That beautifully intricate melody of the nightingale is a scarce occurrence in the UK today, but it's different at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a solitary bird could be heard at this secluded place in rural Surrey; recently, they were everywhere. “We were hearing them chirping all night, from five different territories,” explains one ecologist, top biologist for the Youngwilders. A band of volunteers were staying overnight at the location, but the birds were so loud, “we stayed awake all night,” says an engagement lead. “We were all worn out the next day, but it was so cool.” An professional from the regional nature organization came to help them trap and mark one of the birds the next morning, she states: “He’d never touched a songbird in his hands before. He was crying.”
Rewilding Progresses at the Surrey Site
Rewilding is by its very essence a gradual business, but in this place at the farm, after just four years, the results are already apparent, and audible. The farm previously served as a retirement home for horses. Now it’s a showpiece for the youth-led mission: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the ecologically impoverished regions in the globe, and to link the younger generation (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often denied access to, and a climate crisis they are often ineffectual to halt. Climate change continues, deforestation damages wildlife homes, and another climate conference comes to a unsatisfactory outcome in Brazil – so who could blame young people for choosing to initiate change themselves?
Our initiative was founded on the idea that there were people willing to allow a bunch of youthful idiots on to their land
“The youth is the best educated in terms of nature that there’s previously,” says the Youngwilders’ leader, one organizer. They are also “the highly invested in the issues, and have played the smallest part to their origin, and, then, are also going to suffer the greatest as a consequence.”
Change of the Site
Now, the group is expanding across the UK – and the original site planted the seed, in every sense. “It’s where we started, and the place we created our community,” says another co-director, as she gives a tour of the expansive site. “This once consisted of divided plots,” she says, as we move through tall vegetation filled with bushes, surrounded by established trees. “The main visible change is that we’ve removed all the fencing, over a kilometer of it, to give the sense like a single area.” In the summer, they donned special clothing and cleared significant quantities of harmful weeds, an non-native plant that can burn the skin. “We’ve planted numerous of bush lines,” notes she. “But the main thing is we’ve just given it space for a little bit. We’ve eliminated a significant amount of livestock impact and seen what’s come up.”
Bushes and hedgerows are a ideal songbird habitat, she says, but now they’re trimming some of the brambles to create a greater diversity of environments and to connect separate areas of the site. New trees will take considerably longer to grow, but saplings from the nearby oaks are already establishing themselves in the fields; the team have been placing protectors to protect them from grazing deer.
Wildlife Returns in Abundance
There's more than the songbirds – fauna is returning in large numbers. This year they’ve observed serpents, slowworms, bats and bugs, says a team member, as he lifts up one of their monitoring tools (like a cover over a depression in the earth). “You discover reptiles and animals hiding under there, but it’s probably a somewhat cool for them now.” Wild nests, made from empty parts of wood and buzzing with wild bees, are fixed to some of the trees. The absence of grazing horses has given small creatures room to flourish in the overgrown areas. When they visited this summer, comments Bennett, “I’d not ever observed so numerous butterflies. There were just swarms of them. We were saying, ‘What is going on?’”
Beginnings of the Initiative
The first founders – Noah, Jack, Easton and additional members – formed as students, focusing on or sharing an passion in nature. In the recent past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was predicting that the acceptable threshold of one and a half degrees of global heating was seeming out of reach, a prominent figure was guiding the youth protests for eco-awareness, and advocate another voice was addressing young people experiencing “environmental stress”. It was also the era of Isabella Tree’s work, about nature recovery, on how the authors changed the Knepp Estate from a struggling agricultural business into a thriving wildlife haven. “We were highly motivated by the case study, but what was the role for youth?” asks Easton. “So we created a online presence and contacted numerous of wildlife trusts and were saying, ‘Do you ever get your estate holders seeking to do something and you are short on resources?’”
Durant continues the story: “Our complete project was basically premised on the idea that there were individuals who were willing to let a group of young amateurs on to their estate without strict rules, to take significant choices that would change land value
