That beautifully intricate call of the songbird is a rare sound in the UK these days, but it's different at the Surrey site. Back in 2020, a lone bird could be heard at this secluded location in the countryside of Surrey; lately, they were everywhere. “We were listening to them calling all night, from five different territories,” says a lead scientist, top biologist for the Youngwilders. A group of participants were staying overnight at the site, yet the nightingales were so loud, “we stayed awake all night,” says Layla Mapemba. “We were all exhausted the next day, but it was so incredible.” An specialist from the regional nature organization came to help them capture and tag one of the birds the next morning, Cookson remembers: “He’d never handled a nightingale in his care before. He was teary.”
Ecological Restoration Progresses at Maple Farm
Nature recovery is by definition a gradual business, but at this site at the farm, after merely several seasons, the changes are already visible, and hearable. The property previously served as a sanctuary for animals. Now it’s a model for the Youngwilders’ purpose: to hasten nature recovery, in one of the ecologically impoverished countries in the planet, and to link youth (18-30-year-olds) with a ecosystem they are often excluded from, and a environmental emergency they are often unable to stop. Climate change advances, habitat loss destroys natural habitats, and one more Cop summit comes to a unsatisfactory outcome in Brazil – so who could blame young people for wishing to initiate change themselves?
The project was premised on the idea that there were individuals prepared to permit a bunch of youthful idiots on to their property
“The youth is the most knowledgeable ecologically that there’s previously,” states the group's leader, a key figure. They are also “the deeply concerned in the problems, and have contributed the least to their causing, and, then, are also going to be affected most as a consequence.”
Transformation of the Site
Now, the group is taking root across the United Kingdom – and this location planted the seed, in all respects. “It’s where we started, and the place we built our network,” explains another co-director, as she offers a walkthrough of the 30-acre site. “This was previously divided plots,” she states, as we stroll through tall vegetation dotted with shrubs, surrounded by forest. “The primary visual change is that we’ve eliminated all the barriers, 1.2km of it, to make it feel like a unified environment.” In the recent season, they wore special clothing and cleared significant quantities of harmful weeds, an non-native plant that can irritate the flesh. “We’ve established loads of bush lines,” notes the director. “But the key action is we’ve just let it breathe for a little bit. We’ve removed a lot of animal feeding and seen what’s emerged.”
Bushes and hedgerows are a perfect songbird environment, she says, although now they’re cutting back some of the thorny plants to establish a greater variety of habitats and to link up two parts of the land. Fresh plantings will take much more time to establish, but saplings from the nearby oaks are already taking root in the meadows; the group have been installing protectors to safeguard them from wildlife.
Nature Reappears in Abundance
It’s not just the songbirds – fauna is coming back in large numbers. This year they’ve seen serpents, legless lizards, bats and bugs, explains a team member, as he uncovers one of their survey equipment (like a cover over a indentation in the earth). “You find snakes and things sheltering under there, but it’s possibly a bit cool for them now.” Natural beehives, made from carved parts of timber and active with pollinators, are strapped to some of the plants. The lack of livestock has provided small creatures room to flourish in the meadows. When they visited this time, comments Bennett, “I’d not ever observed so numerous butterflies. There were just swarms of them. We were wondering, ‘What is occurring?’”
Beginnings of the Project
The initial participants – Noah, Durant, Easton and two others – formed as students, pursuing or having an interest in nature. In that year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was indicating that the target of one and a half degrees of global heating was seeming out of reach, the activist was leading the youth protests for climate movement, and activist a speaker was discussing youth suffering from “environmental stress”. It was also the period of Isabella Tree’s work, Wilding, on how she and her husband changed the a nearby property from a struggling farm into a flourishing natural habitat. “We were deeply influenced by the Knepp story, but what was the part for youth?” questions Easton. “So we created a online presence and rang up loads of wildlife trusts and were saying, ‘Do you sometimes get your landowners wanting to make changes and you are short on time?’”
Durant continues the story: “Our complete project was basically premised on the belief that there were landowners who were willing to let a group of young enthusiasts on to their estate indiscriminately, to make major decisions that would impact land value
