BRINGING NATURE BACK - Rewilding

The term rewilding was first used back in the 1990’s and is now within our mainstream vocabulary.

The United Nations has declared 2020-2030 as the International Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. This does not mean that rewilding is the main project, restoration can be heavily managed, but the United Nations are including rewilding within the process.

So, what is rewilding? Rewilding is to restore an area of land or sea to its natural uncultivated state, with emphasis on reintroducing species that have been driven out or exterminated.

An example of this is in the Netherlands the Oostvaarderspassen (OVS) which is an area left as a Serengeti type landscape with large herbivores.

An establishment of birds and small mammals soon followed with boom-and-bust cycles (increase and decrease of a species) taking place. However, there has been controversy from farmers and others stating that the rewilding process is cruel and unjustified because the harsh winters can cause the large herbivores such as ponies and cattle to starve to death. Many do not like the thought of ponies dying, however, this is all part of a healthy environment, where other species that feed on carrion increase for a time within the cyclic system.

The Netherlands project is an amazing step in the right direction. But many people will never see it and can feel distant from this and other large-scale projects around the globe. I would like to see rewilding on a more local level, it can be small parcels of land such as parks and gardens within villages, towns, and cities. This will I feel bring people closer to the larger rewilding projects if we can all see an effect from our living room window.

So, to explain fully what rewilding is, there was an amazing project that took place in America.

So, people had to go back into the park and start shooting again, but not wolves this time, it was the deer. In 2012, zoologists, biologists and conservationists got their wish, they had been campaigning for years to rewild the park by reintroducing wolves back into Yellowstone National Park.

The wolves when introduced in 2012 went straight to work and started killing the deer for food. This caused a small reduction of the deer population, but it was hardly noticeable. So many people were left thinking this isn’t working, who needs wolves, especially with the proposed dangers that they were thought to bring to people and livestock.

However, the real change came from the behaviour of the deer, themselves. For the first time in seventy years the deer were on the run. They could not stand around leisurely and feed for many weeks in one area of the park, until all the vegetation had disappeared, they had to keep moving on continually, as the wolves were snapping at their heels. They could not strip all the leaves from the trees, until the trees were dead. They could not trample the grassland until, all that was left was bare dry soil in which nothing could survive.

This amazing change with the reintroduction of wolves came with the behavioural change of the deer, not the killing of the deer, this then led to an increase in the park’s vegetation, which in turn led to an increase in habitat for the birds, voles, and rabbits, which in turn led to an increase in owls and Hawks. The shrubs started to grow higher, and this gave rise to an increase in berries, which in turn gave rise to an increase in bears. 

The grasslands which were now not trampled to nonexistence now grew up high and strong at the riverbanks, which lead to an increase in beavers and otters. The Beavers therefore started to build dams, which increased the fish and other aquatic species, the dams and sturdier grassy banks then further secured the riverbank structure, which then lead to the rivers changing their course and becoming more meandering and natural.

 So, reintroducing the wolves back to Yellowstone National Park, changed the environment back to its true natural state, the wolves even indirectly changed the structure of the rivers.

Seventy years ago, the people who shot and killed that last surviving wolf would not have known the immense ecological devastation that was going to take place over the coming years.

 Today we know, that removing a species, or a natural habitat can cause unforeseen circumstances that may not be known for many years, and that bringing back nature in the most natural way through rewilding, will stop that devastation taking place.

 By Rose Cleary-McHarg