Bourne Area Group Newsletter September 2023

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.