That beautifully intricate melody of the nightingale is a scarce sound in the UK nowadays, yet not at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a lone nightingale could be detected at this remote location in rural Surrey; lately, they were all around. “We were listening to them calling all night, from several zones,” notes a lead scientist, top biologist for the youth rewilding group. A group of Youngwilders were residing temporarily at the location, yet the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” remarks Layla Mapemba. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An expert from the local conservation group came to help them capture and tag one of the songbirds the next morning, the ecologist recalls: “He’d never handled a songbird in his care before. He was crying.”
Rewilding Speeds Up at This Location
Rewilding is by its very essence a gradual process, but at this site at Maple Farm, after only four years, the changes are already apparent, and noticeable. The property previously served as a retirement home for animals. Now it’s a model for the youth-led mission: to accelerate ecological restoration, in one of the biodiversity-poor countries in the world, and to link young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often shut out of, and a global warming issue they are often unable to stop. Climate change advances, deforestation destroys ecosystems, and yet another international meeting ends with a disappointing end in the host country – so what person could fault young people for wishing to take matters into their own hands?
The initiative was based on the notion that there were landowners ready to let a group of young amateurs on to their property
“The youth is the most informed ecologically that there’s ever been,” says the group's founder, one organizer. They are also “the most emotionally involved in the challenges, and have contributed the smallest part to their causing, and, then, are also going to suffer the greatest as a consequence.”
Change of the Landscape
Now, the initiative is growing across the UK – and the original site was the beginning, in multiple ways. “It’s the initial project, and the place we built our community,” explains Molly Easton, as she provides a tour of the 12-hectare land. “This used to be six different fields,” she states, as we walk through tall vegetation filled with shrubs, hemmed by mature woodland. “The primary visual change is that we’ve taken out all the barriers, a significant length of it, to make it feel like a unified area.” In the summer, they used protective gear and cleared large amounts of harmful weeds, an invasive species that can irritate the skin. “We’ve established many of bush lines,” says the director. “But the main thing is we’ve just given it space for a little bit. We’ve reduced a large part of grazing pressure and noticed what’s come up.”
Bushes and hedgerows are a ideal nightingale environment, she comments, however today they’re trimming some of the brambles to create a greater variety of ecosystems and to join different sections of the property. New trees will take a while to take root, but new growth from the nearby woodland are already taking root in the open areas; the crew have been placing barriers to safeguard them from grazing deer.
Wildlife Reappears in Large Numbers
In addition to the nightingales – fauna is coming back in large numbers. Recently they’ve observed serpents, slowworms, flyers and insects, explains a team member, as he lifts up one of their survey equipment (similar to a cover over a depression in the earth). “You find snakes and things hiding under there, but it’s possibly a bit cool for them now.” Organic nests, constructed from hollowed-out pieces of wood and humming with pollinators, are attached to some of the plants. The absence of livestock has allowed invertebrates opportunity to flourish in the meadows. When they visited this season, states he, “I’d never seen so countless butterflies. There were just masses of them. We were wondering, ‘What is going on?’”
Origins of the Initiative
The initial participants – Bennett, Durant, Molly and two others – came together as learners, focusing on or having an passion in environmental science. In 2019, the climate experts was predicting that the acceptable threshold of 1.5C of climate change was seeming out of reach, a prominent figure was spearheading the demonstrations for eco-awareness, and activist a speaker was discussing the generation experiencing “climate anxiety”. It was also the era of the author's work, on rewilding, on how they transformed the a nearby property from a failing dairy farm into a thriving ecosystem. “We were highly motivated by the case study, but what was the role for youth?” questions Easton. “So we developed a website and called loads of environmental organizations and were saying, ‘Do you sometimes get your landowners seeking to do something and you are short on capacity?’”
Durant continues the narrative: “Our complete project was basically premised on the belief that there were people who were prepared to let a bunch of youthful idiots on to their estate freely, to take significant actions that would impact land value
