Bourne Area Group Newsletter
September 2023
Rewilding
Rewilding is a highly topical, often misunderstood, and sometimes controversial subject. It seems that everything can be rewilded these days – from your garden to yourself. But what does it really mean, how does it differ from other terms such as ecosystem restoration and how does the current emphasis on rewilding sit with the ‘traditional’ management of many Trust reserves?
The Knepp estate in Sussex is the poster child of the rewilding movement. There, the owners turned their 1400ha Sussex estate back to nature (and natural processes) using free-roaming cattle, ponies and pigs as analogues for the aurochs and wild boar lost from our landscape. The results for wildlife, such as nightingales, turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies, have been striking and the site is now immensely popular to visit.
We are now fortunate to have a rewilding site on the edge of the Bourne area – at Boothby Wildlands, a former arable farm of >600ha which will be allowed to revert to natural vegetation. It will be exciting to see how this site develops over the years and, by courtesy of Boothby Wildlands, we are fortunate to have a field visit planned there for mid-September (see events). We will continue a rewilding theme over the winter programme with a talk from the project in the spring for those who weren’t able to make the field visit.
But what is rewilding? Everyone seems to have an opinion, the term is interpreted variably and even national treasures like Monty Don can fall foul of orthodoxy when he claimed that gardens couldn’t be rewilded A definition has been proposed for the Scottish government and their commissioned report is worth reading. Their definition includes the following: ‘Rewilding means enabling nature's recovery….. it differs from other approaches in seeking to enable natural processes which eventually require relatively little management by humans’
It suggests that rewilding is just one part of the family or spectrum of approaches to nature management, but rewilding has a stronger emphasis on restoring ecosystem functioning and achieving natural processes free of human intervention. IUCN has its own definition and set of principles. Ecosystem restoration is a not dissimilar approach but accepts more human intervention and is, perhaps, more focused on a desired end state (rather than letting nature dictate the outcome).
Clearly, in a crowded Britain (especially lowland England), it is hardly possible to leave sites entirely to nature and some human intervention will always be required. Two things stand out to me as being key principles for rewilding and both relate to scale. I think that to work, re-wilding has to be on a large, ideally landscape, scale and there should also be a guarantee of longevity, it cannot be done on a short tenure. That is why I agree with Monty Don that wildlife gardening isn’t rewilding proper, gardens are too small and the tenure of nature-friendly gardeners typically too short. Of course, you can call what you do in your garden anything you want – but what is wrong with just referring to ‘wildlife gardening’ or ‘nature-friendly gardening’? All the same practices apply.
Rewilding has its critics too. Farmer might instinctively push back against seeing land taken out of food production (even though much agricultural land doesn’t only produce food). And even if some food continues to be produced from rewilded areas, overall production is usually lower. This missing food needs to come from somewhere. If we end up ‘offshoring’ this food production so that more forest is cleared in, say, the Amazon to provide it, then rewilding will not have had a net benefit for nature. The alternative approach is to look for increased or intensified production from land already farmed (whether in the UK or elsewhere). And restored ecosystems provide other ‘non-food’ benefits – such as carbon sequestration, water management and human enjoyment.
Where does this recent focus on rewilding leave all our traditional management for nature conservation?? If we were to ‘rewild’ all our reserves in Britain we would lose a lot of our biodiversity. Our chalk downlands, hay meadows, coppice woodlands and more have all co-evolved with human land management practices, lose those and we lose what made them special in the first place. Rewilding, I think, provides greatest benefits when it uses land that is not currently of high value for nature conservation (or for farming either). And, together with ecosystem restoration, it can help, the UK to achieve global targets for ecosystem restoration and ‘30x30’ (30% of land and waters conserved for nature by 2030) in the Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework In other words, it adds to the overall ‘estate’ or capital of nature in the country.
I like rewilding (even though I prefer ecosystem restoration as a term), it offers us exciting chances to support the recovery of species and restoration of ecosystems at larger scales and to see dynamics we might not have anticipated; I hope we see more areas across the country. But, to mix metaphors, whilst rewilding might be the new kid on the block it is not the only show in town; all the approaches to nature conservation practised over the decades continue to have their place, it is not a choice of one or the other.
Communicating with members – a BAG WhatsApp group
We have commented before on the issue of how we best communicate with local members, noting that this newsletter and our programme of events are now only available on the Trust website.
To help alert members to when an event is due or when there is something new to see on the website, we are trialling a WhatsApp broadcast group. This allows us to send messages to anyone who has decided to join the group but still protects people’s personal data (your telephone number) from being seen by others. So, it is pretty much a one-way form of communication but you will be able to ask questions of the administrators. If you want to be part of this group, please let one of the Committee know, either at an indoor event or by sending a message to Amanda Jenkins (07903 028607) or me (Vin Fleming 07968729169).
Of course, we also have our Facebook page (which is here) and where we will continue to post information about events etc. And don’t forget to look on the Bourne Area Group pages on the Trust website – where you’re reading this presumably!
Deeping Lakes Open Day
Our open day in early June was a great success with almost 170 adults & c50 children visiting the Deeping Lakes reserve. On the day we raised over £500 for the Lincs Wildlife Trust, sold out of cakes and other refreshments & saw 52 bird species (plus orchids, dragonflies & butterflies). A big thanks to all the volunteers and visitors who made the day such a good one.
Winter programme
We are hoping to run an indoor programme this winter. We are currently putting together a programme of speakers and we will post talks on our events page once they are confirmed. We will also post these on Facebook and on our WhatsApp group.
