That richly complex call of the nightingale is a uncommon occurrence in the UK nowadays, however not at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a solitary nightingale could be noticed at this secluded spot in the countryside of Surrey; this summer, they were all around. “We were listening to them chirping all night, from multiple areas,” notes Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the youth rewilding group. A group of participants were camping out at the site, however the birds were so boisterous, “we stayed awake all night,” remarks Layla Mapemba. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An specialist from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them net and ring one of the nightingales the next morning, the ecologist recalls: “He’d never handled a songbird in his possession before. He was crying.”
Rewilding Accelerates at This Location
Rewilding is by its very essence a slow process, but in this place at Maple Farm, after just four years, the changes are already evident, and hearable. The property used to be a haven for animals. Now it’s a model for the Youngwilders’ mission: to accelerate habitat revival, in one of the biodiversity-poor regions in the world, and to link youth (18-30-year-olds) with a ecosystem they are often shut out of, and a climate crisis they are often unable to halt. Climate change persists, tree clearing destroys ecosystems, and one more Cop summit ends with a disappointing conclusion in abroad – so what person could fault youth for choosing to initiate change themselves?
The initiative was based on the idea that there were people ready to let a group of youthful idiots on to their property
“The youth is the most knowledgeable ecologically that there’s historically,” says the Youngwilders’ founder, a key figure. They are also “the most emotionally involved in the problems, and have added the least to their origin, and, then, are also going to be affected the worst as a consequence.”
Revitalization of the Landscape
Today, the group is growing across the UK – and this location planted the seed, in multiple ways. “It’s our origin point, and where we built our community,” notes another co-director, as she offers a tour of the 30-acre land. “This was previously divided plots,” she says, as we move through tall vegetation dotted with shrubs, bordered by forest. “The main noticeable change is that we’ve eliminated all the enclosures, over a kilometer of it, to make it feel like a unified area.” In the recent season, they used hazmat suits and eradicated significant quantities of giant hogweed, an aggressive flora that can burn the body. “We’ve planted numerous of natural barriers,” explains the director. “But the primary focus is we’ve just allowed it to rest for a brief period. We’ve eliminated a lot of grazing pressure and seen what’s emerged.”
Low scrub and shrub lines are a perfect songbird habitat, she says, however now they’re cutting back some of the thorny plants to establish a increased diversity of habitats and to link up different sections of the site. Young saplings will take a while to establish, but new growth from the surrounding woodland are already establishing themselves in the open areas; the team have been placing barriers to safeguard them from grazing deer.
Animals Comes Back in Droves
There's more than the songbirds – animals is returning in abundance. This year they’ve seen reptiles, legless lizards, nocturnal mammals and invertebrates, says a team member, as he raises one of their reptile mats (such as a mat over a depression in the soil). “You get creatures and things residing under there, but it’s probably a bit cool for them now.” Wild homes, made from carved parts of wood and buzzing with wild bees, are attached to some of the trees. The absence of grazing horses has provided invertebrates opportunity to flourish in the long grass. When they visited this summer, states Bennett, “I’d not ever observed so numerous lepidoptera. There were just masses of them. We were saying, ‘What is occurring?’”
Inception of the Project
The original participants – Bennett, Durant, Molly and more individuals – formed as youth, focusing on or expressing an interest in ecology. In the recent past, the IPCC was indicating that the acceptable threshold of one and a half degrees of global heating was looking impossible, the activist was leading the school strikes for environmental action, and activist Clover Hogan was talking about the generation experiencing “environmental stress”. It was also the time of a writer's publication, about nature recovery, on how they revitalized the a Sussex location from a struggling farm into a thriving ecosystem. “We were deeply influenced by the Knepp story, but what could be the role for young people?” questions Easton. “So we created a website and rang up many of wildlife trusts and were asking, ‘Do you occasionally get your property owners seeking to take action and you are short on resources?’”
Durant adds the story: “Our whole organisation was fundamentally premised on the notion that there were landowners who were willing to allow a bunch of youthful idiots on to their estate without strict rules, to take significant decisions that would affect land value
