The richly complex song of the nightingale is a rare sound in the UK today, yet not at Maple Farm. Back in 2020, a solitary nightingale could be heard at this remote spot in rural Surrey; this summer, they were in multiple locations. “We were listening to them calling all night, from multiple areas,” explains Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the youth rewilding group. A team of participants were camping out at the location, yet the birds were so noisy, “we were unable to rest all night,” remarks Layla Mapemba. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so incredible.” An expert from the local conservation group came to help them net and ring one of the birds the next morning, Cookson recalls: “He’d never held a songbird in his care before. He was teary.”
Rewilding Speeds Up at the Surrey Site
Rewilding is by definition a slow process, but at this site at the farm, after just four years, the results are already evident, and noticeable. The farm previously served as a sanctuary for equines. Now it’s a model for the Youngwilders’ mission: to hasten habitat revival, in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the globe, and to connect young people (18-30-year-olds) with a ecosystem they are often denied access to, and a global warming issue they are often ineffectual to prevent. Global heating persists, habitat loss eliminates ecosystems, and another climate conference ends with a unsatisfactory end in the host country – so what person could fault young people for wanting to take matters into their own hands?
Our project was based on the belief that there were landowners prepared to let a group of young idiots on to their land
“The newer cohort is the best educated environmentally that there’s previously,” says the group's leader, one organizer. They are also “the deeply concerned in the issues, and have contributed the smallest part to their creation, and, then, are also going to suffer most as a consequence.”
Transformation of the Site
Now, the group is taking root across the United Kingdom – and Maple Farm planted the seed, in multiple ways. “It’s our origin point, and where we built our connections,” notes a founding member, as she offers a walkthrough of the 30-acre property. “This used to be divided plots,” she says, as we move through overgrown meadows filled with bushes, bordered by forest. “The key visual transformation is that we’ve eliminated all the fencing, over a kilometer of it, to make it feel like a unified area.” In the recent season, they wore hazmat suits and removed significant quantities of invasive plants, an invasive species that can harm the skin. “We’ve planted numerous of natural barriers,” explains the director. “But the main thing is we’ve just let it breathe for a brief period. We’ve eliminated a large part of livestock impact and observed what’s come up.”
Underbrush and shrub lines are a ideal nightingale habitat, she explains, although now they’re cutting back some of the wild growth to develop a greater variety of environments and to join two parts of the property. Fresh plantings will take a while to grow, but young trees from the adjacent woodland are already establishing themselves in the fields; the crew have been placing barriers to protect them from wildlife.
Wildlife Reappears in Large Numbers
There's more than the nightingales – wildlife is coming back in droves. Lately they’ve seen serpents, slowworms, bats and insects, explains Noah Bennett, as he raises one of their monitoring tools (such as a cover over a depression in the earth). “You find creatures and wildlife sheltering under there, but it’s possibly a bit cool for them now.” Natural homes, made from empty parts of tree trunk and active with insects, are attached to some of the woodland. The removal of livestock has allowed small creatures opportunity to flourish in the overgrown areas. When they visited this summer, says Bennett, “I’d not once seen so many lepidoptera. There were just clouds of them. We were saying, ‘What is going on?’”
Beginnings of the Initiative
The first founders – Noah, Durant, Molly and two others – united as youth, studying or expressing an passion in nature. In that year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was predicting that the safe limit of 1.5C of warming was seeming out of reach, Greta Thunberg was spearheading the school strikes for climate movement, and campaigner a speaker was addressing the generation feeling “climate anxiety”. It was also the era of a writer's work, about nature recovery, on how they revitalized the Knepp Estate from a struggling farm into a flourishing ecosystem. “We were super-inspired by the example, but what could be the function for young people?” says Molly. “So we created a platform and contacted numerous of wildlife trusts and were like, ‘Do you ever get your landowners wanting to make changes and you lack resources?’”
Jack explains the account: “Our complete organisation was essentially premised on the notion that there were people who were prepared to let a bunch of young enthusiasts on to their property freely, to take major actions that would change land value
