A LOW-FLYING COMET, a rocket of red, a will-o’-the-wisp,
the squirrel raced helter-skelter through the Scots pine wood. It was there one moment and gone the next, up and down, in and out of the greying pillars of pine. There was never more than a very short split-second view, but it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t get to see its perky form, those iconic tufted ears and sparkling, untrusting eyes. Just a glimpse of this, our native British squirrel, was enough to satisfy me. But it shouldn’t be. For a start, I’d travelled nearly seven hundred miles to see one, and this was, after all, our squirrel. Mention ‘squirrel’ today in the UK and the animal that springs to mind is exactly the same one that would spring to mind if you asked someone from North Carolina. The one we call squirrel is now grey, not red.
This is an example of what is known as ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, and it is something that comes up quite a bit when you’re trying to work out the true functionality of a British ecosystem. The problem is that we’re quick to forget. What one generation grows up with becomes the norm, becomes the target we strive for. If my parents had got their act together and had had me just a few years earlier, it’s possible that I would have been seeing colour in my local woods too. That’s how close they were, how quick the change was and how short our collective cultural memory is.
This insidious, slow, creeping change is just one example of how our own perception of what is wild alters with time. What belongs and how the land functions gets tangled up and creates a rocky ground in which to sow the seeds for any rewilding.
One question that is helpful to ask ourselves is where exactly are we aiming at on the time-line – from the first Cro-Magnon footfall on British soil some eight hundred thousand years ago to 1988, when we lost the short-haired bumble bee?
There are countless other examples of this phenomenon of shifting baseline syndrome. The further we get from the land, the less we talk about it, the more ignorant we become as a species and we lose our way. Separated from the mother that ultimately nurtures us all, we struggle to understand because we’ve lost sight of what is real and what isn’t, we disconnect and nature-deficit disorder follows. We are walking blind in a land of shadows.
I have heard quoted the ‘fact’ that there are now too many sparrowhawks, buzzards, white-tailed eagles, foxes or badgers numerous times. In fact, there’s a club where simply being in possession of a hooked bill, sharp teeth, claws and talons gets you guaranteed membership.
Furthermore, our own species has a habit of ecological xenophobia which applies to pretty much anything that seems to have a will of its own. Many people seem to want to ‘control’ and eliminate nature from their garden, to hold dominion over every living thing, big and even very small. I knew of someone who wanted to eradicate the mining bees from her herbaceous border, for no other reason than that they were making it look a mess. This short-lived, innocuous animal would give me great delight in my garden and would actually be of immense benefit by delivering pollination services. For those of you not familiar with a mining bee, it’s a small, foxy red-brown ball of winged fuzz no bigger than your little fingernail. It’s a solitary bee that likes company, an apparent oxymoron meaning that it nests on its own, but it likes to have neighbours nearby. While the nest itself is a short tunnel as wide as the bee, the excavated matter kicked out by the industrious insect forms a small, loose cone of fine soil, no more than a centimetre or so high. It’s a spring species and is usually on the wing for a short period of time between March and May. A perceived need to get rid of such an insect is, to me, further evidence of how as a nation we’ve lost the plot and become ecologically intolerant.
Just mention the word ‘bee’ and everyone is either reaching for a fly-swat or an EpiPen. The fact is that most of our 230 bee species are solitary and, because they don’t store honey that needs defending, they aren’t aggressive and don’t pack any form of venomous punch. You would have to try very hard to be stung by one, and by that I mean you would have to pick it up and squeeze it and even then most cannot do a thing about it as their hardware can’t even penetrate our skin.
It occurs to me that if we cannot accept a small, passive, positively helpful pollinating insect in our flower beds, we are probably not ready to embrace the reintroduction of mega-charismatic, long-missing, keystone species such as beaver, wolves and lynx.
Following on from this thought, the question is, why not? Rewilding has become associated with such mega-toothy and charismatic species, but strip it back to its most basic defining action and the principle of rewilding can be as simple as just letting the corner of your lawn grow up a bit longer than usual. Developing a tolerance for the odd daisy or dandelion pushing up through the tarmac or letting some moss grow in the cracks in the pavement is, at its most fundamental, the start of the rewilding process. Or is it?
It’s the start of allowing the wild to manifest itself in your own space, giving you the opportunity to immerse yourself in the poetry of nature. It’s the kind of process that is at the heart of landscape and habitat restoration; you create the habitat and those animals able to find it will, in their own time, move in. It is a kind of passive rewilding, taking your hand off the lawnmower, spade and trowel and letting nature just seep back of its own accord – in all its tendrilled, stilt-legged, gauzy-winged, velutinous, feathery, creeping, budding, flowering fecundity. A rewilding purist would say that to rewild is simply to leave alone.
If you’ve dug a pond, put up a bird feeder or nest box, you’re taking part in assisted rewilding, making a habitat more desirable for other species. Some would argue this has little to do with the wild and is a form of gardening. However, right now as I write this, a blue tit has joined another on the feeders outside my window. It just fanned its wings (the avian equivalent of growling) at another seemingly identical blue tit on the peanut feeder and now there is only one. This bird is as wild as any tiger and he (or she, it’s difficult to tell unless you’re a blue tit) was moving through the garden, going about wild behaviour as he or she might be doing in the ancient woodland just across the valley.
The next logical step would be the equivalent of reintroducing something that has gone missing, obliterated from the habitat that it was once part of, especially important if that species is a keystone species or one that creates the flavour or captures the ancient character of a particular habitat.
If you plant any native tree species, or some wild flowers once found in your locality, or introduce some frog spawn because there were frogs hopping around in your borders once but not now, then what you’re doing is pretty much the same as those proposing to let a handful of beavers into a strath in Scotland, or lynx or wolves. You’re just doing it on your own patch in your own way.
A good little cerebral exercise is to picture what the world would be like in your street, if everyone did a relatively simple thing and planted a native tree. Imagine if everyone in Croydon planted an oak tree in their garden (ignore, for now, the practicalities of roots and sewer systems, gutters and drains clogged with leaves, etc.) and just left the oak and the garden to do what they are genetically programmed to do: you’d have an urban oak woodland and all the joys that go with it in a couple of hundred years – maybe some roe deer would move in, you might have nightingales singing on every street and, if you’re lucky, a lynx might find its way into your garden. True, not everyone desires all of these things, but imagine a world without any of those experiences to be had anywhere, because that is probably where we’re heading.
Obviously, developing this scenario to its conclusion would entail everyone giving up on the garden and, of course, someone would have had to reintroduce that lynx (and all the other missing flora and fauna that had evolved to function together). We would have to resist the urge to tinker with, and remove, things that we didn’t find useful or that we might consider harmful or simply no good. After all, this is human nature, it’s what we do and have done since we ourselves left the trees. This brings up another factor: us. Surely we are part of this system too. Human nature? The natural human would have been part of this ecology too. At what point in our history did our relationship with nature go wrong, to the detriment of everything else?
You can see that rewilding is a scale. You can plant a native species of tree, local to the area, and you’ve made the place a little bit wilder than it was beforehand. If you add some native wild flowers and a little scrub, then make it possible for every species that would have existed in your patch before our anthropogenic influences spread throughout the land to wander by, resist the urge to tamper and watch what happens once you leave nature to its own devices, then you’ve got the other end of the scale – rewilding at its purest.
Wherever you come on this scale, rewilding is an acceptance of nature and of nature knowing best, a green wisdom, the true value of life. While it might be a bit of a stretch to imagine a Britain with wolves running wild somewhere in the landscape, it’s not so difficult to think of one with a few more salmon in our rivers, or for that matter, frogs in our ponds.
It’s true we’ve lived a long time in the UK without any predator bigger than a fox or badger, but if we can get into the right frame of mind as a nation, and I appreciate this is a big ask, then anything on this rewilding scale is theoretically possible.
Deadhead
What is it that makes me get the mower out and massacre the daisies and dandelions in the summer? Why do I deadhead the flowers? Yes, like a lot of us, I do from time to time. Despite this, I will spend many moments in the garden peering at the tiny denizens that occupy these plants and the micro-habitat they contain and, if the truth be known, I probably spend more time and derive more pleasure from these animals than I do from the deliberately planted flowers.
The reason I start to push that cylinder blade backwards and forwards as soon as the grass starts to grow is simply social conditioning, it’s what I have grown up perceiving is the norm, which is the reason we struggle as a species and become the hypocritical ‘Nimby’, happy to campaign for beavers to stay in our rivers but unwilling to allow the grass to grow in our own backyards.
Rewilding nature is about joining up what is left of the shattered habitats that once were and about reintroducing species once seen as competition or threat in order to re-establish a natural order. The same can be said for us humans: we’ve become separated, distanced from our natural selves, and there’s a desperate need for us to reconnect. We’ve become unbalanced, disenchanted, lost in a shadowland of our own creating both inside, perceptively, and outside, ecologically. I believe rewilding is a big word that can change our relationship with the world.
While ‘rewild’ is a powerful and multifaceted concept, it is much more relevant and closer to us all than we might at first think. Rewilding your attitude to nature, culturally appropriating its qualities, could just as easily be described as ‘rethrill’, ‘rezest’, ‘resense’, ‘reincentivise’ and ‘rejoy’.
What links the plight of the oystercatcher with a wolverine, a bee with a beaver, is our relationship with nature; it’s how we think of it, how we perceive it and feel it in our hearts that matters.
It’s clear that the process of rewilding presents a number of theoretical and practical challenges and while the long-term aim of reintroducing some of the major missing players in our current ghost lands is vital, in reality this situation is a long way off. If we are to succeed in this and in the restoration of large swathes of landscape, we need to train ourselves to become much more tolerant of the wild.
This is much more than just getting beyond those tabloid headlines, where the mere mention of wolf, bear or beaver sends everyone into a tizz. There is no doubt that we need these ‘big headline acts’; of course we do. These are the keystone species; we can never restore complete functionality to any ecosystem unless they are in place.
They are the mascots of the word ‘rewilding’ and stand to remind us about the bigger goal, the ambitious aim. We cannot have the ecological cherry on the cake if we’ve not got the cake yet. We’ve still got a few crumbs of the original functional landscape in many places both in this country and around the world, and while we still have crumbs and all the ingredients, there is hope. We can still bind them all together and rebuild and rewild our world, but first we need to reconnect, to re-establish and recalibrate our valuing system. We need to effect a change in the way we look at and interact with nature. Not as something that always needs to be tidied up, compartmentalised or controlled: we need to start integrating it into our everyday lives. The great thing about this kind of rewilding is that it is something we can all do. It’s more accessible than you might think.
There is very little point in coming to terms with a wolf or a lynx running through your local woods if you struggle with the idea of a fallen tree looking untidy, a bit of mud, letting the corner of your garden run wild, letting your lawn be unmown or, indeed, tolerating mining bees in your herbaceous border. But to understand why this is important, you first need to look at how you view nature. What is your take on the other species that you share your space with? Do you even notice them? This is the sort of rewilding this book is all about. It is about rewilding you, rewilding your life, rewilding your attitude, rewilding your mind, while rehabilitating your heart and soul – and, in doing so, starting a process of deep satisfaction, love for ourselves, other animals and the place we call home. It’s a natural therapy and antidote to the modern, technological bubble we race around and around in.
Where do you start? That’s easy: you start with what you can do something about, and that is you. Somewhere inside is a sensitive creature, one honed by seven million years of hominid evolution. You’re carrying with you right now all you need in order to engage with and experience the natural world, as well as other humans alive today. You are bristling with sense organs through which you can gain some amazing experiences which will give you a deeper comprehension of both yourself and your natural environment. This book is not an instruction manual that you need to follow religiously; rather, look at it as the helpful salesperson who has one of these at home, likes it quite a lot and wants to share with you its best features and how he has come to love, appreciate and value what it has done for him.
There are plenty of resources out there telling you how to do this and the best way to see it. I should know, I’ve written a few of them. They’re great at one level, but what they can’t do is take the place of the real joy – of the exquisite journey of personal discovery. A huge part of being a naturalist and connecting is what you learn and discover yourself, the sorts of things you don’t get out of books. I spend a lot of my life answering questions and showing people things that amaze me; I can’t help myself, it’s only natural.
My big worry is that every time a question is answered, whether on TV, an Internet forum, in the social media or a school assembly, I deny the questioner that indescribable deliciousness of finding out the fact for themselves – the process of the hunt and the hard-earned fact, the ‘kill’ that stays with us; the exhilaration, the thrill of the chase and, of course, the undeniable truth of what is discovered. We live in a world of instant gratification, of lazy enquiry and a Google mindset; how refreshing is it to be left to get on with it, to find out for yourself? I say get out there and open your senses, witness nature first-hand, relish the details and complexities and revel in the interconnectedness of all things; marvel at them and enjoy joining up the dots for yourself. In the process you’ll shake up an inner child and wake up the hidden monkey.