That manically melodic melody of the nightingale is a uncommon presence in England these days, yet not at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a lone nightingale could be detected at this hidden place in the countryside of Surrey; this summer, they were everywhere. “We were hearing them calling all night, from several zones,” notes a lead scientist, top biologist for the youth rewilding group. A team of participants were residing temporarily at the property, yet the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” says Layla Mapemba. “We were all exhausted the next day, but it was so amazing.” An specialist from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them trap and mark one of the birds the next morning, the ecologist recalls: “He’d never handled a nightingale in his possession before. He was emotional.”
Rewilding Accelerates at the Surrey Site
Nature recovery is by its very essence a gradual business, but here at this property, after merely four years, the results are already apparent, and hearable. The land was once a retirement home for animals. Now it’s a model for the youth-led goal: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the ecologically impoverished countries in the planet, and to engage young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a climate crisis they are often unable to prevent. Global heating advances, habitat loss damages natural habitats, and yet another Cop summit ends with a frustrating end in the host country – so what person could blame young people for wishing to take matters into their own hands?
The initiative was founded on the belief that there were landowners ready to permit a group of youthful amateurs on to their land
“The newer cohort is the most informed environmentally that there’s historically,” explains the group's leader, a key figure. They are also “the highly invested in the issues, and have added the least to their origin, and, then, are also going to suffer most as a result.”
Transformation of the Property
Now, the group is growing across the UK – and Maple Farm started it all, in every sense. “It’s our origin point, and the place we built our connections,” notes Molly Easton, as she provides a tour of the 12-hectare site. “This was previously divided plots,” she comments, as we walk through long grass dotted with low scrub, bordered by mature woodland. “The primary visual change is that we’ve taken out all the enclosures, 1.2km of it, to make it feel like one landscape.” In the summer, they used hazmat suits and cleared large amounts of giant hogweed, an invasive species that can burn the flesh. “We’ve planted numerous of natural barriers,” explains she. “But the primary focus is we’ve just given it space for a short time. We’ve removed a large part of grazing pressure and seen what’s come up.”
Underbrush and hedgerows are a perfect nightingale environment, she says, but now they’re cutting back some of the thorny plants to establish a more variety of ecosystems and to connect different sections of the land. Young saplings will take considerably longer to take root, but young trees from the nearby trees are already establishing themselves in the meadows; the group have been installing guards to shield them from animals.
Animals Returns in Abundance
It’s not just the songbirds – wildlife is coming back in large numbers. Lately they’ve seen serpents, creatures, flyers and invertebrates, explains another co-director, as he uncovers one of their survey equipment (similar to a cover over a depression in the soil). “You get snakes and wildlife hiding under there, but it’s possibly a bit cool for them now.” Organic beehives, made from carved sections of tree trunk and active with wild bees, are fixed to some of the trees. The lack of grazing horses has allowed insects room to thrive in the long grass. When they visited this season, states Bennett, “I’d never observed so countless insects. There were just clouds of them. We were like, ‘What is going on?’”
Beginnings of the Movement
The first Youngwilders – Bennett, Jack, Easton and two others – came together as youth, studying or expressing an interest in ecology. In the recent past, the IPCC was indicating that the safe limit of one and a half degrees of warming was looking out of reach, the activist was guiding the demonstrations for climate movement, and advocate a speaker was addressing the generation suffering from “environmental stress”. It was also the period of a writer's work, about nature recovery, on how the authors changed the a Sussex location from a struggling agricultural business into a thriving wildlife haven. “We were highly motivated by the case study, but what could be the role for youth?” questions Easton. “So we made a online presence and contacted many of environmental organizations and were asking, ‘Do you ever get your estate holders wanting to do something and you are short on time?’”
Durant continues the narrative: “Our complete project was fundamentally based on the notion that there were people who were ready to let a bunch of youthful amateurs on to their estate indiscriminately, to make fairly massive choices that would impact land value
