The rewilding of Britain
In the 1950s workmen digging up the south side of Trafalgar Square in the heart of London unearthed the bones of extinct mammals that roamed Britain 120,000 years ago. They included cave lions, straight-tusked elephants – and a giant herbivore known as an aurochs which is regarded as the wild ancestor of today’s domestic cattle. Prized by our distant forebears – who depicted its muscular physique and magnificent horns in prehistoric cave paintings – it was hunted relentlessly. The aurochs fell extinct on these shores some 3,000 years ago and the last recorded aurochs died in Poland in 1627. Yet aurochs-like herbivores will soon be back in Britain.
The conservation charity Trees for Life announced recently that it plans to introduce a social herd of 15 to an enclosure on its Dundreggan Estate, in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, in the spring of 2026. Known as tauros, the cattle in question are not genetically identical to the aurochs but have been ‘back-bred’ in the Netherlands from ancient cattle breeds to replicate its characteristics as closely as possible. These aurochs-proxies are expected to crash around their new Highland home in the way their iconic ancestors once did across Britain – rootling in the earth, de-barking trees and generally roughing things up – and that’s the whole point. ‘I can't wait to see them here,’ says Trees for Life CEO Steve Micklewright, ‘because they are brilliant animals, very imposing, but also because they will wake up the landscape, bring back processes that are missing.’
The introduction of the tauros to the Highlands will mark a new chapter in a process known as ‘rewilding’ that has been gathering pace in Britain over the past decade. The most high-profile example is the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, where large grazing animals such as longhorn cattle are transforming hundreds of hectares of poor-quality farmland and the majestic white stork is breeding again in Britain after 600 years. Meanwhile a herd of European bison are kicking up a storm in a corner of Kent, white-tailed eagles are riding the thermals above the south coast of England for the first time since the late 18th century and the industrious beaver is once again damming Britain’s rivers.
But these initiatives do not herald a new golden age of natural abundance. On the contrary they are taking place against the background of – and in response to – a biodiversity crisis. According to the latest State of Nature report, which collates data from a wide range of environmental, academic and governmental bodies, Britain’s wildlife species have declined by an average of 19 per cent since 1970, with one in six now at risk of disappearing altogether. Our wildflower meadows have been wiped out almost completely.
‘Every independent index of study shows you that what life is left is declining very fast,’ says the farmer, author and passionate advocate of rewilding, Derek Gow. ‘What does rock bottom actually look like? In some parts of the country we're in it already.’ Due to a variety of factors, Britain has become one of the most ‘nature-depleted’ countries in the world and proponents of rewilding believe that conventional methods of nature conservation have been too localised and timid to stop the rot – and in some cases counterproductive.
In 2010 the Lawton Review, an independent report led by the distinguished ecologist Professor Sir John Lawton, pointed the way. ‘It said that the system we had of a large number of very small, unconnected, areas [to protect a certain set of species] was failing as our conservation strategy,’ says Professor Bob Smith, Director of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent, which is part of the Wilder Blean Bison project in Kent.
The Lawton Review’s recommendations were distilled in a few key ideas: create more sites; make them bigger; manage them better; and join them up. The rewilding movement has taken this on board and taken it a step further. Rewilding doesn’t seek to conserve specific species but rather to restore ecological processes – ‘to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself,’ in the words of Alastair Driver, Director of the charity Rewilding Britain.
Rewilding involves (but is not confined to) the reintroduction of so-called ‘keystone’ species on land that is not productive for farming or forestry – keystone species being animals that have a disproportionately significant effect on their environment in relation to their numbers. Big herbivores such as bison or aurochs-proxies are one example but the rewilders’ real poster boy is the beaver. Derek Gow likens this semi-aquatic rodent to a pilot light in a boiler – ‘Because if that pilot light is not burning, none of the rest of your apparatus will work.’
Beavers had been hunted (for their fur and for a secretion called castoreum, used in perfume) to near-extinction in Britain by the Middle Ages though there is evidence they may have survived in isolated pockets into the 18th century. Reintroduction began in Scotland in 2009 and there are now more than 20 locations, both wild and enclosed, across Britain where you can see them – including the London Borough of Ealing.
In the autumn of 2023 a family of beavers was relocated, under licence, from Scotland to an 8-hectare (20-acre) enclosure in a wood- and wetland site called Paradise Fields in west London. This community-led project breaks new ground on two fronts, says project leader Elliot Newton: ‘It's the only one in the UK where beavers are being reintroduced into an urban environment, and the only one where the site is freely accessible so anybody can come in here at any time of day.’
Surrounded by the hum of traffic – as well as 1.2 kms (¾ mile) of fencing and self-closing gates – the beavers have re-landscaped their new back yard and had several kits (young). Though shy and nocturnal they leave plenty of evidence of their industry in the form of felled and gnawed trees and the dams they build from the timber.
On a tour of the site Newton points out a dam of typically ramshackle yet intricate construction. ‘The reason beavers build dams and create these complex wetlands is primarily because they're petrified of being attacked and eaten by a wolf,’ he says. Damming the brook here, between sections of raised ground, has resulted in a 60cm (2ft) difference in water level and created an ‘escape hatch’ – a pool of deep water that they can plunge into if they feel threatened while crossing the land.
The happy by-product of all this landscape disruption is the creation of habitats for all sorts of mammals, birds, insects and plants that hitherto have been scarce or locally extinct – as recent sightings at Paradise Fields have borne out. The reshaped land and new growth also lock up carbon and provide resilience against the increased likelihood of both flooding and drought resulting from climate change. This is why the beaver is feted by rewilders as the ultimate ‘ecosystem-engineer’ and the symbol of a ‘new’ way of doing things that they say is just a revival of the old.
One of the country’s most important rewilding sites is a 160-hectare (400-acre) farm called Rewilding Coombeshead on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. At the Species Recovery Centre there Derek Gow and his team are breeding species in captivity for release into designated areas across Britain. These include beavers, white storks, turtle doves (once the sound of summer, now almost vanished), wildcats (currently confined to a tiny population in the far north of Scotland) and water voles.
The inspiration for Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, water voles are our fastest declining mammal, having disappeared from over 90 per cent of the places where they once thrived. ‘They make a really good meal for birds, fish and mammals so the fact they're not there in the British landscape now is a huge gap,’ says the manager Nick Viney.
For a few years at Rewilding Coombeshead Derek Gow kept another aurochs-proxy, known as Heck Cattle – or, more rudely, as ‘Nazi cows’. They originated in Germany in the pre-war years when brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck – the latter a committed Nazi and friend of Hermann Goering – attempted to back-breed a cattle of supposed Aryan purity to resemble the aurochs. The experiment to introduce them to Devon didn’t work.
‘The biggest mistake we made was pushing them into a forest environment where we lost all control of them,’ explains Gow. ‘And all of a sudden, you get these animals that don't want to come through your yard to be TB-tested. They became more and more difficult, more and more aggressive.’ Eventually one attacked another so severely it had to be put down, at which point Gow admitted defeat and had the entire herd destroyed.
He believes there are lessons there for the Highlands tauros project. ‘There are going be challenges, which I'm sure the guys at Trees For Life are aware of,’ he says. Steve Micklewright agrees that huge animals like the tauros need to be treated with respect but points out they are being bred from different, less aggressive cattle types than the Heck.
As the rewilding movement attempts to shake up long-held views of land use and management, there are edges of conflict and inevitable pushback. Tim Bonner, CEO of the Countryside Alliance, which promotes the ‘rural way of life’ and field sports, talks of a ‘lunatic fringe’ with ‘messianic attitudes’ and objects to giant herbivores being brought in. ‘There seems to be an obsession with “charismatic megafauna”, much of which doesn’t work in modern Britain, and a new trend for releasing things that weren’t here in the first place,’ he says. ‘If they wish to enhance the ecology, there are domestic breeds that do the job just fine.’
This latter point is contested by rewilders. ‘There's a real lack of understanding about these kinds of animals in the landscape in the UK context, which we're battling against,’ says Paul Hadaway of Kent Wildlife Trust, which introduced bison to Blean and Thornden Woods in Kent in 2022. Unlike the tauros the bison are classified as dangerous wild animals and the eight-strong herd has to be kept behind both an electric fence and a ‘people’ fence. ‘Our aspiration is to be able to demonstrate that you don't need that second fence,’ says Hadaway.
Even the word ‘rewilding’ is a problem for some. ‘If you start by telling farmers that they have no future, which is essentially what “rewilding” says, you're not going to engage them,’ says Bonner. Derek Gow admits the word has become a ‘toxic term’ while Paul Hadaway says he prefers to stick to ‘wilding’. ‘I find that ‘re-’ prefix so unhelpful because it takes you down all sorts of rabbit holes,’ he says.
One of those rabbit holes concerns the state of nature we should be trying to hark back to. The ‘megafauna’ whose remains lie under Trafalgar Square arrived on these shores via the land bridge known as Doggerland that connected Britain to mainland Europe before the last Ice Age. But trying to return us to the Pleistocene is absurd, says Professor Smith of DICE, and ‘working out what the baseline should be is often arbitrary’.
The European bison now in Kent were almost certainly not native to Britain – unlike the beaver or aurochs – so they cannot be ‘re’-introduced. ‘It’s about finding the best species to create the natural processes rather than saying, “Thousands of years ago we had these really big, cool cattle, it would be nice to have them back”,’ says Smith.
The most contentious issue of all – and the logical end point of the rewilding process – is the idea of reintroducing the apex predators of wolf and lynx to reassert the natural hierarchy of the wild. They would certainly alleviate the problem of a deer population that is now running out of control in parts of Britain. But they also kill livestock, and wolves in particular pose a threat to humans – though many believe that threat is exaggerated.
The wolf was heavily persecuted here and had probably fallen extinct by the Middle Ages but in the 21st century its numbers are on the rise across Europe. Under the Bern Convention of 1982 the wolf is classified as a ‘strictly protected species’ and in the past decade its population is estimated to have nearly doubled, to around 20,000.
According to EU figures wolves are now killing up to 65,000 head of livestock, mostly sheep, a year (there have been no human fatalities attributed to wolf attacks in the past quarter-century) and in September [of 2024] the European Commission proposed downgrading its protected status. Some people suspect this may be not unrelated to the fact that a pet pony called Dolly belonging to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was killed by a wolf in Lower Saxony in 2022.
Derek Gow – the author of Hunt for the Shadow Wolf: The Lost History of Wolves in Britain and a vocal advocate of the reintroduction of wolves under the right circumstances – certainly believes that Dolly’s fate has had something to do with it. ‘The change of policy in Europe is not being driven by economics because the impact of wolf predation on domestic livestock is still very low and certainly well out of kilter with the impact of domestic dogs,’ he claims.
Whatever the merits of wolf reintroduction, the idea provokes atavistic fears and it’s unlikely to happen here in the short or medium term. The Eurasian lynx – a medium-sized wildcat with distinctive ear tufts that fell extinct in Britain 1,300 years ago – is a different matter. ‘Lynx would have a much, much lower impact than wolves and people would very rarely see them,’ says Professor Smith. He cites the case of Germany, ‘where tolerance for lynx is generally high because of farming practices and strong support from the government, which includes a compensation scheme [for lost livestock].’
Lynx and wolves are also back in the Netherlands, a country both smaller and more densely populated than Britain, which has a system of fences, guard dogs and wildlife corridors in place to manage them. Though their presence there is not without controversy it seems fair to say that European countries are far more sanguine than Britain about living alongside potentially dangerous wild animals.
One of the reasons for this is that these animals either never went away or have already walked back in. Therefore, as Alastair Driver of Rewilding Britain points out, ‘the authorities don't have to go through the angst of deciding whether to reintroduce them or not.’ There is also the advantage that vast tracts of wild land still exist, allowing herds of bison to roam free in eastern Europe while golden jackals are flourishing from Finland to Spain.
Britain’s scope for rewilding is modest by comparison. Driver points out that Rewilding Britain is advising on projects covering 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of England and Wales, which he says he is proud of. But it is just 1.3% of the land surface. ‘These sites are providing cores of biodiversity that could then spill out into surrounding countryside if government was brave enough to start implementing significant policies and funding to back them up,’ he says. Meanwhile the overall trend in Britain’s stock of natural riches continues downwards.
One key to reversing it, say rewilders, is for our national parks and government-owned land to be managed much more for biodiversity (one described the likes of Dartmoor and the Lake District as places ‘where nature goes to die’). They also believe that farmers should be incentivised through ELMs (Environmental Land Management schemes) to be part of local nature recovery strategies and that agriculture in general needs to move to more sustainable and regenerative methods – a tricky sell to many farmers given the multiple challenges and uncertainties they have faced recently.
The position of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) on rewilding is hedged with concerns for the potential impacts on current farming practices and farmland. It said it was unable to provide a comment for this article but suggested I look at previous statements it has made. Last year [ie 2023] in written evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee’s inquiry into species reintroduction the NFU said it ‘believes species recovery efforts and management should focus on species already present in England before undertaking reintroductions.’
Rewilding’s proponents reckon our sanitised culture has lost touch with what ‘reintroductions’ can do – not just clear the way to a more abundant future but re-connect us with a shared past. ‘People are astounded that in Britain these creatures can exist,’ says Derek Gow, ‘but so many of these species that we think of as being unfamiliar, un-British, and too spectacular to be true, are just things that we extinguished 500 or a thousand years ago.’
Published online at telegraph.co.uk on November 21, 2024 as a ‘long read’
