Like the African savannah, the Britain on which Homo Sapiens first set foot was a land of big beasts — of cave bears, mammoths, rhinos and two metre tall deer. While some of the largest died out during the Ice Age, killed off by a combination of climate change and hunting, the disappearance of Britain’s beasts continued into modernity.
Bison died out 6,000 years ago, and brown bears in Roman times. More recent victims of human predation include beavers, wolves, white-tailed eagles and lynx. Now, thanks to a flurry of rewilding projects, some of these species are returning.
Beavers are once again engineering Britain’s rivers, creating pools in which fish and birds feast on insects. Bison are about to return to Blean Wood in Kent, while white-tailed eagles are soaring above Scotland and the Isle of Wight. Separate studies in England and Scotland are assessing the feasibility of reintroducing lynx. Wolves, however, enjoy no realistic prospect of returning to Britain any time soon, as the prospect of their reintroduction horrifies sheep farmers.
The long absence of Britain’s extinct species has thrown their ecosystems out of balance. Without lynx and wolves to prey on them, deer populations have ballooned to such a high level that they are overgrazing the landscape, eating saplings before they can grow. Without bison paring back trees by eating their bark, forests have grown too dense for butterflies to thrive.
The return of long-lost species would help to correct these imbalances, repairing the web of life on which all species depend. That web has been severely damaged, not only by the killing of predators but also by intensive farming practices.
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The reintroduction of vanished species will not on its own be enough to rebalance ecosystems. It is just one among many interventions that rewilders make to return landscapes to health. Other interventions include removing fences, restoring peat bogs and stopping intensive grazing.
“You have to intervene in an ecosystem to kickstart its recovery,” says Professor Alastair Driver, director of Rewilding Britain, “but over time you relax. Rewilding is a marathon, but it starts with a sprint.”
Beaver
Animals that play an outsized role in shaping the environment around them are known as keystone species, and they can be pivotal to ecosystem restoration. It’s plain to see that beavers are one such species. As soon as they arrive on a river bank, they begin to engineer it, felling trees to build their dams.
In so doing, they create habitats for a plethora of other species. Insects, amphibians and fish thrive in the calm waters behind their dams, providing food for birds. Bats are another beneficiary, swooping into the gaps that felled trees open up in the foliage and eating the insects that spawn in their ponds.
Beavers were hunted to extinction in Britain more than four centuries ago for their waterproof fur and their scent glands, which were used to make perfume. Yet now they are spreading through Britain’s waterways once again, building dams in 25 locations. They were reintroduced in Scotland in 2009 and since then their numbers there have increased to 1,000.
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In England, however, their reintroduction has been stalled by the fact that they are not designated as a native species, which means they can be released only into fenced enclosures. This is about to change.
The government is expected this year to fulfil its pledge to designate them a native species in England. It has run a public consultation on what guidelines it should set for how to introduce them to the wild.
One community eagerly awaiting the government’s guidelines is Braunton in Devon, where a group mustered by Adrian Bryant, a parish councillor, hopes that beavers could help to reduce the village’s flood risk. Beavers are astonishingly effective at reducing flooding, because their dams slow the journey of rainwater from cloudburst to floodplain. One study, of Budleigh Brook in Devon, found that their presence reduced the river’s peak flow during storms by 47 per cent.
Had beavers been at work in the upper reaches of the River Caen in 2012, Braunton might not have suffered one of the worst floods in its history that year. The flood inundated the village’s high street and drove hundreds of people from their homes.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Bryant says. It did not occur to him that beavers could help to stop a repeat of the 2012 floods until he heard a talk about them at the Braunton Countryside Centre in 2019. He then set about consulting local landowners and the Environment Agency about the possibility of reintroducing them to the Caen.
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He hopes that, after the government publishes its guidelines for beaver reintroduction, Natural England will issue a licence for their reintroduction into the wild on the river. If not, they would have to be released into an enclosure. “We could do that,” he says, “but the problem is that it would be a lot of fencing, and that would be a lot of money.”
Bryant claims to have the support of more than 50 landowners who would be happy for beavers to roam their land. Public support of this kind is often essential to the success of rewilding projects.
Lynx
Such support has been less forthcoming, however, to those trying to reintroduce the lynx.
The forests of Britain were once home to an elusive predator — a cat the size of a labrador, with eyes so luminous its name came from the Latin word for light. It died out in most of the country more than a thousand years ago, but may have remained in Scotland until the 18th century.
The lynx shuns humans, preferring to hunt in dense woodland. While the Scottish Highlands have been largely deforested, they could still provide space for the lynx’s return. Once there the cats would help the Highlands’ forests grow anew, by controlling the ballooning deer population and stopping it from eating every sapling.
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Although lynx do sometimes kill sheep, unlike wolves they are loath to venture into farmland. For this reason, Steve Micklewright, chief executive of the rewilding organisation Trees for Life, thinks they have a good chance of being reintroduced to Britain.
“Because they operate in forests, we think their potential impact on farming could be very limited,” he says. Trees for Life is conducting a survey of attitudes about the possibility of reintroducing lynx to the Highlands. “With a lot of careful talking and understanding, we could get to a point of a reintroduction,” Micklewright says.
In conducting the survey, he is keen to learn the lessons of a failed attempt to reintroduce lynx, in which Trees for Life was not involved. In 2018, Paul O’Donoghue of the Lynx UK Trust applied to Natural England for a permit to release six lynx in Kielder Forest in Northumberland. Michael Gove, then the environment secretary, refused the permit, saying that the trust had engaged landowners “insufficiently or not at all”, adding: “As key enablers to the project, this is concerning as their support would have provided reassurance about its potential success.”
Micklewright believes that a successful lynx reintroduction will be possible only if rewilders learn to address farmers’ fears more empathetically than O’Donoghue did.
One way to ensure that reintroduced lynx do not damage farmers’ livelihoods would be to follow Norway in compensating farmers for each sheep killed. However, compensation may not be enough to quell farmers’ concerns about the return of a predator to their lands.
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Phil Stocker, chief executive of the National Sheep Association, says: “Farmers spend a lot of time and effort caring for their sheep and the stress and anxiety created when there is a predator attack is really significant. In most cases farmers say it is a greater consideration that the cost.” For that reason, it may be some time before the lynx steps softly back into Britain’s forests.
White-tailed eagle
A less controversial apex predator being reintroduced to Britain is the white-tailed eagle. The country’s largest bird of prey, with a wing span of up to 2.4 metres, it was persecuted to local extinction in the early 1900s.
In 1975 it was reintroduced from Norway to the west coast of Scotland, where there are now 140 breeding pairs. It returned to England in 2019, when the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, in partnership with Forestry England, released six birds on the Isle of Wight. They have released 19 more birds since then and plan to release a total of 60.
Before the partnership released them, they carried out a survey on the Isle of Wight that found 76 per cent of residents supported their reintroduction. Andrew Stringer, the head of environment at Forestry England, says: “There is a small suite of top predators that you could realistically reintroduce to the UK. The white-tailed eagle is one of those species. Their conflict with people is pretty minimal.”
In Scotland the eagles have been known to prey on lambs, a cause of conflict with farmers, but before reintroducing them to the Isle of Wight, Stringer found that there was little chance of them doing so there. The birds eat a broad diet of other birds, fish and mammals. Stringer’s research revealed that the south of England offered them a far wider selection of prey than Scotland, meaning that they were less likely to prey on lambs.
One way that Stringer’s team has earnt farmers’ goodwill is by tracking the birds’ flight. When they enter a new area, Stringer’s colleague Steve Egerton-Read meets farmers there to hear their concerns.
The return of Britain’s biggest bird of prey will have a positive impact on their ecosystem. By preying on meso-predators such as foxes and crows, the eagles will reduce pressure on ground-nesting birds such as woodcocks and curlews.
Bison
While white-tailed eagles have been gone from England’s south coast for little more than a century, bison have not roamed Britain freely for 6,000 years. In May, though, post-Brexit red tape notwithstanding, four of these shaggy giants will find a new home in West Blean Woods nature reserve in Kent.
“Bison are what we call ecosystem engineers,” says Mark Habben, head of living collections at the Wildwood Trust. “They’re a really large, powerful animal, the benefits of which are seen through a lot of their behaviours.”
By eating bark and rubbing up against trunks to remove excess coat, bison kill off selected trees — often non-native species — providing dead wood for insects to eat and inhabit, and clearing areas to allow more light into the undergrowth, helping smaller species thrive.
Habben adds: “They create copses of woodland, and in between you see grasslands coming through. Another really important behaviour we see in bison, is they create these big dust baths and sandy patches, which in turn create habitat for invertebrates, which encourages birds to the area to feed.” Before this spectacular species chain reaction can begin however, first the team need to get the bison in situ.
“It has been very challenging to move the animals,” says Habben. “There have been so many legislative changes, particularly around animal movements subsequent to Brexit. Now we need to get passports for them, but after that hopefully it should be plain sailing.”
But only three of the bison will be doing any actual sailing. Two of the females will journey from Ireland and the bull from Germany. A third female need only cross the Scottish border, having been raised in a managed herd in the Highlands that was bred to support rewilding projects across Europe. “When we see the success of this programme, we’d like to think that there’ll be future projects across the country,” Habben says. “Within the UK in particular we have forgotten how to live with wildlife, with nature. We’re missing out, our children are missing out, so that would be a wonderful legacy.”
