In spring, the woodland in Blean, Kent, is rich in fresh greenery and soundtracked by trilling birdsong. Soon, this will also be a place where you could glimpse an animal that hasn’t been seen here for 6,000 years. In the distance, you might see a furry brown bison rubbing its vast form against a tree to scratch an itch, or taking a crashing dust bath.

European bison are regarded by conservationists as a ‘keystone’ species, missing from UK landscapes; animals whose natural behaviours are invaluable for woodland ecosystems. Bison help to kill off some trees by eating and rubbing up against their bark, which allows light and new vegetation to come through; and stir up soil by taking ‘baths’. All of this can boost an area’s biodiversity, having a significant positive impact all the way up the food chain. And destroying some trees and plants, bison can even help to kill off some invasive, non-native species. 

“Most English woodland is in a really bad ecological state,” says Evan Bowen-Jones, chief executive of Kent Wildlife Trust, which is behind the reintroduction of bison to Blean in spring 2022. “Everywhere in the UK, biodiversity has been plummeting, and one of our big risks nationally is that our ecosystems are so simplified that we are vulnerable to collapse under climate change,” he explains. “We need to create more ecologically resilient landscapes – and bison are animals that are ‘ecosystem engineers’, that will do the work for us.”

The UK’s leading conservation charity, Kent Wildlife Trust owns almost 2,500 acres of ancient woodland in Blean. Its ‘Wilder Blean’ rewilding initiative will see, initially, a small herd of bison released to roam in 1,000 acres of it, safely fenced off from public footpaths. The landmark £1.2m project will be carefully monitored and if successful, has the potential to be replicated more widely. 

Initially, a herd of just six bison will be released, with the hope that they will breed. The trust has not yet revealed where the animals will come from, but similar projects include one in Zuid Kennemerland National Park in The Netherlands [some members of which are pictured here]. UK animal licensing laws mean that the initial herd can’t exceed ten animals, but when they do, a second herd can be created in another part of the woodland, as well as in partnerships with charities that own more nearby woodland. The areas in which bison are present will be contrasted with those in which they are not, creating a new body of data to demonstrate the transformative impact of bison on English woodlands. This could be leveraged to help persuade lawmakers to lessen the costly legal and financial restrictions on managing bison, which are – arguably illogically – categorised as dangerous wild animals in UK law, and require more safety infrastructure and spending than in other countries. 

For this reason, the Wilder Blean bison project, including multiple layers of specialist fencing and tunnels, has cost more than £1.2m (sourced primarily from a lottery grant).

Kent Wildlife Trust’s plan was inspired by the success of bison reintroduction in The Netherlands, where there is two decades’ worth of evidence to support bison as a conservation tool. “In Europe they are further ahead with this,” says Bowen-Jones. “We need to re-prove everything in the UK context, and we accept that, but the learning from Holland is clear.”

Given that bison would naturally have roamed across a wide variety of landscapes, their reintroduction is an ecological tool that might, in theory, be widely replicated across the UK; Bowen-Jones mentions sand dunes in Cornwall and national parks in the north of the UK as examples. More data from what happens once the bison are ensconced in Blean will help prove what the reality of their presence means for today’s United Kingdom. 

“Their natural behaviours will have all sorts of effects, some of which we know about and some of which we don’t,” says Bowen-Jones. He has seen evidence from The Netherlands that bison themselves are a versatile conservation tool, but he emphasises that the financial and legal  constraints on bison reintroduction limit the application in other contexts.

That said, Bowen-Jones is heartened by the prospect of these great bovines grazing the garden of England. “Bison would have roamed over massive areas; they are a missing component from the vast majority of habitats in this county,” he says. Blean, he hopes, will be key to making the case for bison as a conservation icon for a new era of rewilding.

Author: Sophy Grimshaw, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Banner image and 1. Ray Lewis, 2. Tom Cawdron, 3. Evan Bowen-Jones

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Once upon a time in India’s Northeast, there was a vast forest through which a river flowed. Until the mid-1980s, its grasslands were home to rare and endangered one-horned rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants and pygmy hogs. However, it became an arena of violent socio-political conflict when the local Bodos began agitating for a separate state. Forest management took a back seat and by 2000, Manas was almost completely stripped of its rich flora and fauna, including all its 100 rhinos. It was at this time that the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) along with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) intervened to help these threatened animals. “While there were no rhinos left in Manas National Park, our assessment was that it was still capable of being a healthy habitat for rhinos,” says Vivek Menon, executive director, WTI. In conjunction with the Bodoland Territorial Council and the forest department of Assam, WTI-IFAW created a unique programme in 2002 to revive Manas and its biodiversity, embodied by the one-horned rhino.

“We set up India’s first rescue and rehabilitation centre, Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), near a protected area – in this case, Kaziranga,” says Menon. Here, orphaned rhino calves are hand-reared (some even bottle-fed) for up to three years. “Then we transport them to Manas, allow a one-year period for acclimatisation in controlled but wild conditions and then release them into the jungle,” he says. The presence of the one-horned rhino, the largest herbivore of the grasslands, is a sign that the habitat is in good ecological health. “This augurs well for smaller, lesser-known grassland animals such as pygmy hogs,” he says. For the rhino’s continued survival, its grassland habitat was protected and rewilded.

“Unlike other species that have adapted to diverse habitats, rhinos can only survive in grasslands, that too on very specific grasses,” Menon explains.

In 2011, Manas National Park was removed from the List of World Heritage in Danger and was commended for its efforts in preservation. Last month, the 12th annual camera trapping survey conducted in the forest recorded a three-fold increase in the number of adult tigers – an indicator species for forests rich in biodiversity, in the park. The return of Manas’ wildlife, including rhino conservation efforts, has positive connotations not only for wildlife conservation but also for the communities around the protected areas. For the Bodos, and the Assamese, the Manas turnaround symbolises a resurgence of their ethnic pride, which has taken a battering in the last few decades.

“When we began this project, I never doubted nature’s resilience for a minute,” Menon says. Today, Manas represents hope – hope that it is possible to reverse some of the depredations of poaching, social unrest and climate change on nature; hope that in spite of, and with some help from, humankind, the law of the jungle can prevail once more.

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Rhino banner image – Zahir Abbas/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gitartha Bordoloi/ Wikimedia Commons, 2. Kaushik Saikia/ Wikimedia Commons, 3. Sashanka for WTI-IFAW, 4. Biswajit Baruah for WTI-IFAW, 5. Julia Cumes for WTI-IFAW
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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Think of the Cotswolds countryside and what springs to mind? Green, sheep-dotted fields? Honey-stone cottages? Neatly tended gardens with flower beds in full summer bloom? What about lawns and verges that sprawl unmown as they sprout daisies, clover and that most reviled of gardeners’ weeds, the shock-haired common dandelion?

One Cotswolds village has challenged British gardeners to cast aside their famous prediction for neatly trimmed lawns and rigorous weeding of unwanted plants. Tysoe’s journey began in spring 2019, when a handful of its residents refrained from mowing their lawns during May, the month when emerging bumblebees and hoverflies are feeding on the rich nectar of wild plant species such as dandelion, bluebells and cowslips. The campaign, dubbed #NoMowMay, was first proposed by British wild plant conservation charity Plantlife in 2019, as a way to protect endangered species as well as the fast-disappearing natives that feed on wildflower nectar and whose populations are threatened by factors including global warming.

In Tysoe, locals took to it with gusto: sowing wild flower seeds, refraining from mowing and installing Brian May, a scarecrow who inadvertently resembled the legendary guitarist with British rock group Queen, to deter birds from pecking at wildflower seeds and shoots.

“The effort has been growing every year since,” Rosemary Collier, one of the project’s local coordinators and an entomologist at Warwick University. “The idea to make space for nature came from members of the church and we first rewilded parts of the churchyard. Then the parish council came on board and we re-wilded some of the parish’s verges. We also harvested seeds from local native wildflowers and sowed these alongside yellow rattle, which is semi-parasitic and suppresses grass, allowing other wildflowers to grow.”

Tysoe villagers are part of a broader citizen-led British green volunteering trend that’s been dubbed ‘ungardening’, which urges Britons to let 30 percent of their gardens and public spaces grow wild for the benefit of native wildlife. The trend can present a challenge to British tastes, admits Shirley Cherry, who coordinates a conservation campaign to turn Tysoe into a year-round wildlife-friendly village that’s sprung from the village’s rewilding efforts, Tysoe Wildlife.

“You won’t win everybody over because some people like primness in their gardens,” Cherry says. “Nature likes things messier: curving lines rather than straight lines, plants left to grow.”

On a mild day this May, Tysoe’s verges bloom with daisies, buttercups and wild violets as bees fly in busy arabesques and passersby quizzically stop to read the signs erected to explain the thinking behind the villages’ unkempt verges. Collier, who studies insect counts in her work at Warwick University, says that quantitative analysis of the impact on Tysoe’s insect life is tricky but that she had noticed more bees in the village this year, as well as a greater range of insect species.

Any good news is much needed. A 2019 study found that a third of British wild bees and their pollinating relatives, the hoverflies, are in decline, with habitat loss and climate change thought to be the principal causes of the insects’ demise.

Collier has enjoyed the flowers that have sprung up on her village’s unmown verges, including nectar-rich wildflowers such as oxeye daisy, field scabious and knapweed. She’s also pleased that dandelions, unsung kings of the pollinating world, are being rehabilitated, in Tysoe and beyond.

“People get annoyed with dandelions because they’re so good at dispersing their seeds but they’re amazing pollinators because they’re composite flowers with lots of little flowers in their head,” she says. Collier hopes such efforts will lead to a renewed appreciation of the environmental benefits of wildflower such as dandelions and nettles and the important role they play in supporting insects and animals higher up the food chain.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Unsplash, Rosemary Collier and Sylvia Davies

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The scars of the ice age may be carved into Cumbria’s sweeping valleys and fells, but that’s not all that remains of the era.

Ennerdale Water, a glacial lake in the western Lake District, is home to England’s last migratory population of Arctic charr. Landlocked here since the ice retreated, now the fish emerge under cover of darkness each November to spawn in the adjoining river instead.

Yet that instinct has proven problematic, exposing this threatened aquatic species to water pollution in an environment where the gravel the fish use as their spawning nests was in short supply. Gareth Browning of Forestry England explains that the Ennerdale population had plummeted to around 20 spawning charr by the end of the 1990s. Having outlasted the glaciers, the charr was about to disappear from the lake forever.

At that point, local landowners stepped in to form the Ennerdale Arctic Charr Restoration project. It remains a collaboration between the Environment Agency, Forestry England and other Wild Ennerdale partners.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know much about the fish at first. “It was very much initially a discovery project,” Browning says – and this was its own challenge and led to a process of trial and error.

The team’s first intervention was to replace a crude pipe bridge on the River Liza, which was blocking water flow, hoping this would once again allow the charr to swim upriver to spawn; disappointingly, however, the population didn’t respond. It took a broader survey to discover a second bridge at Woundell Beck was blocking the flow of gravel for charr nests.

The improved river flow also helped another issue that was threatening the fish: riverine needle litter from the conifers planted beside the water courses after the Second World War. “Conifers are very good at stripping pollution out of the atmosphere,” Browning explains, “but that pollution’s quite acidic.” Allowing the Liza to flow freely reduced these harmful pH spikes as did replacing conifers in the surrounding area with native broadleaves, juniper and heathland. At the same time, the Environment Agency undertook an off-site breeding programme to boost fish stock, taking eggs from local fish, and returning the hatched fry to the River Liza.

In 2020 over 700 charr spawned in the River Liza and other once-threatened species are unexpectedly blooming too, such as the formerly extinct Marsh Fritillary butterfly.

Dr Ian Winfield has studied the link between climate change and the cold-water charr, he believes that tracking the population health of species such as the charr is key to understanding the impacts of climate change. Milder winters, he says, pose a risk to the incubating eggs of a species at the southernmost limit of their natural territory.: “They really need water temperatures similar to those of a domestic fridge in order to survive well,” Winfeld says.

The humble Arctic charr’s fate is also a barometer for the health of the Lake District, a much-prized natural environment that sees 15 million visitors each year. “If the population is doing well then the lake is doing well,” Winfield adds.

Author: Ruth Bushi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Ennerdale banner image: Kreuzschnabel/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gareth Browning, 2. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 3. Dr Ian J. Winfield
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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Cheshire Wildlife Trust’s Kevin Feeney was submerged in a chilly watercourse, welly tops breached, when he had a revelation. “I was laboriously trying to build a dam and I thought: surely beavers do a much better job of this? And without the polluting fuel-use and chainsaws, too.”

It’s a big year for a humble semiaquatic rodent. Beavers are native to mainland Britain, but were hunted to extinction in the 18th century by traders seeking their fur, meat and scent glands (which were in demand for perfume-making). The loss of these industrious herbivores – who dam rivers to raise the water level, enabling them fell trees – led to the loss of the mosaic of lakes, meres, mires, tarns and boggy places that were architected by their damming.

Feeney’s project to restore beavers to Hatchmere, a wooded lake area in northwest England, is one of a number of experimental beaver reintroductions due to be carried out across Britain in coming years. They include the release of beaver families and pairs in Dorset, Derbyshire, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Nottinghamshire; many of these beavers being sourced from parts of Scotland where residual ancient communities exist, and overpopulation can lead to flooding. At Hatchmere, says Feeney, the ambition was to improve water quality and to clear the shading tree cover that disinhibits diversity.

“In old woodland there’s no sunlight and no moisture on the ground, so you get a lack of plant diversity and a knock-on effect on the number of invertebrates that can thrive,” Feeney says. “When beavers fell trees they let the light back in.”

Beavers’ skills in damming and coppicing are part down to their lowly position on the food chain. “When you’re predated the water is a safer place to be,” Feeney explains. “So beavers need the trees to come to them; and they also need the power of the water to be able to easily shift and trap massive logs.” He adds that the record for the longest beaver-built dam goes to a rodent family in Germany, who built a 168-metre long dam over several generations. Beaver-dammed watermasses also provide homes for otters, water voles and kingfishers.

The downside in beaver reintroductions is overswing: if they dam too efficiently, or in the wrong places, they can flood farmland and roads. Such problems can be overcome, however, with innovations such as the ‘beaver deceiver’, a plastic pipe inserted in a dam that lets water flow through.

Feeney describes the day of the beaver couple’s release into Hatchmere as ‘magical’. “The female jumped out of her cage into a duck pond and started swimming in perfect circles [see footage],” he recalls. “We had to coax the male in, but then he gave a big tail splash and looked right back at our camera.”

The couple also greeted each other with a spot of light paw boxing ‘like kangaroos’, but were found a week later curled around each other on a patch of bramble. Locals have been asked to submit potential names for Hatchmere’s new residents to the Cheshire Wildlife Trust, with a christening due next month.

“There are a lot of puns so far,” says the CWT’s Rachel Bradshaw. “But ‘Justin Beaver’ probably won’t make the grade.”

The Wildlife Trusts have launched a £30 million appeal to kickstart natural recovery across 30 percent of the UK’s land and sea by 2030 wildlifetrusts.org/30-30-30

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images and Video Credit: Cheshire Wildlife Trust

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