The beautifully intricate call of the nightingale is a rare presence in England nowadays, yet not at the Surrey site. Four years ago, a solitary bird could be noticed at this secluded spot in the countryside of Surrey; this summer, they were all around. “We were hearing them chirping all night, from multiple areas,” explains Meg Cookson, top biologist for the Youngwilders. A team of Youngwilders were residing temporarily at the site, but the birds were so noisy, “we were unable to rest all night,” remarks a project coordinator. “We were all exhausted the next day, but it was so incredible.” An expert from the local conservation group came to help them capture and tag one of the birds the next morning, Cookson remembers: “He’d never handled a songbird in his possession before. He was teary.”
Rewilding Accelerates at the Surrey Site
Nature recovery is by nature a slow process, but in this place at this property, after just four years, the outcomes are already visible, and noticeable. The farm previously served as a retirement home for animals. Currently it’s a showpiece for the youth-led mission: to speed up habitat revival, in one of the ecologically impoverished nations in the planet, and to connect youth (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a climate crisis they are often ineffectual to prevent. Global heating continues, habitat loss destroys ecosystems, and another Cop summit comes to a unsatisfactory end in the host country – so who could fault youth for wishing to act independently?
The organisation was founded on the idea that there were individuals willing to permit a group of young amateurs on to their land
“The younger generation is the most informed in terms of nature that there’s historically,” says the Youngwilders’ founder, Jack Durant. They are also “the highly invested in the issues, and have added the minimal role to their origin, and, then, are also going to suffer the worst as a consequence.”
Transformation of the Landscape
Now, the group is taking root across the UK – and the original site planted the seed, in every sense. “It’s our origin point, and the place we built our connections,” says another co-director, as she provides a overview of the 30-acre property. “This once consisted of divided plots,” she says, as we stroll through overgrown meadows featuring shrubs, bordered by mature woodland. “The key visible difference is that we’ve taken out all the barriers, over a kilometer of it, to give the sense like a single area.” In the warmer months, they wore special clothing and removed significant quantities of harmful weeds, an aggressive flora that can harm the flesh. “We’ve planted many of natural barriers,” explains Easton. “But the main thing is we’ve just allowed it to rest for a short time. We’ve removed a large part of livestock impact and noticed what’s come up.”
Underbrush and shrub lines are a perfect songbird habitat, she comments, however currently they’re cutting back some of the wild growth to create a greater range of habitats and to link up separate areas of the land. New trees will take much more time to take root, but young trees from the surrounding oaks are already growing in the fields; the crew have been setting up barriers to shield them from grazing deer.
Animals Reappears in Large Numbers
It’s not just the songbirds – animals is reappearing in large numbers. Lately they’ve spotted reptiles, slowworms, flyers and insects, notes a team member, as he lifts up one of their monitoring tools (such as a mat over a small hollow in the soil). “You discover snakes and animals hiding under there, but it’s possibly a slightly cold for them now.” Wild nests, made from hollowed-out pieces of timber and humming with pollinators, are fixed to some of the trees. The removal of grazing horses has given small creatures space to prosper in the overgrown areas. When they came to this summer, states he, “I’d never observed so numerous insects. There were just masses of them. We were wondering, ‘What is happening?’”
Beginnings of the Project
The original participants – Bennett, Jack, Molly and two others – united as youth, pursuing or expressing an interest in ecology. In 2019, the IPCC was indicating that the target of one and a half degrees of global heating was seeming out of reach, the activist was leading the youth protests for environmental action, and activist Clover Hogan was talking about young people feeling “climate anxiety”. It was also the time of the author's publication, Wilding, on how they changed the Knepp Estate from a struggling dairy farm into a thriving natural habitat. “We were super-inspired by the case study, but what was the role for young people?” questions Molly. “So we made a online presence and called numerous of conservation groups and were like, ‘Do you occasionally get your landowners wanting to take action and you are short on time?’”
Durant adds the narrative: “Our entire organisation was fundamentally founded on the idea that there were individuals who were ready to let a bunch of youthful amateurs on to their estate without strict rules, to decide on fairly massive decisions that would affect land value
