One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring!
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1948
Frans Vera’s book Forest History and Grazing Ecology was translated into English from the original Dutch in 2000, the year we stopped in-hand farming. It sent ecologists and environmentalists all over Europe, but perhaps especially Britain, into a spin. The reverberations washed over us, too – even where we were standing, almost accidentally, with our toes in the water of conservation. Ted Green and his colleague Jill Butler of the Woodland Trust were brimming over with excitement. They urged us to go and visit Vera’s project, the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. His theories, they said, blew open the possibilities of grazing animals in the landscape. What was happening there could change the way we looked at the park at Knepp. It could change the way we looked at nature.
And so we found ourselves standing with the tall, earnest, grey-bearded Dutch ecologist one brisk May day, half an hour’s drive from Amsterdam, in the middle of one of the most extraordinary and controversial nature reserves in the world. The Oostvaardersplassen covers 23 square miles (6,000 hectares). It is part of the polder known as South Flevoland – 166 square miles (43,000 hectares) of land reclaimed from the IJssel, a huge freshwater lake that had once been part of the Zuiderzee, the Dutch bay that was reclaimed over the course of the twentieth century. The scene in front of us was almost incomprehensible: the flat, grassy landscape, as tightly cropped as Kenya’s Maasai Mara, was populated by meandering herds of grazing animals: stocky, primeval-looking Konik ponies the height of a zebra with black legs and faces and mouse-grey coats, foals at foot; dark-coated Heck cattle with the sharp, curving horns of oxen; great gatherings of red deer. Through the binoculars we could see, on a raised mound, a knot of furry red fox cubs scrabbling over each other in excitement as their parent, brazen as a jackal, returned to the den with a goose in its jaws. As we approached a strip of open water, greylag geese tumbled down the banks with their young like a mini-crossing of wildebeest. Thirty thousand greylags – almost half the entire population of north-west Europe – now moult here every year. For sheer biomass Charlie and I had seen nothing like it this side of Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
It was hard to imagine that, a few decades ago, this animated land was all under water. In 1989, only twenty-one years after being reclaimed, it was designated a Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance for nature. The biting wind carried with it the competitive cacophony of birds. From the reeds, the virtually subsonic ‘boom’ of bitterns – like a child blowing into a milk bottle – played the bass refrain in a symphonic chatter of reed warblers, penduline tits, bearded tits and the familiar brekekekex-koax-koax of marsh frogs. Lapwings displaying over the pools furled and unfurled like black and white handkerchiefs with piercing ‘pee-wits’. Spoonbills wading in the shallows, head plumes ruffled by the wind, waggled their spoons back and forth through the water. Grey herons cast a steely eye from the banks. Great white egrets and little egrets, breeding here after an absence from the Netherlands of almost a century, lumbered into the air. High above us, beyond the trilling skylarks, three white-tailed sea eagles, wings like barn doors, were being chivvied by a marsh harrier. The eagles – the fourth largest eagle in the world and, until the 1980s, all but extinct in Western Europe – had built their nest, a gigantic shaggy thing like an African hamerkop’s nest, in the branches of a dead willow. These habitués of ragged coasts and remote, secluded islands were, in effect, breeding below sea level in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Their arrival had been a surprise to all except, perhaps, Frans Vera.
‘When I said, in 1980, that I was hoping to attract white-tailed eagles to the Oostvaardersplassen, everyone said I was mad,’ Frans explained. ‘For a start, I was told they would never nest so close to huge human populations, and never in anything but giant oaks, beech or pine – never in willows. But that was simply because no one had ever observed them to do this. There hadn’t been that opportunity for them. So the white-tailed eagle has become tied in our minds to a remote montane habitat with oaks and pines. And if we want to conserve for white-tailed eagles, that’s what we are told to provide.
‘But this is a circular argument. We’ve become trapped by our own observations. We forget, in a world completely transformed by man, that what we’re looking at is not necessarily the environment wildlife prefer, but the depleted remnant that wildlife is having to cope with: what it has is not necessarily what it wants. Species may be surviving at the very limits of their range, clinging on in conditions that don’t really suit them. Open up the box, allow natural processes to develop, give species a wider scope to express themselves, and you get a very different picture. This is what the Oostvaardersplassen is about. Minimal intervention. Letting nature reveal herself. And the result is an environment we know nothing about.’
Softly spoken and meticulously reasoned, there is nonetheless an air of impassioned determination about Frans Vera. He has a message he feels people should hear. The key to the Oostvaardersplassen’s extraordinary dynamism, he says, is grazing animals.
‘We realized something important early on in the establishment of the reserve,’ said Frans. ‘That there’s a fundamental process we haven’t accounted for in nature, something that doesn’t often get a chance to express itself when humans are in control: the influence of animals. Animals are drivers of habitat creation, the impetus behind biodiversity. Without them, you have impoverished, static, monotonous habitats with declining species. It’s the reason so many of our efforts at conservation are failing.’
The harbinger of this insight was a complete surprise. ‘It was the greylag goose that showed us how this worked. No one imagined this bird would turn out to be a keystone species. The geese solved what we thought was an insurmountable problem.’
The South Flevoland polder had originally been designated for agriculture, explained Frans, with the wettest, low-lying area – now the Oostvaardersplassen – earmarked for industrial development. When the oil crisis and economic recession of 1973 put industrial plans on hold, nature grabbed its chance. A large shallow lake remained in the lowest part of the polder. Very quickly, marsh vegetation developed around the shallow water and an astonishing number of wetland birds, many of them rare, began descending on the area. In 1978, a biologist, Ernst Poorter, published an article about the wildlife appearing on the polder in the Journal of the International Council for Bird Preservation (later ‘BirdLife International’). The article was picked up by Frans Vera, Fred Baerselman and other ecologists who, excited by the arrivals, began lobbying for the area to be protected. In 1986 the Oostvaardersplassen was officially designated a nature reserve.
There were challenges in managing it for nature, however. The natural progression of such shallow ponds and marsh – as we knew from our rapidly shrinking lake at Knepp – is to close over with reeds, silting up until it is colonized by willow and eventually disappears altogether. In most wetland reserves an inordinate amount of time and effort is spent preventing this happening by mowing and cutting back the reeds. But the area of reeds in the Oostvaardersplassen was simply too large to be hand-cut the traditional way and the soil’s load-bearing capacity could not sustain heavy machinery.
‘Without proper management we assumed this area would simply turn very quickly into woodland,’ said Frans. ‘There was nothing we could do but sit back and watch it happen.’
And then something remarkable occurred. Greylag geese discovered the marsh. They came in thousands from all over Europe, attracted by the scale of the area and its inaccessibility which made it the perfect sanctuary for the four to six weeks of their summer moult as they waited – sitting ducks, you might say – for their flight feathers to grow again. For the month or so they were laid up in the Oostvaardersplassen they consumed huge quantities of marsh plants and their rhizomes and, as a result, the marsh and its interconnecting ponds did not close.
‘We discovered something: the grazing of the greylags was preventing the area becoming covered with trees. This was the astonishing thing: the geese were leading vegetation succession – not the other way round. But more than that, their grazing was adding to biodiversity. They were changing extensive reed beds into a more complex habitat of reeds and shallow water, and this was attracting more species than other wetland reserves in the Netherlands that were carefully managed by humans.
‘So now we had another problem. We needed to make sure the greylags would continue using the marshland. We realized we needed to create grassland – their usual habitat – adjacent to the marsh; somewhere they could congregate before and after moulting to build up their fat deposits. The question was how? Could we put grazing animals into the dry areas of the polder that were nothing but reed beds and willow saplings and see if, on their own, they could create grassland? Could grazing animals prevent the succession of trees on dry land, just as the geese had done in the marsh? And if we left the grazing animals to their own devices, as we had with the geese, might they, too, generate something even more interesting and more valuable in terms of biodiversity? In effect, could we manage this land for nature not by costly human intervention, but using natural processes, with grazing animals as the drivers?’
This idea – that grazing animals could prevent spontaneous forest succession and generate more complex and biodiverse habitats instead – was heretical. Until this point, only one form of natural process was recognized by most ecologists as a primary driving force of nature – that of vegetation succession. As any European farmer knows, if you leave a patch of land abandoned, it soon reverts to scrub and, eventually, tall trees. It is a state known as ‘climax vegetation’ – the destination which nature is supposedly endlessly struggling to reach. Before human impact – the prevailing theory goes – any land with the climate, soil and hydrology for trees to grow was covered with closed-canopy forest. In temperate zone Europe only the tops of mountains, the very steepest slopes and some raised bogs would have been devoid of tree cover. This notion, known in scientific circles as ‘closed-canopy theory’, has permeated popular culture and become the mythological baseline for our distant past. In Britain, it is said, before men began swinging stone axes at the woods, a squirrel could have run from John O’Groats to Land’s End across the tops of trees. Closed-canopy woodland has become synonymous with nature, and people are seen as its destroyer: it was man who opened up the primeval forest, and man who, maintaining the landscape for agriculture and habitation ever since, prevents the trees from taking over again.
‘But this theory of closed forest overlooks another force of nature altogether,’ said Frans, ‘one that works in opposition to vegetation succession: animal disturbance.’
The problem, he explains, is that we have forgotten about the megafauna that would have been roaming our landscape before we arrived on the scene: large herbivorous mammals like the aurochs (the wild ox), tarpan (the original wild horse of Europe), wisent (the European bison), elk (known in North America as moose), European beaver and the omnivorous wild boar. All, according to fossil bone records, re-colonized the lowlands of Central and Western Europe along with red deer and roe deer about 2,000 years after the end of the last ice age – around 12,000 years ago. Trees, on the other hand – according to the pollen records – appear only between 9,000 and 1,500 years ago. So, oak, lime, ash, elm, field maple, beech and hornbeam – the key species of what is claimed to have been the primordial closed-canopy deciduous forest of Europe – arrived at least 3,000 years after the large herbivores. This is a very different picture to the one that has rooted in our mythology. It flies in the face of the received wisdom that closed-canopy forest is the natural habitat of these large animals. It also suggests – another heresy – that large herbivores played a part in, or at least did not prevent, the generation of trees in our landscape.
All these large herbivores, along with their predators the wolf, bear, wolverine and lynx, were dramatically affected by the growing population of humans as they converted wildlands into fields and managed – often coppiced – woods. Inevitably, predators came into conflict with pastoralists, too. They were particularly persecuted as sheep numbers grew with the rise of the wool industry in Europe in the thirteenth century. Wild herbivores, readily hunted for meat, also came to be regarded as competition for the grazing areas needed for rising populations of domesticated livestock. The aurochs was hunted to extinction; the last died in Poland in 1627. Wild tarpans – or feral horses closely related to them – survived in East Prussia and Poland until the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The last specimen is said to have died in Moscow Zoo in 1887. The European beaver, once numbering millions across Eurasia, was hunted to near-extinction, with only 1,200 individuals in eight relict populations by 1900. Elk were exterminated from the whole of Western Europe, surviving only in small numbers in the remote northeast – in Latvia, Estonia and Russia. All three subspecies of the European bison were hunted to extinction in the wild: Bison bonasus hungarorum from the Balkans died out in the mid-1800s, the last wild Bison bonasus bonasus was shot in Białowieża forest on the Poland–Belarus border in 1921, and the last Bison bonasus caucasicus was shot, appropriately enough, in the north-west Caucasus in 1927. The European bison that survive today are descendants of a dozen animals held in zoos across the Continent.
In the British Isles, where wild animals had nowhere to escape to, extinctions happened much earlier. Britain’s last beaver was probably killed in Yorkshire in the eighteenth century; Britain’s last wolf in the Scottish Highlands in the seventeenth. The last truly wild boar were killed on the orders of Henry III in the Forest of Dean in 1260. The lynx is thought to have disappeared as early as the ninth century – so long ago that most people are unaware it was ever a native animal. The aurochs was probably exterminated in Britain in the Bronze Age, along with brown bears and elk; while the latest fossil evidence for British wild horses is some 9,300 years old.
By the late nineteenth century, when an interest in nature conservation began to stir, most of Europe had become a completely altered, intensively managed human landscape with only a few of the original grazers and browsers surviving in remnants of their original range. Those that remained, like red and roe deer, were tolerated by man only in very low numbers, and in particular places like parks, because of the damage they did to crops and plantations of trees. They therefore had little or no impact on the succession of trees on any land left to its own devices. There was simply not the number or diversity of wild herbivores left to demonstrate how they might interact with and disrupt natural vegetation succession. In the absence of these animals, closed-canopy forest came to be seen as the natural state of the European landscape. Which led to a further flawed assumption: if climax vegetation was the primordial impulse of nature, then all Europe’s indigenous large herbivores – including the extinct aurochs and tarpan – must, originally, have been forest-dwellers. However, it was clear that, in the agricultural setting, large numbers of domesticated grazing animals (including, ironically, cattle and horses descended from the aurochs and tarpan) did prevent the regeneration of trees. Therefore, it was argued, in order for the original closed-canopy forest to have existed in the first place, the numbers of Europe’s indigenous herbivores must have been very low indeed. It is a circular argument that is still in wide currency today amongst both foresters and ecologists, and has Frans shaking his head in frustration. ‘The problem is,’ he says, ‘we’re always working from the wrong baseline.’
Climax vegetation theory, originally propounded by the American botanist and author of Plant Succession, Frederic Clements, in 1916, and subsequently further developed by the English botanist Sir Arthur Tansley, author of The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), among others, throws up a further powerful psychological barrier for conservationists devising strategies for nature management. Closed-canopy forest is demonstrably species-poor compared with managed habitats like meadows, pasture, heaths and traditional farmland.
‘What it looks like, if you subscribe to the closed-canopy story,’ says Frans, ‘is that, in Europe – before we embarked on the destructive practices of modern industrial farming – man actually improved biodiversity because traditional farming and forestry practices like haymaking, pollarding and coppicing clearly sustain a much broader spectrum of habitats for wildlife than closed-canopy woodland.’ This is the prevailing wisdom amongst ecologists like Heinz Ellenberg who, in Vegetation Ecology of Central Europe (1986), argues that ‘Central Europe would have been a monotonous wooded landscape, if mankind had not created the colourful mosaic of fields, heaths, hay lands and pastures.’
‘No self-respecting ecologist wants to see a return to dark, monotonous, species-poor forest across the whole of Europe,’ Frans went on. ‘This presents us with an enormous responsibility and workload. If man is the driver of biodiversity, then man has to continue to manage nature intensively and at huge expense. We simply cannot believe that nature is capable of doing this on her own. But where would biodiversity have come from in the first place, if not from nature? We forget that nature has been around a lot longer than us.’
Where, then, did all these species so happy in meadows and pastures, coppices and commons, live before we arrived with our oxen and pitchforks, our billhooks, hay carts and flails? Ecosystems on the continent of Africa provided an answer. It is in the place of man’s origin that, historically (until the colonial annihilations of the last two hundred years or so), we have had least impact on the indigenous flora and fauna. Evolving alongside man, African animals had a chance to develop defensive strategies. Elsewhere in the world, however, the arrival of humans – by then highly developed, weapon-carrying and rapidly populous – had a transformative, often catastrophic impact on wildlife, particularly on megafauna. Ecologists like Frans in the Netherlands and others in Germany were inspired by studies coming out of the African savannah including Serengeti: Dynamics of an Ecosystem – the work of Michael Norton-Griffiths and Anthony Sinclair, published in 1979 – which was one of the first to show how the actions of grazing herbivores encourage numerous species of plants and animals.
‘Africa gives us a useful paradigm,’ Frans explained. ‘It shows the vital role played by large numbers of naturally occurring grazing animals in an ecosystem – how they create and sustain species-rich grasslands. So why couldn’t this have happened in Europe? Why suppose that grazing animals can have a dynamic and positive impact there, but not here?’
And so began the experiment to release free-roaming grazing animals into the Oostvaardersplassen. As in Africa, the animals would be left to their own devices, living in natural herds, with no supplementary feeding or other intervention. They would need to be old breeds, sturdy, with strong survival instincts, able to fend for themselves through the winter – basically, more like their ancestors than modern, highly selected animals. They would, in effect, be acting as proxies of Europe’s missing megafauna. The extinct aurochs, a beast of over ten feet from nose to tail, was represented by Heck cattle – a breed designed in the early twentieth century by the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, who intended to rescue the aurochs from confusion with the wisent, or bison – the other large bovine of Holocene Europe. The Hecks’ attempt to recover the traits of the aurochs through selective breeding gained notoriety when it was subsequently celebrated by the Nazis as a symbol of their racial ideology. Although the Heck brothers’ methodology remains controversial, their experiment succeeded in securing recognition for the aurochs as the ancestor of modern cattle. Heck cattle carry the genes of more than eight old breeds including the Highland cattle of Scotland, Britain’s White Park cattle and fighting bulls from Spain. Though still a good eight to twelve inches shorter than the massive aurochs of old, and, with a Heck bull typically weighing in at 1,300lb, at least 220lb lighter than a bull aurochs, they are, nevertheless, imposing animals. Konik ponies, a short, stocky breed with dun coats and a dorsal stripe, originally from the Biłgoraj region of Poland, were chosen for the Oostvaardersplassen experiment for their hardiness and their supposed phenotypical resemblance to the extinct tarpan. They, too, had been the subject of a ‘breed-back’ experiment, started by a Polish count in 1936. Roe deer were already naturally present in the Oostvaardersplassen in small numbers, and red deer were added to the mix.
‘We wanted to introduce the kind of grazing variation you find in Africa and that would once have prevailed in Europe. Of course, this is an imperfect representation of all the animals that would have originally been here but there are still huge positives from bringing these species together. All these ungulates eat in different ways – they have very different mouths, different digestive systems, different behaviours and different preferences. Roe deer are browsers, for example – they feed on twigs, brambles and saplings; cattle and horses are primarily grazers, with some supplementary browsing; red deer graze in the growing season and browse and de-bark in winter when the grass gets tougher. They can even de-bark poisonous elder by neutralizing the cyanide in their stomachs – something cattle and horses cannot do.
‘The ancestors of these animals would have had the same or very similar feeding strategies. They would have had the same gut flora and seed-carrying capacity – cows, for example, transport two hundred and thirty plant species in their gut, hair and hooves. These different species would have existed together in the past and we felt their combined grazing actions in the Oostvaardersplassen would create and maintain open grassland with greater floral complexity.’
As late introductions from the Middle East, goats and sheep – descendants of the wild mouflon of Mesopotamia – do not belong to the suite of herbivores associated with the postglacial ecosystems of Western Europe so they were excluded from the mix. At first, the numbers of grazers introduced were very low – thirty-two Heck cattle in 1983; twenty Konik ponies in 1984; thirty-seven red deer, transported from Scotland and elsewhere, in 1992. The idea was to let the populations grow at will. Here, too, Africa provided inspiration.
‘In Africa you have vast herds of ungulates grazing together in the landscape. There are predators, of course, but population density itself is not regulated by predation.’
The size of grazing herds is driven primarily by the amount of food available. In times of plenty, with good rains and lots of vegetation growth, populations explode. In seasons when there is less to eat – notably, for Africa, during the dry season and droughts – they fall. Under-nourished females will not ovulate. If they are in slightly better condition they may ovulate but not conceive. If they do conceive, they may abort or absorb the foetus. And if they get as far as the later stages of pregnancy, the mother will prioritize the foetus over herself, to such an extent that she may suffer toxaemia, often fatally. Older animals – males in particular – weaken and die. A decline in herbivores releases the pressure of grazing on the vegetation, allowing for a burst of growth when the conditions are right, which stimulates another population spurt.
‘It’s a natural cycle of fluctuations,’ says Frans. ‘Although the climatic conditions in temperate zone Europe are not as harsh as Africa, I see no reason why this could not have been a process that once worked here too. Our long winters have a similar impact as an African dry season; a severe winter is like a drought. Seasonal variations and longer cycles of pressures on vegetation are, in effect, nature’s way of controlling populations.’
The animals introduced into the Oostvaardersplassen did, indeed, multiply, demonstrating a far higher carrying capacity for the land than anyone thought possible. Herd numbers have now levelled out at around 800 ponies and 160 cattle grazing the 2,400 hectares of dry polder, and 2,000 red deer grazing both the dry and marshy areas, having pushed out the roe deer. Meanwhile, overall, biodiversity has risen, with the Oostvaardersplassen – grazed all year round – supporting greater species complexity than seasonally grazed farmland.
The animals do not graze every part of the reserve with equal intensity, explained Frans. The areas that are under-grazed or not grazed at all during the growing seasons of spring and summer produce grass and flowering plants, which benefits mice and mouse-hunting birds like marsh harriers and buzzards. The grazed areas become a temporary home to the geese. Over the winter, areas that have been under-grazed during the growing season are eaten off and trampled, giving many plant species the opportunity to germinate here as well, resulting in a profusion of grasses and forbs in the spring. Over all, the winter die-off of animals removes pressure from the grazing for the coming spring. The fluctuation in animal numbers allows for spontaneous bursts of thorny vegetation, and occasional outbursts of willow – which adds another habitat for small mammals and songbirds, which in turn are prey for owls, goshawks and sparrowhawks living in willows in the marshy areas.
‘So what we’ve shown in the Oostvaardersplassen is that a mix of herbivores, allowed to express themselves freely, without human control, stimulates a much greater variety of animal and plant species than can be found on the short grassland characteristic of seasonal farmland grazing.’
Water voles, rabbits, hares, stoats, weasels, polecats, foxes, grass snakes, toads, ground beetles, dung beetles, carrion beetles and butterflies have all found their way to the reserve and now reside in the Oostvaardersplassen in large numbers. In all, an amazing 250 bird species have been recorded.
But the annual die-off has proved controversial. Starving and dying cattle, ponies and deer are a common sight at the end of winter, something for which modern Europeans are emotionally unprepared. Frans has received death threats from hunters, farmers and animal-lovers. The Heck cattle’s Nazi association has provoked vicious comparisons, with cartoons depicting Frans as an ecological Josef Mengele conducting experiments in a zoological concentration camp. But Frans is unrepentant.
‘Yet again, our view of nature is being dictated by the conventions of human control. The baseline for the welfare of farm animals is being applied to animals living in the wild,’ he says. ‘The fact that animals in the Oostvaardersplassen have a free life in a natural environment – they are not cooped up in some factory farm; they aren’t pushed around by humans every day; they have normal sex rather than artificial insemination; they have a natural herd structure allowing calves to stay with their mothers; they can graze and browse what they are designed to eat, not what is artificially concocted for them by the farming industry – none of this seems to matter. The fixation is solely on their death not the quality of their lives.
‘In particular, people believe these deaths are numerous and “unnatural” because there is a fence around the reserve preventing the animals from migrating in search of food – but cyclical die-offs happen even in the migrating populations of Africa. And in places where animals cannot migrate – like the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, which has the highest density of predators in Africa – the dynamic is the same. Starvation is the determining factor. It is a fundamental process of nature.’
Nevertheless, public outcry has forced a compromise on the non-interventionist principles of the Oostvaardersplassen and, now, animals deemed to be on their last legs are humanely shot. According to Dutch and European law, cattle and horse carcasses – even those of de-domesticated animals – cannot be left to decay, so they are carted off and incinerated. But roe and red deer, since they are categorized as ‘wild’, are allowed to remain, their bodies providing food for the foxes, rats, crows and birds of prey – including the white-tailed eagle. Ultimately every scrap of flesh, fur, sinew and bone collapses, digested by all the insects, carrion beetles, bacteria and fungi that have colonized the Oostvaardersplassen since the project began. Together, these decomposers perform the enriching function of drawing nutrients such as phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and nitrogen down into the soil.
Charlie and I looked out at this landscape, a miracle of ongoing creation, and something clicked. If such a productive response to natural grazing could happen on land reclaimed from the sea – a blank slate, in effect, with a non-existent terrestrial biodiversity baseline – then something like this could happen anywhere, even – perhaps – on land that has been impoverished and polluted through decades of intensive farming. By showing a way to reverse our catastrophic declines, the Oostvaardersplassen could provide a model for Europe.
For Charlie, the imprint of Africa was deep in his bones. The first years of his life had been spent in Rhodesia where, in the years before independence, his father Raymond had grown tobacco and cotton. Africa clearly drew him back and we had travelled together on wildlife safaris in Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. To Charlie, numbers of animals on this scale felt natural; the atmosphere of an unconstrained landscape, second nature. Encountering such an ecosystem amidst the densely populated, heavily managed, agricultural lowlands of Europe, though, was eye-opening. It merged two entirely different experiences, two previously separate worlds. Wild nature had pushed its way into a place where, until now, we had thought it should not logically be. Charlie’s mind was whirring. What would happen, he wondered aloud on the journey home, if we allowed comparable natural processes free rein at Knepp? Could we roll out the idea of the Repton park restoration into the surrounding farmland, but do something much wilder, and self-sustaining? Could we use grazing animals to create habitats and restore wildlife across the whole estate? Could a free-willed conservation project be the answer we’d been waiting for?