaps the greatest influence on rewilders has come from a Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera. Vera argued that our idea of dense woodland covering the land after the last ice ages was wrong, and that instead, we had a savannah-like landscape of wood pasture. What prevented ‘succession’ - trees and shrubs taking over grassland and leading to a dense closed-canopy forest had been the herds of wild mega-fauna that used to roam Europe, such as aurochs (giant wild ox), wild horses, red deer, roe deer, elk, bison and boar, in the kinds of numbers one might see of of grazers, like zebra and wildebeest roaming across the African Serengeti.
Charlie Burrell writes,
‘Their different grazing techniques and methods of physical disturbance – from trampling and puddling to rootling, rubbing, snapping branches and de-barking trees – together with their ability to transfer nutrients and disperse seeds over wide areas, would have stimulated a complex mosaic of habitats. Europe would have been a dynamic, shifting landscape of open-grown trees, emerging scrub, grazing lawns, groves and thorny thickets.’
Vera was able to put his theory into practise in the mid-nineties with the creation of the Oostvaardersplassen (OVP) wilderness reserve in the Netherlands. Originally a piece of wasteland 22.5 square miles, semi-wild herbivores were reintroduced - instead of aurochs and wild horses, Heck cattle and Konik horses and later, red deer. The experiment was, initially, a huge success. So many rare bird and plant species appeared in the OVP, the reserve was added to the European Union’s Natural 2000 network of valuable conservation areas.
Knepp, instead of Heck cattle and Konik horses, has ‘domestic proxies’ for these ancient species, in part because unlike the OVP, which is fenced off, public footpaths run through the site, and there is now, of course, the camping and glamping sites, so the animals have to be docile enough to cope with people and dogs.
Of course, both in OVP, and at Knepp, there are no natural predators such as bears, lynx, wolves and wolverine. Vera does not believe that predators were the main way in which the number of grazing animals were regulated; rather, their numbers were limited by food supply. Instead, predators create a ‘landscape of fear’, where grazing animals were often stressed and travelled to less fertile areas to live and breed, which would have had an impact on the vegetation.
Rewilding, Ivan tells us, quoting Frans Vera, is not about recreating the past.
As Frans Vera says, ‘That will always be impossible. Our world is irrevocably changed. But we can try and create something interesting and valuable with nature, using the components that are left to us.’
In the afternoon, we walk through Knepp, keeping suitably socially distanced from each other. We visit the beaver enclosure. Beavers will be introduced to Knepp later this year in the hope that they will ‘rewild’ the river. Ivan explains that a lot of work has already been done at Knepp to restore the watercourses, returning the River Adur to its existing floodplain, to prevent flooding downstream. All of this work, including purifying the river water, could have been done for free by one family of beavers.
Indeed, beavers are a keystone species. Beavers, because of their dramatic impact on the landscape, directly lead to a rise in biodiversity. For instance, they coppice trees along riverbanks for food and to build dams and lodges, which lets in sunlike and encourages the growth of aquatic plants. All the wood in the ponds they create lead to a boom in micro-organisms, followed by invertebrates, which then feed fish and aquatic birds. However, adjacent landowners are somewhat anxious, and so the team at Knepp are in the midst of building a very long, very deep and very high fence that will hopefully encourage the pair of beavers, due to be released in November, to stay at Knepp.
The whole rewilding approach resonates with me. I’d always said I wanted more wildlife, more nature. I have no idea what species would have lived on our site in the past and I have no wish to return to the past, nor to create a mini nature reserve dedicated to one species. Frans Vera’s ground-breaking book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, was translated into English from the Dutch in 2000, long after I’d finished my zoology degree. But I’d heard of his work and had reported, as a features writer who wrote about the environment, on some of his pioneering work, and written other early rewilding experiments, such as Wild Ennderdale in Cumbria. I’d even been flown up to the Alladale Etaste in North Scotland by Paul Lister, who wants to reintroduce brown bears, elk, wolves and wild boar and wanted the national press to report on his efforts.
So what we needed, I concluded from Ivan’s workshop, were a number of different kinds of domestic proxies for wild herbivores. But where would we get them from? And how would we keep them in? We have a few rotten fences strung across our land, and half is enclosed by a perimeter fence that wouldn’t keep a single sheep in, let alone anything larger. Plus, our site is so small. Wouldn’t grazing animals decimate it?
I cornered Ivan to ask him. He showed me a chart of ‘livestock units’ (LSU). A LSU is a way of comparing stocking densities: in other words, how many animals from which species can exist on your land. From a conservation point of view, low numbers and high species diversity is key. We, at one hectare, can only support 0.3 of a LSU. This translates to half a cow for a year, for instance. Maybe a quarter of a pig? Ivan seems almost as perplexed as I am, used as he is to treating ‘small’ landowners, as people who own 50 hectares or above.
We agree that Jaimie and I should bring in grazing animals, but in very low numbers, for short periods of time, and if we can’t have as many different species as we’d like we’d need, somehow, to replicate the impact that animal would have.
‘And then there’s money,’ I say. ‘This is the main reason we came on this workshop,’ I add.
Ivan looks like he wants to bolt. I explain that all of the funding I’ve found for conservation projects has been tied to either a site that is above 50 hectares (again, that magic number, conjured out of where and what?) or has to be for for a charity or a community project. We fit none of those categories. Since we moved in two years ago, I’ve applied numerous times for funding, only to be rejected for one or all of the above reasons. Ivan, unfortunately, can’t help. He does suggest I go back to Defra, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs though, and see if there is some funding somewhere.
It’s a hot day and by the end of the workshop, our brains feel as if they’ve been over-heated. Jaimie and some of the others head to the wild swimming pool. I decide a cold plunge in a dark pool, so cloudy with silt I can’t see the bottom, is not my thing. Mark Cummings, a gardener on the workshop who wants to learn how to rewild urban spaces, joins me on the terrace of the glamping kitchen, which overlooks the camping field and is humming with bees.
We drink rosé and feel as if all the world’s possibilities are shimmering before us.
And I think of the last stanza of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?