That beautifully intricate song of the nightingale is a rare occurrence in England today, however not at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a lone nightingale could be noticed at this secluded place in the countryside of Surrey; lately, they were everywhere. “We were listening to them singing all night, from multiple areas,” explains Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the Youngwilders. A group of Youngwilders were staying overnight at the site, yet the nightingales were so noisy, “we stayed awake all night,” says an engagement lead. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An professional from the regional nature organization came to help them capture and tag one of the nightingales the next morning, she recalls: “He’d never held a songbird in his care before. He was emotional.”
Habitat Revival Speeds Up at the Surrey Site
Rewilding is by its very essence a slow business, but at this site at Maple Farm, after only a short period, the results are already visible, and noticeable. The land was once a retirement home for horses. Currently it’s a example for the youth-led goal: to hasten nature recovery, in one of the ecologically impoverished countries in the world, and to engage the younger generation (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often shut out of, and a climate crisis they are often powerless to stop. Global heating continues, habitat loss eliminates natural habitats, and one more Cop summit draws to a unsatisfactory outcome in the host country – so what person could fault youth for choosing to initiate change themselves?
Our project was founded on the belief that there were landowners ready to allow a bunch of young idiots on to their estate
“The youth is the most informed environmentally that there’s historically,” states the group's founder, Jack Durant. They are also “the most emotionally involved in the challenges, and have played the minimal role to their causing, and, then, are also going to experience consequences the worst as a result.”
Change of the Property
Today, the group is taking root across the United Kingdom – and the original site was the beginning, in all respects. “It’s the initial project, and the place we created our community,” notes another co-director, as she gives a walkthrough of the 30-acre site. “This was previously divided plots,” she states, as we stroll through overgrown meadows filled with bushes, bordered by established trees. “The key visible transformation is that we’ve taken out all the enclosures, over a kilometer of it, to make it feel like a unified environment.” In the warmer months, they wore hazmat suits and eradicated masses of invasive plants, an non-native plant that can irritate the skin. “We’ve planted many of bush lines,” explains Easton. “But the primary focus is we’ve just allowed it to rest for a brief period. We’ve removed a lot of livestock impact and noticed what’s come up.”
Underbrush and natural fences are a ideal nightingale home, she explains, although now they’re trimming some of the wild growth to establish a greater variety of ecosystems and to connect different sections of the site. Fresh plantings will take a while to take root, but young trees from the adjacent oaks are already taking root in the fields; the team have been setting up protectors to shield them from animals.
Animals Reappears in Abundance
There's more than the songbirds – wildlife is returning in droves. Lately they’ve seen reptiles, legless lizards, bats and insects, notes another co-director, as he raises one of their reptile mats (similar to a cover over a small hollow in the ground). “You find creatures and wildlife hiding under there, but it’s possibly a somewhat cold for them now.” Natural beehives, built using carved parts of tree trunk and buzzing with wild bees, are attached to some of the trees. The removal of animals has allowed invertebrates room to thrive in the long grass. When they visited this season, says the director, “I’d not ever seen so countless insects. There were just swarms of them. We were saying, ‘What is going on?’”
Origins of the Project
The initial founders – Noah, Durant, Easton and two others – united as youth, focusing on or expressing an passion in ecology. In the recent past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was predicting that the target of one and a half degrees of global heating was looking out of reach, a prominent figure was spearheading the youth protests for climate movement, and campaigner Clover Hogan was talking about young people feeling “environmental stress”. It was also the era of a writer's book, on rewilding, on how she and her husband transformed the a Sussex location from a failing dairy farm into a thriving natural habitat. “We were highly motivated by the example, but what was the function for the next generation?” questions Easton. “So we made a online presence and called many of wildlife trusts and were asking, ‘Do you ever get your landowners wishing to take action and you don’t have time?’”
Durant explains the account: “Our entire organisation was fundamentally founded on the idea that there were people who were prepared to permit a collection of youthful idiots on to their estate indiscriminately, to decide on major actions that would impact land value
