Knepp’s a step ahead of the rest
Wild Justice campaign Wildlife is thriving following revolutionary rewilding project on West Sussex estate
WILD Justice, the campaign group set up by Chris Packham, Mark Avery and Ruth Tingay, has turned its attention to the badger cull. It has set up a crowd-funding appeal to raise money for a legal challenge by taking Natural England to judicial review over the issue of licences for the cull on the grounds that it has failed to define humane practices and that, unacceptably high numbers of badgers, killed by free shooting, die slowly and painfully each year.
There is something strange on the path ahead.
The dog stops and growls. Whatever it is, it doesn’t do anything. She skips round it nervously and carries on, tail up, waving like a flag.
The ‘thing’ seems covered in cryptic feathers and squats like an ill hen pheasant. Or a headless tawny owl. I am slightly spooked and touch it gently with a finger.
It wobbles on a pale foot like a fairground gonk from the 1970s. A toadstool! Large, ‘feathered’ and unlike anything I’ve seen. A recourse to twitter reveals it as ‘old man of the woods’ fungi. It is aptly named.
The open down is busy with people and thumping bass from cars with their headlights on full as the sun sets.
The poppy fields lie like picnic blankets below and I think about the news, and the invertebrates has been immense in its scope, scale and, more particularly, the speed of re-colonisation.
The full details are in the book but, to give an indication, there are now 34 species of butterfly, 19 of earthworms, 62 of bees and 30 of wasps.
Many endangered bird species are found here, including turtle doves, nightingales, five species of owl and a red-backed shrike. Of course, this has been greeted with delight by some, deep suspicion by many. Allowing the proliferation of ‘injurious weeds’, such as ragwort, alarmed neighbouring farmers and horse owners. But the minimum of intervention allowed nature to take its course.
In 2007, creeping thistles expanded and, by 2009, covered much of the Repton park. But then many thousands of painted lady butterflies arrived from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and laid their eggs on the thistles.
Spiky black caterpillars emerged, chomping on the leaves and the following year there were no thistles in the park. The question of the degree of intervention is a crucial one.
There was a huge outcry in the Netherlands in the winter of 2017/18 when thousands of red deer, Konik horses and Heck cattle starved or were shot on the point of death in the Oostvaarderplassen reserve where non-intervention was the key.
At Knepp, anxious to avoid such antagonism, some intervention is undertaken to protect animal welfare as numbers of deer, ponies and cattle are monitored and any excess culled.
There is no doubt that the project has been a resounding success.
The estate is profitable, not least because of the large number of people that come to see the wildlife, many species of which are extremely rare elsewhere.
There is a campsite and farm shop where meat from the animals is sold. In 2017, 2,500 stayed at the campsite and 1,300 were escorted on wildlife safaris.
This is a hugely inspirational book that shows just what can be achieved on poor soil ill-suited to modern farming. newts beginning to stir in Kintbury’s ponds down there; all counted in a precious meadow, saved from development.
I drop lower to find the old quiet. There is a new moon above a semaphore of hawthorn.
A hare comes towards me out of nowhere, slowing hesitantly as if her clockwork haunches are powering down.
She stops on my boot, flattens her long ears and I can see my breath-held shape reflected in her kohl-rimmed, amber-glass eyes. I look up to stop the dog, but when I look back down the hare has gone.
Wild Diary
Listen out for tawny owlets chicks demanding food from their parents, as they begin ‘branching out’. They make a soft, insistent ‘tiseeeek’ call.