Rewilding, beavers, and water restoration :Derek Gow

0:00The Climate Water Project. Well, hello, Derek Gao. I'm really happy to have you on this podcast. Hi, Alpha. Lovely to be talking to you. Cool. And you're one of the leading rewouting experts and leaders of bringing back the beaver to the UK, right? Well, I hate the word expert. I always like that old synonym that, you know, X is an unknown mathematical equation and spurt as a drip under pressure. So I've had my share of time working with beavers and with water bowls and with a range of other endangered wildlife species here in Britain. You know, my background is I started my career in farming and at different times I've been a livestock farmer, so you keep beef cows and sheep

1:01and quite considerable numbers. But I've always been hugely interested in the natural world and the other creatures that surrounded me. And now, you know, everything we do land-wise is all turning everything over to nature. There are plenty of people farming. We don't need any more farmers, but we need a more sanctuaries where other kinds of life can make their homes. And these sanctuaries, you know, some of them are definitely related to water and so we kind of have to restore our water. And what you're looking at is kind of the how wildlife actually can help us restore the waterways. Yeah, well, I mean, water is the richest living environment and on this planet. And, you know, I don't know if we've really kind of come, we've understood that for a very long time or whether it's something we're coming more to terms with in our modern age. As, of course, water, you know, waters, you know, become increasingly polluted and increasingly over abstracted for us so that, you know, a lot of the big North American rivers

2:04like the Colorado and others now barely ever reach the sea. You know, it's maybe now that we're beginning to realize that everything we just thought of as being a raw resource is not always our first for the taking. And that when it comes to the engineering that we've applied to the landscapes, both to use water for abstraction, which can be of course a completely disastrous for riparian ecology or to, in part of the world where rainfall is an issue and you want to use the agricultural land as a dry commodity early in the spring to straighten the rivers, knock out the ponds and pools, straighten the wetlands, straighten the streams, dig ditches, do everything you can to create artificial checker boards to get the water off the land so you can use it. You know, that kind of scenario is equally disastrous for a whole host of other regions, you know, ecology, water retention, flooding, all the sort of stuff. We are, we're water as a resource,

3:08we're beginning to realize is increasingly valuable, increasingly finite and we can't have it all our own way. Sooner or later if we want to, to let once again sustainably with water, we're going to have to remake space for it on the earth and start to store it and allow it to, by doing so, to, to, to refill its natural function. Yeah, so this, this, this whole field of water restoration and, and, and rewilding, how did you get it, get into it? Do you want to tell us a little bit of your backstory? So when I was working with water bowls, water bowls are very small animal in Britain, everything in Britain that we do is small, small, small island, breed small mines and small actions. So water bowls which are the, one of the characters and Kenneth Graham's book, The Wind and the Willows, you know, the character of Ratti that was sculling his way up and down the adilic English River Windrush with his pile that toured in the mall, used to be an incredibly common British animal and they were found invisible in waterways,

4:11you know, from the beginning of the 20th century on and many people who were writing children's books or natural history accounts refer to their overwhelming presence at that time. But even at that time things were not going well for the species, it used to have a much wider range as a terrestrial animal in the wider landscape perhaps and in environments where the ground was semi-weight and it could half make runs, half make burrows and live just above the surface of the water in the soil. But I wrote you to the land are farming our drainage pushed them back into the river systems. While we were still using the river systems as a source of a water-aged timber for, you know, willowhees or the whole variety of different tree species for our purposes, for, you know, houses and carts and pegs to hold that on the roofs of houses together, then we were cutting the trees down and the water bowls did well in result of that.

5:11Also in fairness of that claim every carnivorous animal or bird there was, we killed because we wanted all the fish. So not only had we killed all the predators, but we were also cutting the trees down for our own purposes at that time. So a hundred years ago, water bowls prospered, they were common and that prosperity would last maybe until the 1960s and 1970s. Before a whole range of different factors like the canalization or rivers and streams, the covering over their banks with concrete and the introduction from fur farms and North American mink, all these different things conspired, probably pollution of water courses as well, on an overwhelming scale, all these different things conspired to start separating the water bowls which once lived in colonies as a season we link chains along water along through aquatic environments into tiny fragments and as soon as they start to fragment and they can't find mates that are unrelated to them, then the animal just starts

6:12to start to disappear. And at this point in time, I think it's estimated that the species is lost about 97% of its British range. It's only found in significant clusters in the last of the old wetlands in the east and throughout much of the rest of the British Isles, it's the animals now extinct. And the scariest part of that, because we've done a lot of work on reintroductions, is that we now know it's an extremely robust creature and that if you get your gene-based right, you put in many animals at the right age, at the right time of year, right sex, ratios and and on, these animals can recover themselves, no problem at all. And it's another example, just how harshly we've treated this earth, even the little things that are robust can no longer stand, the affliction that we apply to them. So, I began to work with water-roar reintroductions. I've worked on them for 30 years, we've learned an awful lot. We haven't saved them from

7:12extinction, but we know a lot more about them than we did at the beginning. And at some point on that journey, very early on as we're digging ponds and cutting down trees and creating over open sunny wetlands, you begin to realise that something else must have been doing this for them, before we came along. And it was at that point in time that some of these must have said, well, do you understand what beavers do? And of course at that time, I really didn't. So, maybe in the early 1990s, I went to Poland, I spent a month going round a number of wetlands sites there where the beavers had reintroduced in the 1960s. And as you put on your chest waders and you weighed out through these great ponds with floating islands of vegetation and orchids flowing on them, with frogs jumping away in front of you with dragonflies following you to land in your head, you know, to reach the great beaver lodges that were in the centre of this wondrous world.

8:15It's very quickly that the animal that made the living space for the water rolls and it makes living space for so many other things is the beaver. And then it's not just, I mean, people say Keystone species. Beavers are not a keystone species. Beavers are much, much bigger than that. They're a function of nature. And it's been estimated that, you know, with the exception of us and elephants, they are the third most impactful species on the planet in terms of habitat creation for a whole host of other species. So that was the kind of, the first jaunil led me to the beaver. So it's really interesting. So you were, were you a farmer or a land manager when you started introducing the voles, which I guess are small rat-like animals? Is that what? Well, you know, I prefer to describe them as small beaver-like animals. They have rounded nosies and tiny, hairy ears that sit into the side of their heads. So water can't easily get into

9:18their cavities. They have membranes that come across their eyes when they're swimming underwater. They look much more like a mini beaver than they do like a rat. But one of their old English names was the the water rat. That's the one that Kenneth Graham used in his book, Wind and the Willows. And then variously, they have all manner of other old English names too. So one of which are the most unusual of which comes from the Breton word for vol. And in Cornwall in the south-west of Britain, and they were called campagnoles. And that's taken, the Breton word for vol is campanule. And if you then derive the word vol from the word voleur, which is French, and the French used to call them thieves. So there's a kind of human history. Even when it comes to very small animal, it's a thief because it steals a carrot from us for whatever else. So yeah, I was farming on and off at that time, but I was also working in conservation projects for a range of different

10:21British species. And as I say, the water vols and then the beavers became the two principle of those. So yeah, so for the vols, you found that you needed to restore the waterways and the wetlands, right? And so that led you to investigation and you realized, oh, actually, the beavers of the species we need to bring back in order to restore that land. I mean, that was an easy, easy conclusion to come to. Then you look at the world of nature conservation. There's a few people, but not very many, talking about restoring the beaver. And when I started in the mid 1990s, you know, it's, you know, you just laughed at people, some people of sympathy, some people will understand. But the vast majority of people in nature conservation just thought it was a lady'sly funny and it was never going to happen. And then I traveled to Poland, to Germany, to Russia, the United States, to a whole variety of different countries where beavers that either be reintroduced or were being reintroduced. And you begin to

11:25realize that actually, it's not a daffling at all, that in many parts of Britain where the trees still exist, because bear in mind we were cutting them all down up until the by the time of the second world war for all the utensils we wanted. Those trees are still there. And they're still there with their kind of ancient coppice patterns, you know, where they were last cut down 50, 60 years ago. And when they reach a height of, you know, maybe 30, 40 feet on either side of the water, of course, what they do is they shade out all of vegetation. So when you drive through the countryside and you look all the nice trees, you think, yeah, well, that's all pretty green. Underneath it, there's not a lot of life because none of the plants can grow and then therefore none of the insects or fish or small mammals or whatever other kinds of life are depleted and an open sunny wetlands can flourish. So you begin to realize that actually there's the beaver food. And there's a huge amount of available habitat in Britain and that this is not something that would be literally difficult to do. The problem

12:29was was all the misunderstanding and ignorance and inertia because in Eurasia, beavers, are a species that yeah, we knew them well, but we knew them well, you know, maybe in Britain five, 600 years ago, you know, in older times, right, the way through the fertile crescent and into the Far East. It was an animal that was understood as a trade item as goods because in the St. Glans, they produce a sauce called Salicylic Acid and that's Salicylic Acid because they consume the bark of willow actually is an effective ingredient of pain relief. And that meant that beavers were incredibly valuable, you know, dead beavers were incredibly valuable because you know, people wanted the castorium which contains the acid. But then after that, you know, we forget about them as we could they dwindle and become a rare creature in modern times and it's really only again since, I don't know, in Britain in the last 15, 15 years,

13:30that people have begun to re-understand the beaver and look again at how important it is. Another part of European North America, obviously that understanding is has been much more developed and being in place for much greater length of time. So there are two deepened beavers, right, there's North American beaver and then there's the European beaver and in North America it kind of got wiped out but it wasn't quite as wiped out as the European ones, is that right? There are no estimation really, I mean, it's estimated in North America possibly where the Europeans came that you were maybe looking at 100 million beavers. And those beavers were taken and the days of the Far Trade from your 100 million down to somewhere in the region of two and a half in Eurasia, the beavers, which again number hundreds of millions over a much, much longer time scale were killed down somewhere in the region of maybe about 2000 by the beginning of the 20th century by which time different governments looked at what was left

14:35and started to impose protective laws. So the collapse has been catastrophic and because the collapse in North America occurred much, much more recently than it did in Eurasia. Ecologists have been able to track the environmental impact of the removal much more accurately. So if you look at Ben Goldfarb's work, his bookie, the papers, he's subsequently written about beavers thereafter. He'll tell you that you can go to some of the sediments of the Great River Basins, look at a time when water was naturally regulated by the pattern of nature and then look at what and then look at thereafter what happens when you smash out the beavers, smash out the riparian forest, completely engineered landscape to suit yourself and by doing so create this disastrous litany of issues such as flooding, soil erosion, you know chemical intrusion into rivers, going out into estuaries and so called creating these kind of forever dead zones for the so much

15:43shit from the past that the process was so long. The life in these areas is going to be retarded potentially for centuries to come. So our pursuit of the beaver was ruthless. We did everything we could to kill them and it wasn't really just the European beaver, it was the Eurasian beaver because they went from Britain and the West and you know up to the edge of the of the Arctic where you know you've got dwarf willow in the north and down into the into the Mediterranean basin into the warmlands of Spain and Portugal where the old Farf Trappers records tell us they were there in plenty right the way through across to China and Japan. Although there are tiny populations of them in China now tiny populations in Mongolia if you pass through areas of the world like Iraq and Iran and rivers like the Jordan and the Ureferatis there were beavers on there until well into the 1890s and beyond and we slaughtered everything and it is interesting to reflect again when you look at

16:44the you know the crude way that we dealt with them in our neon modern history that one of the first peoples to talk about the you know how important it was regularly through water where the the leaders of this Eurasian religion in Iran and there they're telling you two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ that you cannot kill the water dogs and if you kill the water dogs and then the deserts will advance and therefore you know you will be subject to considerable fines and other penalties and when you look down on some of those river systems there are still flowing because of course most of them are extensively abstracted as well but agriculture and crop production but where water still remains what you can see in the patterns of the sand and the landscape the lies behind it is the erudity that came when the bee first removed and and then through the removal all the greenness all the water all the you know re-greening you see in Oregon and the added parts of North America where the beavers are enabled

17:49to return that's all gone beyond a time whereby any effect can ever and be naturally recovered and that's what happens when you as a species with no understanding removes you know nature's water gardeners from the earth wow so even way back then they understood that if you remove these water what do you call water dogs like the deserts will advance yeah they figured that out those are all guys understood it you know in modern times you know you get carcines and all the great iconic mountain men of the eastern and the people that killed them and and and you know the middle ages and you know we we if we understood that nothing comes back from those records beyond the the value of the beasts and their forests or or in their glands so when the beavers you want to go into a little bit so when the beavers you know cut down the trees and they make their dams how does that affect the water the rivers and then the surrounding flood plains and

18:53right okay so the beavers move the beavers like that are so lazy and because there are many reintroductions to river systems you know where they're absent what we're able to say is it fine there's the rivers are trees up and down it's banks um the trees are palatable there are some reads that is there are other maybe there are offline a few small offline wetlands and and and is what the beavers do first when you put them in a river system like that is they go for an easy life they go and live in a wetland they go and live in a series of pools they flow up and down stuffing their feces with reeds and iris and they don't work very hard at all because they don't have to but there are territorial species and once a family has established this territory they will not willingly tolerate animals from other families living within the territory and to try and um you know create barriers around territories beavers will use the castorium to scent mark um stumps or or spit some gravel in a in a river um you know to tell the

19:54other beavers that that is the boundary of their territory and and entertainingly one of the other methods they they've evolved of of informing other beavers of this is that at the edge of territories where territories if one territory meets another there lots of lovely little bits of fruitage of these animals taking a stick in that little little tubby rest there's going to the edge of your your territory and using your stick and sit down in a stick bobbing dance to press your lips don't know whether you can bob your stick higher than he can and then hopefully you'll just bugger off and leave you alone but um that's you know when animals do move into the territories of others they're savagely attacked and therefore what beavers do is the population expands is they go from the easy living habitats up into the smaller stream systems that surround them and there they build the impoundments that we call dams and when they start to do that the dams and the water that flows round them and the wetlands that reform all act as giant sponges over time

20:56and so that when you have heavy rainfall um the water is diverted off to the left and to the right by the fallen trees it fills the you know the dry pool systems that perhaps don't contain water at the tail end of a summer under the autumn um you basically go out it fills the canals you've got a system of absorbance that is entirely natural and what but then happens is when the water hits the beaver wetlands it takes ten to the the absorb ten times the the volume of water where it takes ten times longer to to flow through than would otherwise be the case and as far as we consent for the communities and people living downstream it breaks the flood peaks and if you want to see a brilliant example of them in Oregon what you do is you go to the John Day River and you then look at a project called the Bridge Creek Project and that's a project whereby um the fishing game guys realize that the beaver they I mean they had these terrible terrible floods because of this snowmell it discovered the river bed clear

22:01the cattle had grazed off all the vegetation all on the sides of the river it was a good going disaster with the the communities that live alongside the John Day River just being smashed out year after year after year and then Sunday figured out that there were beavers building dams in the side creeks but the power of the river was now such that the beavers couldn't build anything that wasn't smashed out so they went back to the river then stood out the cattle till out of vegetation to regenerate then put all bunch of steaks across the river enter wolf trees through the steaks and in the first year something like 39% of their structures were then added to by the beavers so the beavers came out of the side creeks put more mods more stones more vegetation more more timber on the dams and the net end of this was that people and beavers working together were able to slow slow slow slow the flow of the John Day River that that it was it was it was it

23:04stopped the erosion of human communities and the loss of property very significantly so beavers don't have a small effect they can have a big effect but it depends on how much of the land we are prepared to allow them to use because of course if the valley bottoms were the old soils and sediments like that accumulate behind their dams are are richest are where we want to farm and of course those are the very environments where the beavers by expanding the water out into the land and then building more dams and more canals are really the basically linked to the other dams that's where they can create sponges so it's down to we either go on fighting with them and drain their dams and shoot them and kill them or we say well there are areas where this is acceptable and where this needs to be done and we start to look you know I think all partnership which is built on tolerance which is not something we're ever good showing as a species when

24:06it comes to wild animals so rivers that a lot of the rivers we see nowadays is very different than how they are in the wild right like we canalize them and straighten them but really they're they're much more you know braided and in curvy and like they're flooding over like and they're much slower because of this and so nature never produced anything that floored in a street like weeded there and I mean I have no idea what protonation's culture will impact on rivers I would imagine it was insignificant because in the mean well you know it can't be insignificant because you know you had different cultures who were farming different times and who must have had sophisticated systems of irrigation to enable them to grow the crops they grew but you know when you look at the American West and the accounts of the first travelers there then I mean they would encounter swamp and aggregations of timber and rivers like the Mississippi

25:07that you could virtually walk across I mean it was just incredible so you were looking at a much much wilder landscape and certainly when it comes to to the European but when it comes to European landscapes I mean as soon as we you know we we become communities in Europe you know which is Bronze Age prehistoric certainly we are draining land on the Bronze Age and then with every age that comes the Bronze Age the Iron Age the you know the Romans you know every every people brings a different technology to the land to and then tries to get the water to function in a different way so as soon as you get you know wind pumps and steam pumps you're able to clear swamps that you were never able to clear before and and the water becomes something we try to enslave and we enslave it and we put it in lines and we build our houses and churches and communities and farmland along its banks and then all of a sudden the climate changes again more

26:10water comes at different times of year we have double the rainfall in some counties that we've ever had before and before you know where you are this land that we think we have complete control over our starts to river back to nature and the water starts increasingly to smash and to swell into the areas where we have developed our living space and then we call that a disaster it's not a disaster it's nature taking back what it had before and what we've only been able to hold perhaps and throw for less than a century and that's not going away it's going to get worse so the sooner we come to terms with that and the sooner we start to think about how we're going to reshape the landscape then the sooner we you know we can we can look back at the beaver and begin to decide that this animal might be our very best of friends and there would be better to work alongside it rather than to to ignore it and kill it and diminish you know its capacity to to help us where we wish it to do so yeah so you know humans I guess when they try to you know

27:18control the water they're looking for specific use but they're kind of their perspectives not wide enough they don't understand that the beavers are actually if you the rivers were allowed to rewild they would actually slow down you know the floods because of all the spilling over into the wetlands and so if we kind of expand the somewhat our ideas of what the rivers are and and the land usage then I think we will find it we want to move towards this rewilding route well you think so I mean it's a sensible week of year but you'll realize as well as I do that you know what then happens is you have all sorts of groups that lobby for the interests alone I mean yesterday there's a cracking story going the roads you know over here about the the empire because we've left the European Union now we have left for example the rules and pesticides which means that there are 10 different you know carcinogenic pesticides which can basically also endocrine disrupt and sterilize here and we are now using these in Britain

28:21where you know quite liberally when we with the Europeans can't because you know we're no longer part of the European Union and the argument is presented for this you to buy the people that made the chemicals is the commercial agriculture wouldn't be valuable if they weren't able to use it so that's fine well you have a lot of farmers getting a good price for the big fat carist well a whole bunch of people sitting hospitals weeping because the mothers just died how does that work out you know the whole point of it is that we need to get the we all live in a difficult time politically we all understand the strength of the lobbies but but it's it's always measuring the impact it's going to have on many people and many communities and the younger people that follow us forever against the selfish interests of a very very small cartel of old people and that's what what prohibits any you know sensible rational evaluation of where we're going to go from here with the guard animals like the beaver

29:23yes so there's a lot of sociological factors that kind of impede some of this rewilding and I was just wondering if you could say a little bit about the rewilding movement in the UK and also in Europe and general so the rewilding movement in the UK if we start with that does a huge amount of talk about rewilding the most famous rewilding project that is in the UK it's a place called Neb Castle in Sussex and that is the home of a couple called Charlie Bottle and Izzy Tree and and they have rewilded their estate effectively over last quarter century for nature and the results of of what they've they've done they're the cessation of farming they're the use of of big domestic old breeds of domestic animal as proxies for the extinct animals has just been remarkable I mean the response of all the other wild species that live there is incredible being the burden numbers of resin much greater diversity much greater numbers and it really just shows you that if you approach

30:23you wish to approach meat production in a different way lower densities of animals feeding them no extra supplements that you can create a landscape which is very rich in other life by doing so I'm still keep some cattle but elsewhere in Britain you've got other people talking about rewilding they're all sorts of different shapes and forms in which it becomes from managed landscapes where you know you have very very low densities of domestic animals you know perhaps some wild although there are very few of those left in Britain maybe a few wild boar and a few red deer and and different organizations and and different individuals are doing that for different reasons so it is slowly growing in Britain as a way of approaching land use but our government is incredibly hesitant to bow to and our nature conservation authorities can be very difficult when it comes to moving this whole process forward quickly and you know to be brutally flying

31:25flying kind of things of the beavers for the introduction of the beaver has been a 30 year battle with with all sorts of obstacles but the nature conservation organizations really have not helped much at all until about the last five years and even now when it comes to the the government organizations bureaucracy involved with regard to moving a few beavers into a new river system you know it would be easier to move nuclear missiles and point them at the Irish than it would be to move the beavers so Europe Europe's much more advanced that's been a huge degree of liberal thinking and action there again for possibly a period of 30 years so you know one of the best parts of Europe to visit when if you went to want to look at you know initial rewilding are you know countries like the Netherlands where you know you've had these large projects like the Oath's largest blast and above Amsterdam you know where they've taken six thousand hectares out of what was going to be industrial land that had been reclaimed from the bed of the North Sea

32:29and that's that and they put wild herds of large wild herbivores in there which wherever regulating themselves allowed the the the landscapes to develop and and that again drew very much other wildlife to it and now right the way through Europe you see different mimic projects for different mimic source with different species of same blaze and different habitats forming and yes it's incredibly encouraging and when you go to countries like the Netherlands and I'm just finishing this note that and you look at the response that is to well-free introduction places like Yellowstone and Colorado in the United States and then you go to countries like the Netherlands if you guys have a conceptual mind's eye view of it is going to be a lot of you know windmills and tulips the wolves are right the way through that landscape now that in people's back gardens eating their pygmy goats you know people encounter them and walks when they're out Nordic walking or they're taking a little dog for a hike in the countryside and in the mean everybody regards their presence quite rationally I think maybe three or four weeks ago one wolf had attacked and

33:33a child was sure but nobody's jumping up and down about it and making you know a huge fuss about the fact that the wolf is back and if you look at that again you know we do evolve the species of our relationship to nature it's unarguable it's frustrating if you're living it day to day but when you look at it over time if the wolves had returned to the Netherlands 50 years ago nobody would have been arguing what to do with them in the mean there would have been a few lone voices but the gist of it would have been kill them all now now the vast majority of people are prepared to tolerate the wolf and the wolf you know really does change the way you can live as a as a stock keeping person and a very cultivated landscape if you know if you're not prepared to again show a degree of toleration do you want to say a bit about your efforts to reintroduce the beaver like where do you introduce them and and what if you had to fight through and stuff so my first reason is to be required to introduce them now well now we're reintroducing

34:37them to habitat search suitable so this last few weeks the first licenses have come through to put more beavers out in England and to get a point where you had that official part of the permission has taken the best part of quarter of a century when the beavers first I mean so I imported beavers initially for areas where the owners of the land were going to put big fences off and put the beavers in areas that had high fences round them and of course sooner or later the beavers you know which are are made by God you know with a set of bolt cutters on their face have got through the fences out into the surrounding wetlands and then just started to live and so there have been been if you like illegal colonies of beavers or beaver populations that have been living free in England without licensees or perhaps I don't know when the 20 odd years maybe longer and and my role I guess was importing these animals giving them to people

35:40nobody broke the law at that point in time and in the beavers just some of the beavers escaped my role now is we still old beavers for some of the projects that are putting them out into other wetlands so we have big buildings on the farm here that are purpose designed so when beaver families come and they're going to be released two or three weeks later they can rest in here we can feed them we can look after them and then they move on to their ultimate destination so it's kind of like a beaver hotel and and that's really my part in what's happening now initially there was a huge amount of advocacy and there is still a bit of that yeah there was a lot of film and media work um you were talking to lots of organisations about beavers I don't do a lot of that now and I don't think any human being can do things like that for for the entirety of your life I think if you're going to stay sane and balanced then you have to have other interests and my interests now are in moving forward with the restoration of other species that are not

36:44you know that maybe dependent on the beaver like you know water bowls or use the habitats that beavers create like white storks but because not very many people are working on those creatures I'm working principally on them now as the number of people working with beavers rises because more organisations become involved so the whole thing has changed greatly from being um you know kind of lonely guerrilla war to one whereby many other organisations and individuals are involved with the restoration of the beaver and you can kind of leave that in part to then so I have beavers living free in my farm here and in the summer evenings my greatest delight with regard to the beavers is to go get a bottle of cider so and on a sunny evening with a pair of binoculars and watch them doing whatever they're doing and watch the other life and revolves around them living its life I don't want to fill in any more forms in their bath or have any more political battles those days are done all right well thank you so much for getting the

37:44whole momentum going and getting the whole movement going do you want to say a little bit about the white stalks like what are you doing with those okay so the white stalks so when the beaver went and we destroyed them and they were uncommon animals very uncommon animals by the tail end of the 1700s but probably largely gone from Britain you know a thousand years ago we destroyed the wetlands as well because we wanted the wetlands to farm and when you destroy the wetlands you destroy everything it lives in the wetlands you destroy the fish and the waterfowl the great birds like the cranes the white stalks the black stalks you know the little bitters everything that used to revolve around them we kill it all and then we eat what we can and then we plow it and we grow potatoes there so white stalks in Britain that are records of the birds nesting you know in the 1400s that are records of the birds trying again to nest after the second world war but that are bird that from the time of the ancient Greeks from the time of Esau was always

38:45viewed by other cultures as as a bird that's associated with joy recovery hope restoration rebirth regeneration and in Britain when they came and sat in the roof of people's had houses that were made out of mud we looked up and thought ah there's lunch so we just kill them kill them kill them and what that's meant is that the bird though the bird has tried to come back as it's recovered its populations in Europe you know after the you know the scandals of DDT diminish them very greatly as a reading species but as they come back to Britain the problem is that the bird that that has to be born with a satnav chip in its head that says I am British I am French I am Italian I am whatever and if you don't have young birds being born in Britain that think they're from here well they just won't come it's as simple as that they might pass over when they're blown by a storm wind but they won't regen they won't come back here to breed

39:47because nothing remains that thinks it has any has any affinity with this land so my role in the start project was that we did big feasibility study at the beginning in 2017 and also in 2017 we were lucky to to obtain funding from others principally the net castle estate to move on with the first imports of birds we went and spoke to the polls there was a big animal hospital in Warsaw a zoo that had very many orphan stores and we asked if we could have the birds from there and they said yes and maybe in the first year we got 120 and in the years that followed further 60s and 70s were brought in and these were birds were brought in kept in enclosures someone could fly someone couldn't the ones that could fly flew within half a year of being brought to this country and eventually over time in a combination of the flying birds and the birds that that were had broken wings and remained in the enclosure started to breed and they this this happened in the woodlands

40:48in and around net castle and it went up into the big oak trees built the nest and the oak trees I think last year they had 47 nests and they're in a season every year the numbers go up and the whole idea is to reintroduce the stalkers are breeding bird in Britain but Britain is a very conservative country you get a lot of people again in nature conservation who look at things that actually happen and say well you know there are no records since the 1400s we are not sure this was ever a british bird even though none of us can time travel we don't believe it we don't want them here it's an introduction rather than a reintroduction and when you look at at the kind of like silly conservation politics of all this you can end up having the stupidest of arguments with the stupidest of idiots for for years and years and years pointlessly and what you must do is step away from that and look at the response of people because all the old words that I used when it came to how the Greeks described them and antiquity apply absolutely to people

41:51who've never seen a bird like this rising in spirals and in hundreds and fifties into the sky or seeing them come to land on a chimney or an oak tree in Britain or on one day the roof of their culvert their bungalow in a cul-de-sci and they look at a thing oh my god our nature can be truly spectacular this is what it's once like and this bird for me begins to mean an awful lot and that's why you do these things in a time of terrible darkness when you know Britain something like that it's at the bottom 10 of most impoverished nations worldwide in terms of psychology we need to have symbols of hope and the white store always was going to be and now is you know one of the greatest totems of hope that we now have so for ordinary people for children for people who are not immediately connected to nature the idea that you can step out to support your house look up into the sky and you have a tornado of these great birds you know sailing upwards on the

42:55thermals above Britain it is just the most incredible thing and it takes us right by to the way that the Greeks viewed them in times of antiquity which was a symbol of hope and and regeneration which in these very dark times for nature is exactly the sort of remedy we need in Britain so so there's a so nature itself can regenerate quite quite fast right if you can get it going again is that right nature can regenerate if we help nature to regenerate we're very good at cultivating all of the creatures that we want so if you think that many billions of chickens we produce because we want to eat them and that millions and millions of cattle and everything I was looking at the American cattle tree the other day which killed some of the region 325,000 cattle a day you know if we want to cultivate a creature we can cultivate a creature without any issue but we're incredibly selfish and most of the cultivation is always of course done because we want to feed ourselves so if you want to look at other creatures and say you know

43:59yes we can help you and we will then there is a different future for us as a species on this earth we don't have to be the plague we've become we can be something that that's benevolent and if you look at you know it's all very easy to become overwhelmed with the statistics and the loss of other life and this planet and the realization that 95% of the vertebrates that now now roam the surface of this earth are us and our domestic animals and our pets and that the vertebrates percentage of all pet life on earth is larger than all the wild animals put together and that's a sobering figure but scattered through this the world over you see people who do the most remarkable of things who are absolutely have the deepest love and devotion to the creature or creatures that mean much to and motivate them and they devote their lives to ensuring these creatures

45:02prosperity and if you look back in the history of so many things and I just finished a book on the history of the North American bison and European bison governments don't save species governments commonly in the beginning do everything they possibly can to stand on side with the railroad barons and the the cattlemen and the skinners and the tanners and the people who are going to grind their bones into dust to say well its economy its jobs you know we're building a new world future these things are these are an old world thing what we need is we need to look forward is positive and of course by doing that that kind of of of a size ensemble of bvs lies behind that works the fact that we as you know just another species because we certainly are not god-given to this earth we're we're just we were just basically trashing things that have evolved as life forms that are millions and millions tens of millions of years older than us and and and there's no rationale to the reasons they they afford you there's no writing what they say so it's not

46:07until you get to a point where you realize that that's the background that you actually see people you know a bit in North America there were a number of them well actually you know there were tiny tiny number as the bison dwindled down to less than a thousand you know of people who actually said you know I'm going to do something and some of them were poor men who could only go out catch and assemble tiny herds but some of these tiny herds made it through the worst of all the killing it became the foundation of the hair the 500 thousand bison then now live in North America today so I mean as I said earlier on it's people who love animals and people who love other forms of life and it prepared to commit a significant part of theirs to ensure that the creatures they love prosper who really are the people who are the most remarkable of all because they change things yeah you know for good they make an effort they make us them dear but they're doing it on behalf of other creatures and on your you have a farm right and you've turned it into kind of a sanctuary

47:10for wildlife do you want to say a bit about that we I originally wanted about 400 acres of land or accumulated 100 acres of land within sight of Dartmouth which is just over there because it's not raining I can see it in the distance and we are used to farm here but all the I mean there's a few cows here now but they are here as lawnmowers they're here to provide pardon me clean dung and blood for the insects that rely on them they're here to provide you know thick woolly here so the birds can line they're next with it in the spring and they're not here as beef animals or milk animals or anything like that anymore so my farm is the farm where the grasses and the herbs grow tall they grow to the height of a hay field they flower and then they fall over and the voles live underneath them and and insects burrow down into the roots and the dung beetles that enjoy the crackle dung you know roll it into balls that any confectioner would adore

48:12and take it back down underground and and and everything I mean we've opened up maybe a hundred pools or more the beavers on the bottom of the valley you know create more and more living space for frogs every year bird species that that we're not here like skylarks which we should do these song flights to spiral upwards into the air are now breeding here maybe we had five or six pairs last year there would be more this year this year for sure but in the next year or two will have white stalks flying in a two and throw from here and building their nest on the roof of the farm buildings we've reintroduced while geese we've reintroduced water balls we've reintroduced water frogs the whole range of other species every we're moving a bunch of ants tomorrow to restore the ant hills that were plowed into the grounds 50-60 years ago so everywhere we can we're showing you how you can create living space for other creatures and you can create a life scape you know that is shared between them and us so we're not saving the planet we're not

49:14saving this earth but what we hopefully will do is create a site where people can come to be inspired and see what can be done to benefit nature rather than just talking about it and producing a whole lot of reports that nobody will ever read okay cool and it was it when you initial when you had your farm right you had a lot of wetlands right and you kind of didn't was it true that you didn't initially think it was that great but then you kind of started you know no we had no wetlands here there there were the rivers in the bottom of the farm that were lined by trees and underneath the trees in the valleys you could see the last of the wetland plants but they could not survive because the sun virtually never hit them so and then the beavers escaped from some of the central holding pens there so now depending where you are in the farm there are some big beaver wetlands with trees you know with where they have felled the trees opened them to the the sunlight the irises you know that I don't know if you have yellow flag iris you know to say so I think

50:15possibly no but there's a there's a flower in in in Britain called the yellow flag iris in France it's called the Fleur de Lille which means the travelers flower and when people used to walk through the landscapes either on on foot or on horseback they would cross rivers where the rivers were shallowis which would be sand bars I'm going across the river and commonly because the iris takes root in rich fertile sills and shallow water you'd look for the iris then to understand the somewhere in the surrounding landscape there would be a crossing because the water is shallow and therefore that's why the yet the flag iris became known as the the the travelers flower and of course it's where beavers build their dams eventually as they degrade they leave the silt bars across the river and these silt bars are quite commonly surrounded by iris so all these things in the end are interconnected you know and I like to think of something like that and say well you

51:16know there's the last of the iris the beavers are coming again they are going to save you you are going to prosper your kingdom will open to the sun and and and yes you know I've made it possible but it's part of of of a natural cycle you restored which one started should become never ending right cool so yeah so on your farm you kind of reintroduce the wetlands and that kind of like create a whole feedback cycle with the vegetation and one exactly restored other life cool do you have any advice with people who want to get into rewouting or where my advice that I'd give to anybody who wants to do something in life is bloody do it none of this is a rehearsal it's much much better to and it's always very easy to sit in an armchair and think somebody else will take responsibility in the end what you have to realize is if you really have a fire burning within you or or you are determined that something should be that the this the

52:17only solution to to that the flame that burns is to do it is to stop talking to look at what your circumstances are to look at what you can assist this positive and then do it because if you don't do it as quickly as you possibly can then then then age will overwhelm you that and the time for doing anything will come and go so do it do it quickly and enjoy the rewards in in I suppose in in just you know the fun fun is a good word you know the fun the satisfaction you get from doing so let your life and your love okay cool well I think that might be a good place to end this but we've lovely talking you out but really enjoyed that yeah thank you I really appreciate too no but thank you for asking me take care okay ciao bye