Rewilding the Dawn Chorus

In Burfa Bog in Radnorshire the other morning listening for the dawn chorus I heard birds I haven’t heard in years. It was a truly extraordinary experience.

Burfa Bog is twenty-three acres of wet and dry grassland, bog and brook-side alder woodland, in the middle of the Radnor valley. This valley was formed by glaciers and strewn with fine glacial gravels, and was almost certainly filled by a lake while the glaciers were retreating. It was then colonised by alder woodland, which thrives in shallow lakes and bogs where other trees cannot grow because of the lack of nitrogen. Alder, like clover, can ‘fix’ nitrogen, by cooperating with a certain type of bacteria, and the eventual result was a valley of very fertile soils, where the farmer was pretty soon the dominant mammal. The valley has much evidence of late Neolithic people, and a Roman fort. Much of it now is a flat farmland of straggly hedges and wire fences but there are remnants of the alder woodland lining the Hindwell Brook as it runs down towards the Ditchyeld Bridge and on towards Presteigne. The farmers work the land pretty hard here, not leaving much time between crops.  When I worked in the valley one farmer was noted for spraying herbicides along his hedgebanks, which should in a land with its wits about it be classed as an ecological crime. So in among all this the bog, a nature reserve for forty years now, gives a hint of how the valley must have looked before the beaver was evicted and man moved in. For you can be sure that the land of the whole valley was once shaped and formed by beaver ponds and beaver meadows on braided streams flowing slowly through the alder woods. 

The Knobbley Brook that meanders the marsh is bright with the great yellow open globes of Kingcups wherever alders line the brook, and there is a complex matrix of plants in the wet woodland. There are patches of Saxifrages, their flowers surrounded by golden sepals, and tiny Moschatel, minute flower heads looking like the clock towers of Radnorshire market towns, dials facing four ways and one on top. There was Yellow Flag Iris not yet in bloom, rising shoots of red campion and bluebell, and leaves of Ragged Robin and Meadowsweet quietly building summer. The dry slopes of the old castle motte suit the Primroses, and in some of the damp meadowland are precious tussocks that may have taken decades to form.

You could choose to think that these plants were competing with one another, if you brought that kind of human mind-set to the natural world. I prefer to see it as a complex matrix where everything is interconnected and interdependent - a web including insects and fungi, snakes and frogs, where everything thrives for being in company with everything else, where every single richness nurtures another richness and where the connections and intersections may be as complex as the linking of neurones in a brain. There was a pile, a few handfuls, of small beautiful empty striped toffee-coloured snail shells under one old hazel bole. I have no idea what ate them or collected them, except that there was no thrush’s anvil there, but I’m fairly content not to know. Nature is full of small puzzles that sometimes, if you remember them long enough, may get resolved. Everything that lives in the marsh is part of the life-cycle of other organisms, feeding each other and feeding on each other, a living and breathing challenge to the world of monocultures just across the fence.

So this morning I got up a four o’clock to make a flask of coffee. Last time I did this so early was many years ago, making believe that an early morning journey was just another of our adventures, and since then I haven’t had the mettle for another such event. I had decided to go to Burfa to hear the dawn chorus before I remembered what memories making the early flask would stir.

Almost all the summer migrants should by now have arrived to join our natives, to make the musical racket that is the glory of an English spring morning. I drove through the dark, arriving at the bog at five o’clock, an hour before sunrise. I opened the flask, burned my tongue and settled down to listen.

 At 5.08 a wood pigeon called. At 5.14 I heard a pheasant – an invasive alien - and another wood pigeon, and then there was silence until 5.28 when I heard a distant blackbird and a brief thin robin’s song. The blackbird got going again at 5.38 followed by some (non-native) Canada geese at 5.49. All was silent then until 6.03 when I heard a wren and a pigeon, and then a crow and a robin. The pheasant called again, as I mused on the absurdity of the landowning classes being able to import millions of alien and destructive pheasants every year, even in the midst of an Avian Influenza pandemic.  Were I to return a pair of beavers, a native species, to this bog, I would be breaking the law.

There are 36 bird species listed as breeding in Burfa Bog, but only five were singing. Most notably, neither Song Thrush nor Mistle Thrush; no sign of Chaffinch or Yellow Hammer, and the only warbler was the Chiffchaff. I did get to hear the dawn chorus though. I hadn’t come all this way to go home without hearing the sublime cacophony of the English spring morning. I had my phone with me, and I found a wonderful dawn chorus recorded years ago in a Sussex woodland. I listened to it with Radnorshire crows and pigeons chipping in from time to time, and the odd pheasant.

And what do I take from this? The inevitable slow creeping realisation that nature reserves are powerless to preserve nature in the face of a modern farming which has the field opposite the bog cultivated tight up to the hedge bank leaving no space for hedge plants or insects, and, as it chanced, a sprayer arriving in a wheat field as I turned for home. I saw no moths on the journey there, and you can be sure that if we allow farmers to keep on spraying biocides everywhere even the precious mosaic of flowering plants in the reserve will disappear, because there will no longer be insects to pollinate them and they will not set seed. The birds of the reserve are disappearing and the flowers will not be far behind, because everything is interconnected. The chief value in nature reserves has been in saving species that farming destroys, but this can only be a temporary respite. Whatever survives in nature reserves cannot survive indefinitely because species cannot breed forever in isolated pockets and because the damage done by agriculture to the soil and the air and the watercourses affects the whole countryside.

Nature reserves have been remarkably successful in preserving habitat and species. Without them what remains of nature in our farmed countryside would by now be utterly bereft and without hope. When we come to our senses and devise an agriculture that is suited to the needs of life on earth, rather than moulded to meet the needs of a few huge corporate chemical manufacturers, nature reserves will be useful as seed sources. But we do not have time to wait for farmers to make this change, or for the government to direct it, because the government doesn’t care and farmers are concerned to make as little change as possible and to convince themselves comfortably that there is nothing much wrong with what they do.

Nature reserves and nature trusts were created not by governments but by visionary and energetic individuals coming together and organising. If you want to actually do anything to change the situation you need to get behind a new generation of visionary people. Keep sending your sub to the nature trust by all means, but if you want to know you are changing our future there are even better places to put your energy and money.

Whatever you have heard and whatever impression you may have formed of the rewilding movement, it is easy not to realise its enormous significance. This is not just a fad or a fashion, started by a few posh landowners hosting Eco tourists. It represents a complete reversal of previous attitudes to land-use and the environment. Until extraordinarily recently few landowners or farmers thought about ecology at all, and farming subsidies were based on the idea that anyone who owned rural land could call themselves a farmer, extract value from whatever land they owned, and be subsidised by the tax-payer to do so. In the thirty or so years since the concept of rewilding was first developed, the idea of returning ecosystems to something like the state they might have been in before humans arrived has, and I hesitate to use the phrase but will anyway, spread like wildfire. Here in the UK we had taken the biblical assurance that we should have dominion over the natural world to extremes, with a nationally sponsored wildlife extermination programme, Elizabeth the First’s Vermin Act, running from Tudor times until the work was taken over by gamekeepers in the nineteenth century and by Shell, Monsanto, Bayer and the like in the twentieth. It worked pretty well, and the UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries anywhere in the world. But the assumptions that underpinned this rape of the countryside are now being fundamentally challenged by hugely ambitious landscape-scale rewilding projects that, in the age of the internet and of crowd-funding, we can all get behind. And the idea that nature is full of all sorts of values that are important to society in general is a fundamental challenge to the private exclusive privilege of land ownership. Even the current Conservative government concedes that landowners should be providing public goods as well as living off whatever fat they can still get out of the land.

To restore the biosphere we need to start to work on a much larger scale than that of tiny reserves like Burfa Bog, to recreate large areas where nature is not besieged by farming. Often these will be places where farming is marginal at best. The famous Lakeland sheep farmer James Reebanks tweets that he cannot make a living on 700 acres. Many of us now think it would be a good idea to get the sheep off the hills and let the land heal itself. This is unlikely to happen in the Lake District, because we have allowed our dead poets to convince us that this wasted landscape is iconic, but there are places where we are not held back by this antiquated view and progress can be made.

In the Scottish borders, for example, there are no such shibboleths about iconic landscapes. Their local poet, Robert Burns, was more interested in human foibles than in landscape. Anyone can see that this is a totally sheep-blasted landscape, best to hurry through on the way to Glasgow or Edinburgh. What is there to stop for? A few more bald hills? A black conifer plantation? In fact next time I’m up that way I’m looking forward to turning off the A74(M) near Moffat to where a handful of visionary people have got together to create the Carifan Wildwood. These aren’t rich people as far as I can tell, and nowadays crowdfunding can power all sorts of projects that capture the public imagination. They started with a valley of 1500 acres that was bought in 2000 entirely by donations and with help from charitable trusts, a valley which had been so heavily grazed by sheep, deer and feral goats that there were apparently few native species of any kind except the short turf typical of so much of our uplands. One ancient rowan tree had survived. After twenty years of tree planting and the exclusion of herbivores there is now a growing diverse wooded landscape such as has not existed there for many centuries. Some plants were able to recolonise from crevices in the rocks where a few relicts had survived beyond the reach of sheep, and many species have moved in over the years. There are now, almost miraculously, bluebells in these young woodlands ‘Foxes and badgers are now common and otters, stoats and weasels are also present. Kestrels, buzzards, peregrines and ravens are regularly seen … and there are occasional records of short-eared, long-eared and barn owls. There are large increases in willow warblers and chaffinches, and many other woodland and scrub species such as blackcap, long-tailed tit, siskin, lesser redpoll, reed bunting and tree pipit are gradually establishing themselves. Ring ouzels are variable in occurrence but black grouse have maintained a good population, recently with eight regularly displaying males.’ Since that was written Pine Marten have also reintroduced themselves to the valley, and maybe one day soon there may be beaver. They have since gone on to buy  more land and rewild a total area so far of 3,100 hectares (nearly eight thousand acres0.

The area around Carifan now run by the Borders Forest Trust illustrates how quickly the destruction of the biosphere can be reversed. Further north the work of the charity Trees for Life is helped by the obvious beauty and ecological richness of the remnants of the ancient Caledonian Forest. Those who have absorbed the notion that the ravaged parts of the Highlands are somehow awesome and magnificent natural wildernesses cannot sustain that view when they see the huge areas of the old forests starting to spread back across the hillsides, with birches growing among the heather and bilberry and vibrantly green young pines stretching upwards towards the sun and up the mountain slopes. Much of this rewilding - now expanding exponentially as landowners and bodies such as the Woodland Trust or the Affric Highlands and the Northwoods projects gather momentum – owes its inspiration to a single remarkable and inspirational individual, Alan Featherstone Watson, who founded the charity Trees for Life in 1986. It now owns a large former stalking estate at Dundreggan north of Loch Ness where they are demonstrating how rewilding can not only kick-start the restoration of the biosphere but also revitalise dying and depopulated communities, through their tree nurseries that raise 100,000 trees a year, and the new Rewilding Centre attracting volunteers and conferences and workers into an area that once only offered jobs for a few stalkers and shepherds..

Both these inspiring examples are from Scotland. But in England and Wales there are huge opportunities for rewilding too. We have large areas of desolate uplands ripe for restoration, and many people willing to donate, to crowdfund and to volunteer to plant trees. In Abergavenny, Stump up for Trees is well on the way towards its target of planting a million trees in and around the Bannau Brechineog, developing a cadre of skilled volunteers and their own tree nursery.

The principle that underlies this, whether articulated or not, is that although we have been destroying the biosphere, the living matrix of life on which we all depend, it can heal itself. Plants and trees protecting the soil and working together with microbes and fungi can rebuild the richness that we have squandered, and there are huge areas of this country where the case for this kind of rewilding is clear and overwhelming. Some communities and landowners are suspicious, naturally, but as projects get going and the benefits are clear people will start jumping aboard, just as they did when the rewilding project at Knepp in Sussex started to gain attention. Rewilding, it seems, can be done profitably even in the sorts of farmland that jostle round nature reserves like Burfa Bog, but maybe our greatest challenge will be to start the sort of rewilding which involves creating space in farmland for wildlife and ways of farming that do not involve the use of indiscriminately poisonous chemicals. When I look at the rewilding achievements of some of these charities I start to think that anything is possible. The sooner you all come to share this belief with me, the sooner it will be. Even at Burfa there is one rushy field alongside that would make a wonderful addition to the reserve if we could raise the wind to buy it and make more space for nature and a little less for lamb chops.

For those who would like to find out more about rewilding projects I have added some links and descriptions of projects and organisations together with my possibly subjective impressions. It is an exciting and fast moving world but these links will give a glimpse of what is out there.

https://knepp.co.uk/rewilding/

The original inspirational project allowing an unprofitable farmed estate to rewild itself in a carefully controlled way while allowing it to profit from eco tourism and from selling rare-breed meat. Has been quite successful in supporting nightingales, turtle doves, white storks, and in making the idea of rewilding fashionable.

https://wildkenhill.co.uk/

Wild Ken Hill is a project to restore nature, fight climate change and grow healthy food across a coastal farm in West Norfolk. Best known as a site for filming Springwatch and Autumnwatch recently

http://www.summit2sea.wales/

This ambitious project launched with the support of Rewilding Britain to rewild an area from Pumlumon to the Welsh coast ran into serious trouble because of opposition from local people, being seen maybe as an imposition by posh outsiders who did not consult local feelings, needs and opinions. Now relaunched as Tir Canol, the project is being redesigned in collaboration with local farmers and landowners. Good luck with that!

https://stumpupfortrees.org/

A brilliant organisation, started by people rooted in the farming community around Abergavenny, aiming to plant a million trees in the area. It has made a very good start, and although it maybe works with local farmers less than with landowners who have moved in, it seems very well integrated into the rural community while attracting idealistic volunteers who plant trees, run a tree nursery and do wildlife surveys. A great bunch of people showing how rewilding can be a fun way to make a difference.

https://bordersforesttrust.org/wild-heart/carrifran-wildwood

As far as I can see this Trust is moving forward from the wonderful restoration of the Carifran valley to wider ambitions for ‘reviving the wild heart of southern Scotland’. My impression is that their ambitions are simple and straightforward, just getting on with demonstrating how simply they can achieve massively important ecological restoration.

https://cairngormsconnect.org.uk/

This is a massive project partnership of neighbouring land managers, committed to a bold and ambitious 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area within the Cairngorms National Park. It involves organisations such as the RSPB, NatureScot, Forestry and Land Scotland, and the privately owned rewilded estate of Glenfeshie. It is truly huge, covering 600 square kilometers, where they are restoring all aspects of the landscape, reviving aspen woodlands along the rewilded rivers and montane scrub above the rapidly expanding pine forests.

https://treesforlife.org.uk/

  and https://rewildingeurope.com/landscapes/affric-highlands/  are active north and west of Loch Ness and out towards the west coast. Trees for Life runs a new purpose-built Rewilding Centre on the rapidly rewilding Dundreggan Estate, which also supports other schemes such as the Affric Highlands project. This seems to be a model of sensitive consultation with local stakeholders starting to expand the rewilding of the old pine forest remnants in Glen Affric and spreading down through the National Trust lands in Glen Shiel and taking in remnants of western rainforests

There are also many national bodies like the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland and the Woodland Trust managing very large areas of land and doing great work