The beautifully intricate call of the nightingale is a scarce sound in the UK these days, yet it's different at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a solitary bird could be heard at this hidden place in the countryside of Surrey; recently, they were in multiple locations. “We were hearing them chirping all night, from five different territories,” explains Meg Cookson, chief environmental expert for the youth rewilding group. A team of volunteers were staying overnight at the property, but the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” remarks a project coordinator. “We were all worn out the next day, but it was so incredible.” An professional from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them net and ring one of the songbirds the next morning, Cookson remembers: “He’d never handled a nightingale in his hands before. He was teary.”
Rewilding Progresses at the Surrey Site
Rewilding is by definition a lengthy business, but here at Maple Farm, after just a short period, the outcomes are already evident, and noticeable. The land used to be a haven for animals. Currently it’s a example for the Youngwilders’ goal: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, and to connect young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often denied access to, and a environmental emergency they are often ineffectual to halt. Climate change advances, deforestation destroys ecosystems, and another Cop summit draws to a unsatisfactory end in abroad – so what person could criticize young people for choosing to act independently?
The project was founded on the idea that there were people prepared to let a collection of young amateurs on to their land
“The newer cohort is the most knowledgeable in terms of nature that there’s previously,” says the Youngwilders’ co-director, a key figure. They are also “the highly invested in the issues, and have contributed the minimal role to their origin, and, then, are also going to be affected most as a outcome.”
Revitalization of the Site
Today, the group is growing across the United Kingdom – and the original site started it all, in multiple ways. “It’s the initial project, and the place we created our connections,” explains another co-director, as she gives a overview of the 12-hectare land. “This once consisted of divided plots,” she says, as we move through long grass filled with shrubs, surrounded by forest. “The main noticeable change is that we’ve removed all the fencing, over a kilometer of it, to give the sense like a single landscape.” In the recent season, they wore hazmat suits and removed significant quantities of harmful weeds, an non-native plant that can irritate the body. “We’ve planted loads of hedgerows,” says Easton. “But the main thing is we’ve just let it breathe for a little bit. We’ve eliminated a large part of livestock impact and seen what’s sprung up.”
Underbrush and shrub lines are a ideal nightingale home, she explains, but currently they’re cutting back some of the brambles to develop a greater diversity of environments and to connect different sections of the land. New trees will take considerably longer to establish, but new growth from the adjacent woodland are already establishing themselves in the fields; the group have been installing guards to safeguard them from animals.
Nature Reappears in Droves
There's more than the songbirds – animals is reappearing in large numbers. Recently they’ve seen grass snakes, slowworms, flyers and invertebrates, notes a team member, as he uncovers one of their survey equipment (such as a cover over a depression in the ground). “You discover snakes and wildlife hiding under there, but it’s likely a bit cool for them now.” Natural beehives, constructed from hollowed-out pieces of tree trunk and buzzing with insects, are attached to some of the plants. The removal of livestock has allowed small creatures space to flourish in the overgrown areas. When they visited this season, comments the director, “I’d never seen so countless lepidoptera. There were just clouds of them. We were like, ‘What is going on?’”
Beginnings of the Project
The initial Youngwilders – Noah, Jack, Molly and two others – united as learners, pursuing or expressing an passion in environmental science. In the recent past, the IPCC was predicting that the acceptable threshold of one and a half degrees of warming was appearing unachievable, Greta Thunberg was spearheading the youth protests for eco-awareness, and campaigner a speaker was discussing the generation feeling “eco-worry”. It was also the period of Isabella Tree’s work, on rewilding, on how they revitalized the a nearby property from a struggling farm into a successful ecosystem. “We were deeply influenced by the Knepp story, but what was the role for the next generation?” questions Easton. “So we developed a website and contacted many of environmental organizations and were saying, ‘Do you sometimes get your property owners wanting to do something and you don’t have capacity?’”
Durant adds the narrative: “Our complete project was basically based on the belief that there were landowners who were prepared to permit a collection of young enthusiasts on to their land without strict rules, to make significant choices that would change land value
