The beautifully intricate call of the songbird is a rare presence in Britain these days, yet it's different at this rural location. Back in 2020, a solitary nightingale could be noticed at this remote place in the countryside of Surrey; recently, they were everywhere. “We were listening to them chirping all night, from multiple areas,” says one ecologist, chief environmental expert for the youth rewilding group. A group of Youngwilders were staying overnight at the location, but the nightingales were so boisterous, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” comments a project coordinator. “We were all exhausted the next day, but it was so cool.” An expert from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them trap and mark one of the nightingales the next morning, she recalls: “He’d never touched a nightingale in his hands before. He was emotional.”
Habitat Revival Accelerates at Maple Farm
Rewilding is by its very essence a slow process, but at this site at the farm, after only a short period, the changes are already apparent, and audible. The property used to be a retirement home for equines. Currently it’s a showpiece for the Youngwilders’ mission: to accelerate ecological restoration, in one of the biodiversity-poor nations in the planet, and to connect youth (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a environmental emergency they are often unable to halt. Rising temperatures persists, deforestation destroys ecosystems, and another international meeting ends with a unsatisfactory conclusion in the host country – so who could blame young people for wanting to initiate change themselves?
Our organisation was premised on the idea that there were landowners willing to permit a collection of young enthusiasts on to their estate
“The youth is the best educated in terms of nature that there’s previously,” explains the Youngwilders’ leader, one organizer. They are also “the deeply concerned in the challenges, and have played the smallest part to their creation, and, then, are also going to suffer most as a result.”
Transformation of the Site
Currently, the initiative is expanding across the UK – and Maple Farm started it all, in multiple ways. “It’s the initial project, and the place we created our community,” explains Molly Easton, as she offers a walkthrough of the 30-acre property. “This was previously six different fields,” she states, as we stroll through overgrown meadows featuring shrubs, surrounded by forest. “The key visual difference is that we’ve taken out all the barriers, 1.2km of it, to make it feel like one area.” In the recent season, they wore hazmat suits and removed significant quantities of harmful weeds, an aggressive flora that can burn the skin. “We’ve planted numerous of natural barriers,” explains the director. “But the primary focus is we’ve just allowed it to rest for a brief period. We’ve eliminated a significant amount of livestock impact and observed what’s come up.”
Underbrush and hedgerows are a excellent nightingale home, she explains, however today they’re trimming some of the wild growth to establish a greater variety of ecosystems and to link up two parts of the site. Fresh plantings will take considerably longer to grow, but young trees from the nearby trees are already establishing themselves in the open areas; the team have been setting up protectors to shield them from animals.
Wildlife Returns in Abundance
There's more than the nightingales – wildlife is reappearing in droves. Lately they’ve spotted serpents, legless lizards, nocturnal mammals and bugs, says a team member, as he raises one of their reptile mats (such as a cover over a depression in the ground). “You discover creatures and wildlife sheltering under there, but it’s likely a somewhat chilly for them now.” Wild homes, built using empty pieces of tree trunk and buzzing with insects, are attached to some of the woodland. The lack of livestock has given small creatures space to flourish in the meadows. When they came to this time, comments Bennett, “I’d not once encountered so countless lepidoptera. There were just swarms of them. We were like, ‘What is going on?’”
Inception of the Initiative
The first Youngwilders – Bennett, Durant, Molly and two others – formed as learners, studying or expressing an concern in environmental science. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was predicting that the acceptable threshold of one and a half degrees of global heating was appearing out of reach, the activist was spearheading the demonstrations for environmental action, and activist a speaker was discussing young people feeling “environmental stress”. It was also the era of Isabella Tree’s work, Wilding, on how she and her husband revitalized the Knepp Estate from a unsuccessful dairy farm into a successful ecosystem. “We were deeply influenced by the Knepp story, but what was the part for the next generation?” says Easton. “So we created a platform and contacted numerous of wildlife trusts and were like, ‘Do you sometimes get your estate holders wishing to do something and you don’t have resources?’”
Durant explains the story: “Our whole organisation was basically founded on the notion that there were individuals who were willing to allow a group of youthful enthusiasts on to their land freely, to take significant decisions that would change land value
