We patronise the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
It was almost impossible to imagine other farmers and landowners in the same predicament as us, on the same kind of land, not wanting to follow suit. Who wouldn’t throw in the towel on farming, pocket the subsidies for arable reversion and seize the chance to restore their soils and recover some of our countryside’s missing wildlife? Encouraged by his cousin’s commitment of adding 75 hectares (185 acres) to the Northern Block, Charlie drew up a map with obvious potential for expanding the project much further – a rectangular 10,000-acre block around Knepp defined by main roads. On 6 August 2003 we invited other neighbouring farmers and landowners, fifty in all, to an afternoon of presentations followed by supper in the bothy in the park. Avoiding the contentious word ‘rewilding’ we called it ‘A Wild Wood Day’. Hans Kampf, an environmental policy adviser to the Dutch government, drove over from Holland to present the evidence of the Oostvaardersplassen and explain Vera’s theories about grazing animals and natural processes, Ted Green showed slides of wood-pasture ecosystems in Spain, Portugal, Romania and Britain’s New Forest, and Tony Whitbread, CEO of the Sussex Wildlife Trust, talked about the enormous biological potential of creating something like this in Sussex.
We knew the idea was challenging but hoped there would be at least a flicker of interest from our audience and that, in time, this might ignite support for the project and perhaps even a desire to join forces. We had no idea how far off the mark this was. Hans’s slides of fighting Konik stallions, avalanches of greylag geese and Dutch backpackers sidestepping maggoty carcasses were met with stony silence. When Charlie stood up to show how he envisaged the landscape of Knepp changing over the next few years, the tidy Sussex fields and manicured hedges devolving into rampant scrub and untrammelled wetland, the room erupted into a dissident murmuring and shaking of heads. It wasn’t simply that our neighbours (including some other members of the family) thought this wasn’t right for them. Chatting to them afterwards, Charlie and I realized it was more visceral than that. It was an affront to the efforts of every self-respecting farmer, an immoral waste of land, an assault on Britishness itself.
As our neighbours drove away that August day in 2003, unpersuaded if not downright appalled, they might have passed the herd of old English longhorns we had introduced into the park two months earlier. On reflection we had decided against Heck cattle. Having seen them in action in the Oostvaardersplassen we felt they had too much Spanish fighting bull in their blood for the parish of Shipley. Walkers on the footpath, particularly with dogs, had to be safe. We needed a traditional breed with enough of its wild ancestor’s genes to survive all year round outside but one that had been bred for docility and was receptive to handling. With a pang of regret Charlie realized that his grandmother’s beloved herd of Red Polls that he had sold off sixteen years earlier would have been perfect for the job.
We stumbled on old English longhorns through a local rubble-moving contractor who kept a herd at Gatwick and had some to spare. Fourteen cows and heifers – with thick brown and white coats and a distinctive white line, or ‘finching’, down their backs – made an immediate impression on the park. With their dramatic horns, sometimes curving upwards like the Texan (no direct relation), sometimes swooping downwards and framing their faces, occasionally pointing quizzically in different directions, there is more than a hint of the aurochs about them. They trace their ancestry back to the oxen used as draft animals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the north of England. They were prized for their longevity, their ease of calving, the high butterfat content of their milk and their horns, transparent slivers of which used to be made into buttons, cutlery, lamps and drinking cups – the poor man’s glass. The breed was improved for beef during the Industrial Revolution to supply growing urban populations but, like most traditional cattle, lost out in the modern farming race to short-horned or polled (hornless) specialists like Friesians and Holsteins for dairy, and fast-growing Charolais, Hereford and Aberdeen Angus for beef. It was rescued from oblivion by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in 1980.
Like the fallow deer, the cattle took time to settle. They spent their first few weeks tracing the perimeter fence, testing their boundaries. Only then did they begin to explore the interior, wandering outside the house, investigating the lake and ponds, constantly on the move. Though freedom like this was new to them, they demonstrated behaviours that were surprising to us, having only seen cows previously in the limiting context of the farm. They weaved amongst the trees, rubbing themselves against trunks and low-lying branches, raising their heads above the fallow browse-line to strip off leaves and buds with their long, gluey tongues, foraging in the margins of ponds and streams, wading through the marsh. They seemed to love the sallow at the head of the lake and when the flies and midges were bothersome they would rub their horns against the branches, stripping off leaves and bark and smearing sap onto their faces as insect repellent. The sight was very different to our single age-group herds of Friesians and Holsteins, short-lived, under-stimulated, heads down in the featureless fields. Ours had been by no means a bad system of dairying by modern standards. Yet we realized now that we had lost the ability to see the whole animal. To us, cows had become, for the most part, uniform and functional – a sad conclusion to our species’ long and close association with them. But then perhaps it was this very reduction in character, this restraining of natural expression, that had made it easier for us to process them through the impersonal systems dictated by intensive farming.
Most of the longhorns were pregnant when they arrived at Knepp and the first calves were born within a few weeks. As with the fallow, we found ourselves suddenly encountering new-borns lying up in a ditch or hedge. This was far more disconcerting than stumbling across a fawn. Not intervening, particularly during calving, felt entirely alien. We had to make a conscious effort not to interfere without cause, trusting in the innate expertise of the cows.
Shortly before she is due to calve, a cow leaves the herd to find a good birthing spot. In some cases, she’ll remain loyal to this spot for the rest of her life. If she is not a creature of habit it can take hours, if not days, for us to find her calf to tag it – something we are required to do by law, like any farmer. Shortly after the birth a cow will often seek out a patch of nettles to eat, presumably to replenish her levels of iron. After suckling her new-born the new mother will return to the herd, commuting sometimes miles to her fellows and back again until her calf is strong enough, usually when it is two or three days old, to follow her. The calf’s introduction to the herd is momentous. The cattle crowd around, lowing gently, sniffing at the new arrival one by one, imprinting its aroma, the sense of its being, on the collective. While the calves are still young, often one or two experienced matrons will guard them in a nursery while the herd moves on to feed.
It took about two years for the herd to settle into a recognizable pattern. We began to predict the places where they would lie up in the rain, cooling themselves off in summer, or sniffing out the early spring grass or tender young nettles shooting up amongst the brambles. By then a multigenerational structure including a growing number of bull calves was beginning to develop, and the dominant females were throwing their weight around. They had also chosen a leader – an older cow – as the decision-maker. This leading matriarch has galvanizing authority. The herd might be lazing in the sunshine or holed up in warm leaf litter in the woods when suddenly she will begin to bellow and lead off. Time for pastures new. As one, the herd rouses itself and lumbers on behind her, responding with dutiful mooing as she bellows them on, sometimes encouraging them into a brisk trot. Seeing the cattle crashing through the Pleasure Grounds on some unknown mission is reminiscent of the elephant march in The Jungle Book – except that, of course, Kipling’s lead elephant, Colonel Hathi, should have been an old female battle-axe. Most herd animals – including elephants and deer – are governed by a matriarchy that out-yins the herd yang and keeps even boisterous young males in check. Almost all accidents on farms involving cattle and the public are caused by young, single-generational, usually single-sex, groups of animals penned together in a field, and often provoked by the sight of a dog. Deprived of the natural herd dynamics, steers or young heifers are like bored teenagers lacking parental control.
Once they had had time to settle it was clear we had no need to worry about our free-roaming longhorns and the footpaths. Despite their intimidating appearance (it is surprising how often people assume horns mean bulls) they barely raise an eyebrow at walkers and their dogs. Only if someone gets between a mother and her calf do the eyes begin to flicker and the head to lower. Centuries of domestication, of breeding out aggressive genes, have reduced the risk posed by their dramatic horns, but ultimately maternal instincts rule the day.
Allowing the herd to expand naturally meant that calves could be suckled until they were almost as big as their mothers. In nature, a cow will generally only start kicking her offspring away from her teats once her udders have begun to ‘bag up’, or swell with extra milk, in readiness for another birth. But even after the arrival of the new calf the family bond remains strong – complex relationships that, again, we were unused to seeing. I remembered agonizing nights, living in a house on the estate when Charlie’s grandparents were still alive, listening to bellowing calves, newly separated from their mothers, in the cowshed next door. They had been allowed the benefit of their mothers’ colostrum – the yellow cream, rich in antibodies, let down in the udder in the first few days after birth – but at three days had been separated into calf units where they were fed on powdered milk from an automated machine at regulated times of day. The bull calves would be taken to slaughter at the age of about eighteen to twenty weeks for ‘white’ veal, or twenty-two to thirty-five weeks for ‘pink’ veal; while the pick of the heifers would be grown on at Knepp to continue the dairy herd and the others sold off at the market. Back in the dairy, the mothers would call for their calves, sometimes for days, as they rejoined the treadmill of milk production for human consumption. A dairy cow’s life is unrelenting. By five or six years old, having produced three to four calves and an average of 22 litres of milk every day for 365 days a year (we had one cow that, during peak lactation, gave us 75 litres a day), she is ready for the knacker’s yard, her meat good for little more than dog food and meat pies. The toll on her health is unsurprising given that, in nature, the amount of milk she produces for her calf is 3–4 litres a day. One particular affliction of modern dairy cows is mastitis – a painful inflammation of the udder caused by bacterial infection. In a herd of a hundred cows in the UK there can be as many as seventy cases of mastitis every year.
In our naturalistic system, however, particularly while we were growing the herd, we could allow even the older barren cows to live on, culling them only when it became the humane thing to do. The oldest amongst them would reach the ripe old age of twenty-one.
In early March, before the arrival of spring grass, the longhorns’ former owner paid us a visit, anxious to see how his cattle had weathered the winter without human intervention. The cows had lost a little weight – to be expected over winter – but browsing heavily on twigs and vegetation they were robust and healthy, and the summer calves were thriving. He simply couldn’t believe we hadn’t supplementary fed them. There had been no need for the vet and no calving problems, other than one accident – a calf, born beside the river, had fallen in and drowned. Our calving and health statistics were better than most conventional cattle farms.
The Exmoor ponies, six fillies, arrived in the park several months after the cattle, in November 2003. They had been gathered from Exmoor for market in the annual autumn round-up and been loaded up for transport for only the second time in their lives. As they galloped from the trailer, bucking their way back to freedom, we could see we were dealing with an animal way wilder than the longhorn. Another Dutchman, Joep van der Vlasakker, an expert in wild horses and conservation grazing, had advised us on the breed. To Joep’s mind, Exmoors are amongst the oldest horses in Europe, closer genetically to the original tarpan than even Koniks. The Konik had been chosen for the Oostvaardersplassen back in 1984 principally because it was believed to be descended directly from the tarpan. Whether or not these claims are valid (Joep is dubious), he feels there is a strong genetic and ecological argument for using more than one breed in conservation grazing projects as a replacement for the extinct wild horse – Hucul horses in the Carpathians, for example; Norwegian Fjord ponies or Swedish Gotlandruss ponies in Northern Europe, Koniks in lowland Eastern Europe; and Exmoors in Western Europe.
There is little doubt about the Exmoor’s credentials as an equine aboriginal. Fossil remains have been found in the area of Exmoor dating back to around 50,000 BC. Roman carvings in Somerset depict ponies phenotypically similar to Exmoors, and the Domesday Book records ponies on Exmoor in 1086. Whether Exmoors have been pure-bred since the ice age remains a subject of debate. The DNA evidence is inconclusive and there are stories of domesticated stallions over the centuries breaking out onto the moor to breed with wild Exmoor mares – one is said to have been an Arab, Katerfelto, who swam ashore after the wrecking of the Spanish Armada. Unlike the Konik, however, there has been little intentional breeding interference of free-living Exmoors by man, other than to take stallions off the moor to promote hybrid vigour in domesticated stock.
What is evident is that the Exmoor’s characteristics continue to dominate, even in cross-breeding. With its powerful build, stocky legs and small ears, its dark bay colouring with mealy ‘pangaré’ markings around the eyes, muzzle, flanks and underbelly, the Exmoor is the living image of the horses depicted in the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in the Dordogne, dating back 17,300 years; and its bones and skeleton closely resemble fossil records of primitive equines such as the wild Alaskan horse.
Enduring and perfectly adapted to its rugged environment it is a miracle, nonetheless, that the Exmoor has survived into the present day. During the Second World War, when Exmoor became a military training ground, soldiers used the ponies for target practice. Others were rustled by locals for food. By the end of the war there were fewer than fifty left. Despite breeding programmes since, it remains on the UK Rare Breeds Survival Trust’s endangered list, with fewer than 500 free-roaming individuals on Exmoor, and just over 3,000 elsewhere in the UK and a handful of other countries. Globally, its predicament is ‘critical’, according to the Equus Survival Trust. Knepp had become a custodian of an animal rarer than the tiger.
In the eyes of the American writer and poet Alice Walker, horses make a landscape more beautiful. She was thinking of the wild mustangs and Appaloosas of America’s rocky canyons and prairies, rather than quarter-horses in a Kentucky paddock. The Exmoors brought that frisson to Knepp – creating an atavistic bond with the landscape of our past. With their characteristic ‘toad’ eyes they seem to be looking at the world from the ice floes. They are evolved for the harshest of conditions, with deep chests, large hearts and lungs, broad backs, strong legs and hard hooves; big heads with small nostrils for breathing freezing air; strong jaws and long, deep-rooted teeth for macerating the toughest fibres; thick manes and long forelocks, and fanned, water-deflecting ‘ice tails’. In winter, they grow an insulating woolly under-layer beneath an outer coating of long, water-resistant oily hair. Their eyelids are insulated with fatty pads to deflect rain and snow and, perhaps, to protect from the claws of the predators that would have once roamed the moors. They are spirited, defiant, inquisitive, with – one senses – an imperious contempt for human beings. To begin with, at least, their flight distance at Knepp was almost twice that of the longhorns.
One of our initial concerns was that, after the wilds of the moors, our lowland clay might be too soft for them, our grasses too rich. We worried about laminitis, a disease affecting all ungulates but particularly horses, whose single stomachs make them susceptible. Laminitis is caused by carbohydrate overload. If a horse is fed grain or clover in excess, it can accumulate sugars, starch and fructans, which ferment in the gut, killing off beneficial bacteria, increasing the acidity and permeability of the gut lining and producing a build-up of toxins in the bloodstream. This results in body-wide inflammation, particularly in the feet where swelling tissues have no place to expand without structural injury. It is the dread of every horse-lover yet, paradoxically, it is most often caused by indulgent over-feeding. In severe cases it can require aggressive treatment or even euthanasia.
The following year, during the spring flush of new grass, Mark, our stable manager who had taken on custody of the Exmoors, spotted the telltale signs of laminitis in one of the fillies. Deploying his impressive horse-whispering skills he caught her up and installed her in the old paddock next to the house where, for four weeks – to the curiosity of her sisters who rubbed noses with her over the fence – she was fed nothing but small amounts of hay. Gradually the symptoms subsided and she was released again onto the rougher summer grass. The disease had been caught in time. The following spring we watched the Exmoors anxiously and when one began to show signs of inflammation, erring on the side of caution, Mark caught them all up and put them on strict rations in the paddock for ten days before releasing them again. We were worried this would be the pattern but the following year, none of them showed signs of the condition. With declining artificial nitrogen in our soil, the sugars and fructans in the grass had finally dropped to levels that the ponies could metabolize.
Once we were confident the Exmoors would do well at Knepp we set about building a herd. Enter Duncan, in July 2005 – a semi-domesticated pure-bred Exmoor colt, a fine specimen who had been taken off the moor at a year old and halter-broken so he could be shown as a future stallion. Though never ridden he was accustomed to being handled, washed, brushed and led around a ring. His introduction to Knepp was not his finest hour. The ponies were calmly grazing in front of the house, casting shadows in the evening sun, when Duncan arrived. As he trotted up to befriend them the six mares turned on him in unison and, snorting with affront, belted him with their back legs. Whinnying with shock he took cover behind us as the thug misses pawed the ground, baying for blood.
We had chosen a semi-domesticated colt because we thought he would be easier to handle as a stallion. Now we worried he wouldn’t be tough enough for the job. Mark was sanguine. ‘Let them settle down,’ he said, and we walked purposefully away, leaving Duncan to his fate. Sure enough, the following morning, there was Duncan, shell-shocked and still acting a little furtively, but in with the girls. We watched the group grazing in front of the lake and let out a cheer as the valiant little colt began to cover them.
Eleven months later – the average gestation of an Exmoor – it was still virtually impossible to tell if any of the mares with their naturally rotund bellies was pregnant. We had almost given up hope when, one freezing, rain-swept day in October, our first foal was born, out in the open, just yards from the main drive. More than the fawns, or even the calves, this little colt standing and collapsing on his shaky legs, shielded by his mother in the driving rain, marked a milestone, bringing rewilding to life. In December another colt was born, and a filly the following April, swelling the global population of free-living Exmoors.
However, as Duncan grew bolder his temperament was becoming a problem. Natural Exmoor curiosity combined with an over-familiarity with humans gave him a brazen disregard for boundaries. He staked out his territory with a dunging spot directly outside the Estate Office where our accountant parked her car, positioning himself – it seemed – as king of the castle. Every day Mark would shovel away the dung heap steaming with pheromonal urine, only to find the beginnings of another territorial mound in the same spot the following morning. One day Duncan strolled into the entrance hall of the office, giving Charlie’s PA a near heart-attack as his head appeared at the reception window.
But it was Duncan’s behaviour towards riders in the park that caused us most concern. Though the wild Exmoor mares and their offspring were curious, they tended to keep a healthy flight distance from humans and their horses. Duncan would charge up and challenge. He would gallop onto the practice polo field in front of the house, straight through the spectators, to investigate his strange cousins chasing a ball. The chukka would end up, more often than not, in a game to evict Duncan from the pitch. His semi-domestication was proving a liability for rewilding, and in July 2007 he was sent away to a new home with ‘Exmoor’ Paul – a friend of Mark’s who had a small domesticated herd of his own. A year later we received a photo of Duncan, trotting through his show classes, good as gold, with a child on board, looking for all the world like a Thelwell cartoon. His days in the twilight zone between wild and tame were over.
The Exmoor mares’ dominion over the park had been rocked, in December 2004, by the arrival of our two Tamworth sows and their eight piglets. The Dangerous Wild Animals Act, prohibiting the release of wild boar into the British countryside, had forced a compromise on our original plan. Enacted in 1976 to prevent releases of dangerous and exotic pets such as pumas, boa constrictors, venomous reptiles, spiders and scorpions – for which there had been a craze in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the Act had, in 1984, been amended to include wild boar, despite their being acknowledged as a native species that had once been widespread in Britain.
The contradiction has led to a bizarre anomaly in the status of wild boar in the UK. The number of wild-boar farms has been increasing since the 1970s, driven by a market for their strong, wild-flavoured meat. While in captivity they are subject to the Dangerous Wild Animals Act and require a licence. However, if they break out into open countryside they become just another non-notifiable wild animal like deer, badgers and foxes. Since they can weigh 280lb fully grown, jump six feet and reach a speed of 30mph, this is not an unusual occurrence. Every now and again, farmers find they are too much to handle or that the cost of keeping them fenced is beyond them. No one knows the true figure for how many wild boar have broken out and are roaming Britain, but in the Forest of Dean alone the number is thought to have reached 1,500.
Our best bet was to hope that a feral individual in our area would arrive at Knepp on his own. If a wild boar wanted to break in, we were advised – and the scent of our Tamworth sows should prove irresistible – a deer fence would present no obstacle. Until then, the Tamworth would stand in as its proxy, rootling and disturbing the soil of Knepp as their wild ancestors had in the time of King John.
We had chosen Tamworths, as we had the Exmoors, as an old breed renowned for their hardiness and their close relationship to their original ancestor. Their long legs and snouts, narrow backs, long bristles and surprising ability to sprint for short distances as fast as a horse, are characteristic of European forest swine. Registered as a breed in the early nineteenth century on the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s estate at Tamworth in Staffordshire, they have lost out to fast-growing, large-littering modern breeds specifically designed for intensive farming. The Rare Breeds Survival Trusts estimates that there are fewer than 300 registered breeding Tamworth females in the UK.
When the Tamworths appeared, the Exmoors acted as if we had introduced them to a pack of grizzly bears. One glimpse of the vast, bristly, ginger farmyard sows and the ponies were running for the hills. Domesticated horses, too, shied away – a response triggered, we imagined, by some atavistic memory of wild boar predating on new-born foals. Like hyena, wild boar are omnivorous. Their meat-eating is usually of carrion – their teeth are for grinding rather than killing – but they are opportunists, and a tender, unresisting new-born wild foal would, a thousand years ago, have been a delicacy to a hungry wild boar.
Eventually, the Exmoors realized that the Tamworths posed no real threat. They relaxed a little and would even graze in the same area as the pigs – but if a piglet was foolish enough to stray into their herd they did not hesitate to boot it to death, as I witnessed to my dismay one morning when I was showing some adorable new piglets to my four-year-old goddaughter.
People have a famously soft spot for pigs. Intelligent, inquisitive, imperious, myopic, sociable, gluttonous, grunting, ungainly, it is easy to recognize ourselves in them. From Miss Piggy to the Empress of Blandings we have celebrated the comedy of our similarities. But there may, indeed, be real biological grounds for the sense of connection. Recent genetic research has identified a close relationship in pig and primate evolution. Whether we are actually descendants of an ancient common ancestor of pig and chimpanzee will require a detailed search of the human genome but it seems we are certainly much closer to pigs than we originally thought. Which is why, perhaps, the Tamworths are constantly forgiven their antics at Knepp. The instant they were let out of the acclimatization area in the Rookery, they applied themselves to destroying Charlie’s manicured verges along the drives with the unstoppable momentum of forklift trucks. Then, two abreast, they unzipped the turf down the public footpaths, following the exact routes on the Ordnance Survey map, heading diagonally across the fields. We realized that what they were doing, with the undeviating propulsion of slow-motion torpedoes, was zeroing in on slivers of the park that had never been ploughed – margins rich in invertebrates, rhizomes and flora. In the first few days of their release the pigs drew an accurate blueprint of what modern farming had done to our soil.
The ornamental grass circle in front of the house, another patch of pristine turf, proved to have a magnetic attraction, too, and Charlie was compelled to take to his bicycle, jackeroo stock-whip in hand, to impress upon them that this area was sacred ground. There aren’t many effective ways of turning around a 500lb beast compelled by appetite, and the alternative – a bucket of pig-nuts – would only have encouraged them to return. The two sows – nicknamed ‘Big Mama’ and ‘Sweet Face’ by our children – got the point, however, and passed on the message to their piglets. On this score at least, we’d come to an understanding. As Winston Churchill once observed, ‘A cat looks down on you. A dog looks up to you. A pig looks you straight in the eye.’ We had met our equals.
Their ingenuity often got the better of us, however, when it came to public events in the park. The pigs could spot a marquee going up a mile away. Though we electric-fenced the showground for the summer Craft Fair we didn’t think to fortify the pond on one side of it. The pigs swam across in the middle of the night, broke into the confectionery tent and hoovered down two sacks of Mr Whippy powdered ice-cream. At the annual Polo Ball held on the field in front of the lake they would mingle with the black ties and ball-gowns, begging for canapés and stealing the show with their party trick of crashing over onto their sides for a belly rub. When the phone rang the morning after a big tented Indian wedding in the park with news that the pigs had snaffled two trays of onion bhajis, we braced ourselves for demands for a refund and possibly a court summons. The mother of the bride, however, was congeniality itself. The visit from the pigs had added to the delights of the day. She was only worried that the spices might have given them tummy-ache. Could we give them some Alka-Seltzer?
The Tamworths’ opportunistic snacking, however, was a real concern – and not just because it might give them indigestion or lose us our recently accredited organic status. Like Duncan, we worried that the Tamworths might just be too familiar with humans to be left to their own devices in a rewilding project. Walkers had begun bringing crusts to feed them and Big Mama and Sweet Face – and their rapidly growing offspring – were starting to charge up and head-butt people’s pockets. They meant no harm, but they could easily knock over the elderly or infirm, or a child. And a protective dog might not be so forgiving. We put signs up on all the footpaths begging people not to feed any of the animals. In time, and with wild-born generations, we hoped, the pigs might grow more reserved and perhaps even develop a flight distance of their own.
Once the pigs had exhausted the verges they cast their snouts further afield. We were dismayed at first to observe their capacity for damage, particularly in the wet, when ten individuals could churn acres into the battlefield of the Somme in a matter of hours. But the land’s ability to regenerate was equally astonishing and in the growing season it was only a matter of days before a patchwork of pioneer plants would appear where the sward had been opened. Invertebrates, including solitary bees, colonized the exposed ground. Some of these bees, now rare in the UK, need large patches of open ground in which to burrow and, in the absence of wild-boar disturbance, resort to farm gateways where heavy traffic and bottlenecks of livestock have the same earth-churning effect. In winter, wrens, dunnocks and robins trailed in the wake of the pigs, picking for insects in the furrows.
Ants began to use the clods of earth turned over by the pigs to kick-start anthills that have grown, in some places, over a foot in eight years – their colonies thriving in micro-climates of sun-warmed, aerated soil. The anthills, in turn, attract mistle thrushes and wheatears, and especially green woodpeckers, whose diet, particularly in winter, can consist of as much as 80 per cent grassland ants. In flight the green woodpecker is easy to spot: a flash of vivid yellow-green dipping through the air with a loud cackling cry – the ‘yaffle’ which gives the woodpecker its Sussex dialect name. It is not so easy to spot once it has landed. Perfectly camouflaged against the grass, it drills into the ant mounds, breaking into the galleries and gathering up ants with a flick of a tongue four inches long and coated with glue. At rest, in order to fit inside the bird’s head, the tongue coils behind the skull, over the eyes and into the right nostril. The adult collects ants for its nestlings too – in astronomical amounts. In one study, carried out in Romania, seven green woodpecker chicks consumed an estimated 1.5 million ants and pupae before leaving the nest. The droppings of a green woodpecker look like cigarette ash on top of an ant mound. Break them open and they are full of sad little ant faces looking like they don’t know what hit them.
The sun-warmed soil of the anthills is also a favoured basking spot for the small copper butterfly and the declining ‘common’ lizard, and provides a place for the widespread common field grasshopper to lay its eggs. Very occasionally, in a reversal of fate, the pigs will excavate the anthills for beetles, and then the ants bustle about to repair the damage. The anthills have a different soil composition from the surrounding acid grassland, favouring different species of fungi, lichens, mosses, grasses and other flowering plants such as wild thyme which colonize and help to bind the surface. Suddenly, miraculously, thanks to the unexpected association between ants and pigs, we were seeing light, complex soils rising out of our heavy Sussex clay.
The pigs were having an impact on vegetation, too. They have a penchant for plants that other grazers cannot find or stomach, like the stubborn, subterranean roots of docks and spear thistles. Unlike other ungulates they can also eat bracken and its rhizomes, neutralizing the toxins and carcinogens in their gut. While even they can’t tackle poisonous rhododendron as a mature shrub, they have proved an effective ally in eradication programmes in conservation projects, suppressing rhododendron regrowth by eating the new shoots.
It was clear to us from the outset that the pigs were creating opportunities for other species. But the browsing, trashing and trampling of the other grazing animals was also having an effect. In places where the low branch of a tree provided a scratching post for the cattle, for example, the compacting of the clay by their hooves created saucers in the ground which periodically filled with water. For once we were happy to see water lying on the land. We began to learn that these clean-water ‘ephemeral ponds’ – sometimes no bigger than a large puddle and so shallow as to be prone to evaporation – are an important habitat (now increasingly rare in the UK) for plants like water crowfoot, water starwort and stoneworts, and a whole range of specialist snails and water beetles, as well as the endangered and ethereal fairy shrimp. All the grazing animals would spend at least some time investigating the margins of the lake and other ponds in the park, and their trampling and browsing challenged the supremacy of reed mace, creating opportunities for other aquatic plants.
But the biggest change of all came from simply not drenching the land with fungicides and pesticides, as we had since the 1960s. As our insect populations exploded, we were seeing pipistrelle bats flicking outside the house at night and Daubenton’s bats skimming the surface of the lake for midges and mosquitoes. And, according to local chiropterologists (bat scientists), rare barbastelle bats had begun flying in from the Mens woodland reserve, fifteen miles away, to feed on night-flying micromoths and small beetles over our water meadows. A candle-lit dinner in the garden was now an invitation to a host of moths we were useless at identifying, apart from hummingbird hawkmoths – which were conspicuous and self-explanatory. In autumn, we can now pick field mushrooms in the middle of the park and, every year, an eruption of parasols fringes the edge of Spring Wood with fairy rings.
With the grazing animals no longer taking avermectins – the powerful wormers and parasiticides with which most domestic horses and all livestock on non-organic farms are habitually dosed – we were seeing cowpats and horse dung unlike anything we had seen outside Africa, latticed with the holes of dung beetles. For Charlie this became something of a fixation, taking him back to the bug obsessions of his childhood in Africa and Australia. He would lie next to a pile of fresh Exmoor dung and count the minutes (the record was three) that it would take for the dung beetles to arrive. Summoned by the smell and zeroing in like attack helicopters, the beetles fold their wings and plop straight into the dung. If a crust has already formed, they bounce off and then have to scamper back into it, burying themselves headfirst in nourishing excrement. Before long the kitchen counter was forested with glass vials containing all the species Charlie could find, to be dispatched to Professor Paul Buckland at Bournemouth University for identification. Triumphantly, after a summer of faecal rummaging, he had identified twenty-three species of dung beetle from a single cowpat.
There are about sixty species of native dung beetle in the UK, we learned. Unlike African dung beetles, which are famous for rolling away dung balls up to fifty times their weight over long distances, some using the Milky Way to guide them, most of our dung beetles are tunnellers – pulling the dung down into the soil to nest chambers that can be up to two feet deep, either near or directly underneath the dung site. The dung provides a food supply for the beetle’s larvae, allowing them to develop deep inside the nest, away from predators.
There have been dung beetles on the planet for 30 million years. They exist on every continent except Antarctica and specialize in every form of animal dung there is, though the majority prefer the plant material contained in the dung of herbivores. Dosing livestock and pets with parasiticides that pass into their excrement, killing any insect that eats it, including dung beetles, is one of the most serious problems affecting our soils. The process of a dung beetle’s tunnelling, eating and digesting adds organic matter, increases soil fertility, aeration and structure, and improves rainwater filtration and the quality of groundwater run-off. Ironically, by eating the parasites harboured in dung and by swiftly processing the dung itself, dung beetles also reduce the transmission of parasites and hence the need for chemical livestock wormers. Only now, when several of our dung species are on the verge of extinction, are farmers beginning to appreciate their value. Dung beetles are estimated to save the British cattle industry £367 million a year simply by encouraging the growth of healthy grass. And of course they are part of the food chain. For the first time we were seeing little owls – beetle specialists – breeding at Knepp, perching with their chicks on the tree-guards of the new generation of oaks we had planted in the park.
Other insectivorous birds were returning too, including a species once familiar to the ear of everyone living in the country. The skylark is the subject of Britain’s favourite modern classical piece of music. Yet this beloved bird declined 75 per cent between 1972 and 1996, and still the decline continues. People are now more likely to have heard ‘The Lark Ascending’ in a concert hall than in the countryside. Walking over tussocky grass in what was once the large arable field next to Tumbledown Lagg overlooking the floodplain of the River Adur, and Town Field – so named for the medieval town (all trace of which has vanished) that once thrived in the curtilage of Old Knepp Castle – we were hearing skylarks again, their vertical ascent pulsating with urgent song. The very air, it seemed, was being recolonized with the sounds of the past.