20 Tips on How to Wild
Stand back and watch for a year
It may feel like a long time to you, but in ecological terms one year is a tiny snapshot. If you are able to ease off, or remove management of the land, and to watch what emerges over a year we can guarantee that there will be some surprises.
Remove negative human influence and infrastructure
Remove as much human (negative) influence and infrastructure as possible. From litter picking old rubbish dumps, to removing unnecessary fences and drains, there is a lot we can do to reduce the traces of human influence from our landscapes. Think about softening field edges, removing straight lines, and rewilding your farming practices, or buffering noise and air pollution from roads with luxuriant hedges. Allow people and animals to create desire lines and pathways across the land, rather than cutting or laying paths yourself.
Provide year-round food and habitat
We spend a lot of time planting meadows for bees in summer, but wildlife really needs food in late autumn, winter and during the hungry gap in spring. Plants like Ivy, Primroses, Blackthorn, Hawthorn, Oak, Rushes and Holly all provide hungry gap food when wildlife needs it most. Try and incorporate year round forage for a range of species in your land, be it a garden or a wildland.
Create connections
It is important for wildlife to be able to move through the countryside in response to disturbance and changing weather and seasons. Something as simple as cutting a hole in your garden fence to allow Hedgehogs through can be a massive help. Creating, or being part of a pollinator highway, and linking woodlands with hedgerows are all ways to help wildlife move through the countryside when it needs to. Speak to your neighbours, and see if they can work with you in creating more space for nature.
Create fuzzy edges and bendy bits!
Our countryside is full of straight lines and sharp edges. The graded edge of habitat between tall trees, and short grassland is one of the most biodiverse parts of our countryside. A broad based hedgerow takes in everything from woodland, to scrub, long grass and flowering plants and is full of nectar, shelter, fruit, nuts and insects. Allowing streams to meander and field corners to curve or regenerate with scrub creates habitat niches which are otherwise absent in the highly managed areas of countryside.
Value the ancient
Our ancient woodlands, veteran trees, ancient hedgerows, ancient meadows and old wetlands harbour some of the greatest diversity of species, and provide valuable sanctuaries, soil and seed banks for some of our rarest wildlife. Allowing these habitats to breathe and to expand can produce incredible results.
Make space for water
Nothing on earth lives without water. Making space for permanent and seasonal water both in winter and in summer, encourages a greater diversity of wildlife. Even a pocket pond can help.
Value diversity
Wildlife needs lots of different micro niches – everything from anthills and bare ground, to dead wood and temporary ponds. The more variety you have in your habitats and their structure, the better. You don’t necessarily need to create variety for varieties sake, but if it fits into your landscape then allow it.
Protect your soils
An inch of soil can take 1,000 years to create, and a day to destroy. There are more organisms in a tablespoon of soil, than there are people on the planet, and soil is one of the biggest carbon stores on earth. Un-compacted soil is a sponge for huge amounts of water. Unusual soils like greensand, peat and chalk also create habitat for unusual wildlife. Protect it, and it will help protect us.
Observe and record what you have
Just knowing what wildlife is out there helps us to protect it in the long term. It also helps to record the story of the lands’ transformation over time. You can upload wildlife records to irecord, and you can use Ispot for help, or contact your local Wildlife Trust for help. Observe and record what is on your land, how it changes and what recovers when you leave it alone. Some areas of your land will clearly already have high value for wildlife (ancient woodlands and meadows, chalk streams, sandstone outcrops, dead ancient trees etc.). Notice where these are and try to get expert advice on them.
Have at least one wild corner
Leave one corner that you walk away from and allow to do its own thing. Manage it or intervene only if absolutely necessary. It’s usually easiest if this is the furthest point away from the home.
Help insects & bugs
Insects are the keystone of our ecosystems. Without them, very little survives. Our pollinating bees/insects, the bugs that break down dung and wood, and other insects all perform important roles and provide food for myriad other species. Use less chemicals like methaldehyde slug pellets, insecticides and Ivermectin wormers, and we can create a massive boost to our ailing wildlife.
Listen to nature
There are little signs we can look for which tell us where our most natural and thriving areas of wildlife are – patches of mushrooms and orchids in woodlands and meadows show healthy mycorrhizal fungi; natural wood and gravels in meandering rivers and streams provide habitat for aquatic life; areas of lichen growth in trees are present where pollution is lowest. See where nature is abundant, listen to what nature is telling you, and try not to damage these areas. If birds nest on your land, particularly if they are on the ground, try and keep dogs, cats and people away from them during nesting season.
Embrace emergent properties
Think of this as the barn owl principle of ‘where did the barn owls live before barns?’. Nature currently exists in such an impoverished system, that we are often trying to conserve species which have been pushed to the limit of their existence and which are clinging on in ecological niches which they might not otherwise use. This distorts our ‘knowledge’ of what is best for nature, and often sets us off on the wrong foot with nature conservation.
One of the most incredible things about rewilding, is watching species flourish which you had no idea would arrive. The ‘emergent properties’ of wildlife which has been given all the ingredients that it needs to thrive can be extraordinary. At Knepp rewilding estate and elsewhere, they have re-written the book on where many species live including turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies. In the more degraded areas of your land, you have scope to be creative, and to experiment more with restoring natural processes, and encouraging a range of potentially unanticipated species onto your land.
Get yourself and others engaged with nature
As Baba Dioum said, "In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught." If you can immerse yourself and others in nature, you will begin to understand and appreciate its subtleties at a much more intuitive level. Things like being led around areas of your land blindfolded, sleeping out at night in a hammock and listening to the dawn chorus, or walking barefoot across a dewy field warmed by the sun, allow a sensory interaction with the natural world which we often miss out on. Most of our conservation action is based on what we experience by day, and yet a lot of nature ‘happens’ at night. The more time that you spend experiencing a range of states, seasons and senses associated with the wild world, the more you will come to appreciate it. Getting children engaged with nature is invaluable for their future.
Don’t just think about ‘What’, think about ‘Why’
Too often we carry out management on our land which we believe to be beneficial, but which we don’t question. If you only have a small area of land, you may not be able to re-introduce beavers, however you may be able to mimic the action of beavers by cutting down or bulldozing trees. This mimicking of natural processes is the ‘why’. It is creating coppice woodland for a reason, rather than just coppicing because someone told you to do so. You may be doing it to create additional habitat structure, to mimic a natural process, or to create a wood fuel resource for your home, but the reason why you are doing it is as important as what you are doing.
Be aware of invasive species
There are thousands of species which have been introduced into our landscapes over millennia (including rabbits which were introduced by the Romans). Many of these are naturalised and do little or no harm, and in some cases can help with your rewilding. However there are other species such as Giant Hogweed, or Floating Pennywort which can be so invasive that they negate all the positive things that you put in place for nature. Be aware of what is potentially invasive, and never introduce a species on your land unless you know why you are doing it.
Re-language your land
The language that we use about our land, is almost as important as what we do to it. Most of us have grown up in a post-industrial landscape, with language which speaks only of that era. Even conservationists still write ‘land management plans’ rather than ‘nature restoration plans’, and rewilded scrubland is often called wasteland and viewed as a good building site. Think about how you speak about your land, and about how you can change that, so that you can help others to change their understanding of it too.
Reduce your reliance on chemicals
Put simply, the less chemicals you can use the better. Organic is the way that nature intended, and if you want to have abundant wildlife, then you may have to put up with a few more insects and a bit of extra mould. One of the single most effective things you can do is to stop, or reduce your use of Ivermectin wormers in your animals. These chemicals sterilise all insect life which lands on animal dung for 3 weeks or more after it is excreted. Try encouraging natural forage and natural alternatives for your animals.
Think in natural timescales
Some things, such as the remedying of pollution, may need immediate action. However we are often pushed into action and into managing land before we truly understand the reasons or motives behind it. Most woodlands have been there for hundreds years, and many other habitats have been there for decades, or even millennia. A year or two of careful research, advice seeking, exploration and planning from you is far less likely to negatively impact on nature than leaping in impulsively and doing something before you understand why you are doing it. If needs be wait one, five or ten years before you change what you are doing on the land.
There are a few key principles that you can also embrace:
Accept change
Everything changes. From night to day, season to season, youth to age and every breath we take, we change, and so does the world around us. It’s less discombobulating for people if things stay the same. Change can be unpredictable, it can make us feel uncomfortable and many of us will openly resist it. But if you desire you and your land to be wilder, then change is a necessary and part of a creative process that needs to happen.
Venture into the unknown
Part of accepting change is acknowledging that we can’t and don’t know everything, and for that to be ok. Work to the principle of ‘as good as it is now or better’ and even if you can’t predict the precise outcome of what you are doing, you know that it will be better than what is there now.
Be the change & lead by example
We need a lot of people, making a lot of positive changes to get to a place we need to be, as rapidly as is needed to combat climate change.
Engage with imagination
In order to recover our lost knowledge of what wild and natural really means, we need to be open to being creative and to stepping away from the perceived wisdom of current conservation practices. Many of these practices were established when wildlife was already in freefall, and so they are based on retaining the struggling elements of a damaged landscape, rather than the thriving elements of an abundant landscape.
Relinquish control
We as humans find it hard to ‘not know’ what to do. We also find it hard to ‘do nothing’ when it comes to nature. Sometimes, we need to let go of the reins, and see what happens without our intervention.
Share in your abundance
It is a huge privilege to own or have access to wild or nature-rich land, which millions of people around the world do not have. Sharing in this privilege and in the benefits that ‘owning’ nature’s abundance brings you, is one of the most generous things that you can do.