Arthur Cole 0:21

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast with me, Arthur Cole. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. This week we're invited by rewilding legend Ben Goldsmith to his home, Canwood. Ben has turned this special part of Somerset into a rewilded wonderland with the reintroduction of beavers, northern European turtles, turtle doves and wildcats. Join us as Ben takes us on a tour of this remarkable mosaic of habitats. Let's jump straight into it. So here we are, just under 10 miles from the Newt, and it feels very different. We're here with Ben Goldsmith. Probably one of the better known names in the rewilding community. Ben, good morning. Hi Arthur, thanks so much for having me on the podcast again. Welcome. This is um this is a great privilege to be here in Somerset. And you know what? There's a feeling almost as if we're in Africa or or certainly in Spain, but we're not. We're in Britain and we've been going through a drought. But your garden seems to have fared better than quite a few others. And were you all going to take us around the wider estate here at Canwood and tell us about what you've got going on?

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah, it was funny enough, I was showing a guy around from the Czech Republic in the spring when it really was verdant and green here and not much drier like it is now. And he said to me, it's strange, it doesn't feel like England. It feels like Africa. And I said, No, no, no, England doesn't feel like England. This is what suathes of England are meant to feel like. You know, kind of dynamic, semi-open mosaics of woodland and wetland and bog and so on. And of course, landscapes that are wilder are like sponges. They're much better at holding water, which is why it is greener around us in this valley here at Broham than in other parts of the surrounding landscape, because it is still reasonably damp and reasonably green. So we are in the Broham Valley, which is to the east of Newt, near the town of Bruton, in fact, roughly halfway between the towns of Bruton and Froome. And we're at what was once the heart of a forest called the Selwood Forest. And the term Selwood Forest is not used very much anymore, but this was like the new forest or Sherwood Forest. This was a great woodland pasture, wetland mosaic that stretched uh from, let's say, Bath down to Wincanton and in the east from Froome across to Wells, where the cathedral is in the west. About 100,000 acres or 40,000, 50,000 hectares. And this great forest, if you look at the maps kind of earlier than the 1830s, 1820s, was was uh described as royal hunting chase in the north. So it was a place that the rich and that the royals came to hunt for centuries. And the southern half of it is listed as manorial wastes. So here the lords of the manor still today are the Dukes of Somerset, the Marquises of Bath, and it was not deemed worth farming in the Selwood forest landscape because it's heavy clay, it's very difficult to do anything with the ground, and so they would have told local communities, do what you want, go and cut turf, collect wood, collect fruit, run your pigs, turn out your cattle. It would have been like common land, but without the same legal underpinning that common land on Dartmoor or the new forests say still have today. And so, with the arrival of steam machinery in sort of middle of the 19th century, suddenly this land looked a little bit more appealing for farming. It was suddenly easier to take away the scrub, the trees, to drain the water, and to create the lattice work of what are today suspiciously green fields with tightly cropped hedges that surround us in the West Country. And so there were a couple of acts of parliament in the early part of the 19th century that allowed for the enclosure of this land. And there were local protests, it was an extremely unpopular move because Selwood had been seen as common land by people here for centuries. It was really one of the last truly wild places in southern England. In fact, there's a book by Andrew Pickering called The Witches of Selwood, which describes the last shamanistic witch communities in the southwest that lived here in the Selwood Forest. There were coverns near Winkanton and there were coverns right here in the Broham Valley. In fact, if you look up there, that's Druley Hill, Druly being the old word for Druid, and in the Bruton direction, that way is Creech Hill. And between these two hills, where we're standing now, there were witches still practicing the pre-Christian knowledge of herbal medicine and so on. They would have been generally old people who lived together in covens, and they would have gone out into the local community to provide midwifery and other kind of medical help for people. And they were brutally penalised at the end of the 18th century by the Bishop of Bartham Wells, and there were trials and burnings and all kinds of things. So just to illustrate quite how wild this place was, it was one of the last places that this shamanistic witchcraft culture continued in the south of England. So in the mid-19th century, the woodland was cleared and the fields were enclosed, and Selwood became like the rest of the West Country, which is a lattice work of fields. Well, today that great medieval wood pasture is starting to re-emerge because it's very, very difficult to farm this land. This is heavy clay, it's mostly grade five out of five in terms of agricultural productivity. If you try to work the land, it's like the Battle of the Somme, you know, the mud in winter for six months, and then it stops raining and suddenly it's baked concrete for six months in the summer. So costs of managing this land, even with livestock, are very, very high. You've got to bring the animals in for months on end and bring in lots of feed from elsewhere. And it's just expensive, messy business, and there's no money in it. And since the end of basic payment subsidies following Brexit, uh, you know, I think it was Warren Buffett who famously said it's only when the tide goes out you can see who's been swimming naked. Well, trying to farm commercially in this great former medieval wood pasture, is very, very difficult. It's a loss-making business. As I found out during the first 10 years of being here. In fact, our um our mutual friend James Hooper, who has a business called Historic Productions, does house histories, and he did a house history of Canwood, which was built in about 1710, my house. And what we found is since the enclosures, which happened in where we're standing right now in about 1840, no fewer than 12 farmers have tried and failed to farm commercially here on this farm. The only people who succeeded were two sisters who arrived at the turn of the 20th century and set up a cheesemaking school in the barn over there, which was also built in around 1710, and they were here for 50 years teaching cheesemaking. So this is not good farmland. We know from the National Food Strategy report that around 20% of the land in our country produces 85% of the food, and nearly all of that's in the East, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire. This land here in Selwood is not very productive farmland. So it's a perfect place for farmers to prioritize nature while continuing to farm. So you'll see when we go exploring, I've still got native Old English longhorn cattle whose grazing and browsing and trampling is entirely self-sufficient. They have no feed from outside, they're not brought in at all, but they're still managers' livestock, they're still cared for and still tested for TB and so on. But they live as wild, they roam where they want, eat what they want, sleep where they want. And when we scale up to around one animal per ten acres, which is a stocking density that we think the land can handle, we'll be producing about half the amount of meat that we were producing as an intensive farm seven or eight years ago. So we're we're we've switched to a kind of old school model of what you might describe as extensive cattle ranching across what is now, you'll see, a kind of wood pasture mosaic. There's little trees and scrub popping up through the fields, the fences have all been removed, the field drains are all out, there's pools of water and little streams everywhere. And I'm now one of seven neighbours contiguous with about 3,000 acres between us who are adopting this approach in the Broham Valley. Um, so it's um it's feeling like Africa. It's feeling quite wild, but we're still farming, we're still producing beef, but in a very different way.

Arthur Cole 8:59

Fascinating. Farming whilst rewilding. And I think in the popular consciousness, those two are mutually exclusive. But let's go and see.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

So a lot of people think of rewilding as land abandonment, but if you simply abandoned this land, you didn't have any of those heavy grazers, which are of course a keystone species. They've always been heavy cattle grazing and browsing in this landscape. Even before humans, there were the aurux, the ancestor of all domestic cattle. The last ones were taken from the Highlands of Scotland by the Romans to fight in the Colosseum. And before that, you had European bison. So to remove all that heavy grazing, to have no cattle at all, zero farming, you'd end up with very, very dense and impenetrable closed canopy woodland. And about 90% of the wild species that we love on this island need sunlight. Even the English oak grows in open sunlight, the crab apple, all the berries that we like to eat, the edible mushrooms, the songbirds, the little mammals, hedgehogs, everything loves sunlight, which points to a past that would have been much more sunlit than we imagine. We didn't have that much closed canopy forest. And what engineers that semi-open landscape with lots of sunlight is cattle. So land abandonment, to my mind, is not rewilding. Rewilding is about restoring natural processes. And in this landscape here in South Somerset, domestic proxies make perfect sense because it means you continue producing food, you keep farmers in the landscape, but you get all those incredible natural outcomes that you get from restoring natural processes.

Arthur Cole 10:28

Okay, so we're standing in what you would look at as an open meadow here, but this open meadow is very productive. We have approximately what about 50 raised beds. It's got a perimeter of fencing to keep out those pesky um grazers, and on the outside of the fence there are fruit trees. In these beds, they are productive. We've got runner beans, there's um chard, there are French dwarf beans, there are peas, there are corgettes.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

So is this rewilding? Well, we've got we've got about uh 350 acres here, and at the very centre of it is my house, and we drew a perfect circle, a mandala, if you like, around about five acres with the house in the middle of that. And inside that circle is kind of like a homestead, it's where the children are, the chickens, the dogs, garden, vegetable garden, and orchard, and we produce an enormous amount of food within that very small space. So it's it's all around our house. It's a kind of human or domesticated zone. And yes, the fence is to keep out pesky grazers, deer in particular, but also the cattle can wander up. There are wild boar scattering in the woods on the ridge. Um, and if a wild boar gets into your vegetable garden, it's problems. That's why we've got this proper fence around uh this productive area. And yeah, I what I just it's it's a very definition of of unlimited generosity or of or and or kind of you know of love really. You look after the land, and boy, does it look after you in return. Because my wife has a big restaurant in London, and this vegetable garden produces more than we can use even when we send loads to that restaurant. Um it's it's just absolutely burgeoning with produce on a tiny patch of ground. Great.

Arthur Cole 12:20

Let's go and see the bit outside of this circle of domesticity. The wild, but also you say Ben, productive in its own way too. Exactly. Let's have a look.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

So, Ben, where are we off to now? So we have an old cow shed that we no longer use for cows because our cows don't come in anymore. Um, I use that as an event space. We had a big party here for my anniversary, and um, I'm taking you to two avies. One is kind of zoo-sized, it looks like something you might find in London Zoo. Um, it's one of three in this landscape where we are doing a conservation breeding program of European white stalks with a view to reintroducing those into the landscape in a year or two. And then the smaller one, which is about the size of a polytunnel, houses 250 turtle doves, a species that hasn't been seen in South Somerset for at least 80 years. And we're part of the Turtle Dove Trust programme, uh, which is about breeding turtle doves and releasing clouds of about 200 a year in eight locations. The westernmost one is at Derek Gow's Farm, Wild Coombshead in Cornwall, and the easternmost one is with the King at Sandringham in Norfolk.

Arthur Cole 13:31

We've just seen, we've pulled up to what looks like a hangar or perhaps a polytunnel with the struts, but without the plastic, it's net, and a gentle cloud of turtle doves has just taken up with inside that aviary. Let's go and have a look.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

So turtle doves have disappeared from suathes of their former range in southern Britain, really for two reasons. Firstly, because they get hammered by hunters when they migrate, that they're Europe's only migrating species of dove, and they go down to southern Europe and North Africa every winter, and there are hunters lined up to shoot them, especially in places like Malta and Sicily and southern parts of Spain and Portugal. But the second reason, I think probably the more significant reason, is that they need messy habitat. You know, they need areas of short grass, areas of longer grass, areas of thick scrub in which to build their nests. They need mosaic landscapes that have just been tidied away from the British countryside. So there's nowhere for them, even if they do manage to run the gauntlet successfully on their migration back here each spring. So, here, of course, in this valley, we've got loads of lovely turtle dove habitat. And pointed out to you two miles in both directions now of farms that are returning a sense of wildness, which have cattle and which have pigs. Pigs are in wild boar do the same thing. They root and turn the soil over, and lots of species depend upon that opening up of the sward and that kind of ploughing of the landscape. But turtle doves are one of them. They really, really need the activities of pigs in which to find forage. So we're breeding 250 in there, but they don't all get incubated and raised by turtle doves. You can double clutch them, which means when a pair forms, you take the first few eggs away and put them under these wonderful midwives here, which are Java doves. They're not native, but they're brilliant at raising young. So we end up raising roughly half of the turtle doves we're breeding in here, raised by Java doves, and the other half in here, raised by the biological turtle dove parents. And then in about uh June each year, we release um uh between 100 and 200 into the landscape. Um and we've radio tracked some of them, we've got rings on all of the ones we release on their legs, and we now know that they're successfully migrating and returning here each year. So it's it's working, it's a bit of a roll of the dice. I don't know the extent to which this will work. I just thought it would be really fun and exciting to be part of this.

Arthur Cole 15:55

What's the what are the implications for the wild birds that are here in releasing these numbers of turtle doves into the wild?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Well, there are no pre-existing wild turtle doves here. They haven't been seen here since the war. And um turtle doves really are just a very important prey source for sparrow hawks and and goshawks and so on. So they will be extra food for the predators. There's a suggestion perhaps that the non-native but otherwise very charming collared doves, uh, which were not present in in Britain uh maybe a generation, a human generation ago, they might have moved in and filled some of the niche that's been left behind by turtle doves. So, what does that mean? Turtle doves versus collared doves? We don't know. The whole thing is a bit speculative. But I think the conservation movement is too cautious. There's too much cost and paperwork and fear of failure when it comes to doing things that are a little bit out there, like reintroductions of species that have been expunged from a place. Now, look at the tying itself in knots of the conservation movement and the regulatory bodies around beavers, for example. Ultimately, every pretty much every free-living beaver in Britain, of which there are now at least 5,000, are there as a result of unlicensed releases, people just getting on with it because they got fed up of decades. There were people that spent decades discussing the release of beavers, and eventually people just got on with it outside of the system. So I think the conservation movement itself needs to be much more open to trying things out. This much larger Avery has 10 pairs of white stalks, European white stalks, another species that's been expunged from Britain. They say the last pair to breed in Britain were in the 1480s on Edinburgh Cathedral. And then, of course, Sussex was the first county to get storks back. A reintroduction was led by the Nepp Rewilding Project with several local landowners. And they have had an enormous success. I think 120 wild European white stork nests, including one on the tower itself of the castle at Nepp in the last year. And these storks are being recorded migrating down to Senegal, down to North West Africa, and then coming back and breeding in great colonies across that part of Sussex. The town of Storich is named after presence of storks in the past, and it's now once again a stork town. There's wonderful images of people living in storage putting the wagon wheel onto their roofs to encourage the storks to come and bless their household by nesting on those roofs. Well, we're trying to do exactly the same here in South Somerset. We've got three Averies. One is here at Canwood, another is on my neighbour's land to the east, and another is on my neighbour's land to the west, my neighbour being 42 acres, which is a retreat where you go and do uh yoga or corporate team building or what have you. And they've got 180 wild acres. They're one of our seven neighbouring contiguous rewilding landowners. So between us, we should end up with 30 pairs producing 40 to 60 chicks a year. And so we're going to build a release enclosure in this open space here in 2028, and soon you'll see storks kettling high above the skies of the Broam Valley and the wider South Somerset landscape for the first time in maybe half a millennium in two years' time. Kettling.

Arthur Cole 19:13

As Ben's been talking about these storks, they're these rather marvellous uh creatures are walking around. Um they are, oh, I it at least four feet tall when as they're walking around, mainly white with um half, just under half of them of uh black, and these beautiful orange bills. They do look exquisite in the landscape, but they do also look curious and perhaps foreign in the landscape. Doesn't that say a lot about how we begin to normalize in a very short period of time big changes in our wildlife and our and our fauna? Here are storks, they were once part of our landscape, but to see them now feels odd and foreign.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

This is the big question people have asked about the stork reintroduction in Sussex, which didn't have universal support among the nature conservation movement. People said, What's the point? You know, what are they what are they going to add? You know, storks are not a keystone species, they're not essential, like for example, beavers are. And of course, every species plays its part within the ecosystem. There's that famous idea of you know, if you pull on a thread on your woolen jumper, you find the whole jumper starts to fall apart. Everything is essential. While we talk, look, you can see a large grey heron, you missed it. That would have been a nice moment. As big as a stalk just flew around. We'll come back. So every species has its part to play in the ecosystem, and some species have a disproportionately important effect. The so-called keystone species, the wild boar, the native cattle or their wild antecedents, the beavers, ultimately the big carnivores, the wolves, and so on, play a keystone role. But all of these species have a part to play. So these great white storks, I think, play a particularly important part in igniting people's imagination and reconnecting people with the nature all around us. Now I grew up with this, what was to me a wholly unacceptable notion that Britain is not a place for wildlife. No, no, no, no, Ben. If you want wildlife, go abroad. You know, go to East Africa, go to India, maybe cross the Channel, go to Italy, if you want wildlife. But here in Britain, we're about the serious business of feeding people, producing food, um, and organised tidy landscapes and everything under our control. Well, I rejected that idea from a very young age, hated the idea. I think what storks do is reignite the idea among people that we can have wildlife here too. And we can have these amazing spectacles if we choose it. Um and and that's certainly been the case with the Sussex stalk reintroduction. It was the number two most popular story on the BBC website in 2024 was the storks being reproduced. Introduced in Sussex and coming back and breeding for the first time in the wild. There's a webcam. Literally, millions of people around the world, and especially here in Britain, have watched a live stream of a particular pair of storks raising their young at NEP. People are enlivened by this idea. So I think um I think that's what storks do, as well as course of moving through the landscape, consuming crickets and grasshoppers and frogs and small mammals and and and so on.

Arthur Cole 22:24

I think what's most interesting about what you said there is that they do something in our mind to make us appreciate the otherness of what was once natural or or at least commonplace and no longer is. It perhaps it's about changing our perception. And the stalk helps to change our perception of what should be commonplace.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

So much of what we've lost has been lost completely unnecessarily. Yes, of course we need to farm, we need to feed ourselves, we need to make space in order to grow food, build houses, build infrastructure and so on. But a lot of the real harm has been done by a misplaced sense of control and tidiness. For example, we don't need to clear away these rough edges that you're looking at now. There's thistle here, there's willow herb, there's dock. In the shadier areas, there's nettle, there's pockets of bramble. All this stuff has been tidied away from the landscape, and this is what wildlife needs. And there's no reason why we need to do that. We don't need to be tidy freaks. We can have it all. We can produce food, we can have all these things that we need, and we can also have loads of wildlife. And what we'll find is that by having these streaks and these um uh threads of nature woven through our landscape, we'll actually have a much more resilient landscape. The landscape will be able to hold water better and protect us better from flooding, and the flip side, of course, being drought and wildfire during drier periods, and we'll have better soil, we'll have more pollinating insects. Of course, a third of our crops are reliant upon pollinating insects. Where are they supposed to live if we tidy everything away? So I think a lot of the loss has been cultural. And so, if you can shift the culture back to an appreciation of the rough edges and of these strange-looking species like storks picking their way through the corners of our fields and so on, I think that we can we can unleash a tremendous recovery of nature without losing without it costing us anything. Um and if you look over there, you'll see a stone circle. Oh yeah, a granite stone circle of the kind you might find at Amesbury or throughout this part of the West Country. So that marks the spot where uh we suffered the tragedy of the loss of my daughter, um Iris, who was 15 and a half, and really loved all this stuff. You know, she and I were like real little buddies on this nature stuff, and she was dashing about on her pony with her friends. There's a farm on the corner called Dreamers Farm. Um, and in fact, the Dreamers, as we knew them, um the Oakley family, have moved to a much better farmland to the east now, and their farm is being rewilded by the new owners. Uh, but growing up, there were four Dreamers' children and three of my children the same age, and they were a gang. And um, yeah, it was it was really the loss of Iris and that unimaginable, indescribable darkness that made me think, What you know, what I spent all my time here since she was a baby, in this corner of the farm, why don't I make it wild like she'd have wanted? And so it was really that year trying to navigate the madness of grief and trying to keep a family afloat and to keep my other children kind of you know joyful in some way, um, that we decided to just get on with it and start rewilding. And so um we turned the whole farm into what you see there, but without the tree planting, because we realised it wasn't necessary. Oh look, guinea fowl! Hey guys, I mean you said it looks like Africa. Yeah. My son put 20 guinea fowls out uh nearly 10 years ago.

Arthur Cole 26:02

We've got three of them running in front of us here, and they really are an African sight uh with their speckled bodies there. Um we didn't hear them there, but they've got a great sound, and they're just marvelous characters, they're they're so lovely.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

I told my son they won't survive three weeks and they've survived ten years. I don't think they've successfully bred, I think the ones we see running around are the same ones that we released.

Arthur Cole 26:27

Alright, so we're going to a very scrubby area here. It's a mixture of uh young oaks, um some of the aspens and poplars that Ben was talking about earlier, some older oaks now, and nice. Oh, and almost like a cartoon, we have now come across beaver activity.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Uh, what are we looking at here, Ben? Well, so I planted these trees, as I said about 2010. Um, we're now very busy opening up clearings and glades within this new plantation woodland. And I realise now, of course, we didn't really need to plant these trees because they come up everywhere very quickly if you allow it. But beavers are coming in and doing the job for us and creating these lovely little clearings. Uh, you can see these two trees have been felled by beavers, um, and then they strip all the bark off uh and and and eat that as food, and then they haul off most of the tree to use as building material. Um, sometimes, of course, the tree falls onto another tree, and then the beavers can't reach it, but it all adds complexity. So, what we would consider mess, uh, most of nature would consider uh wonderful uh habitat.

Arthur Cole 27:40

Lots of clothes this year, bramble. I mean, it's not farmed food, but there certainly is a fair amount of food for what we're any sort of wild animal that might be after anything.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

My wife is a chef and the endless foraging that we do. Yesterday we filled four buckets with plums and some of those within the circle, but I planted 300 fruit trees that I bought from a failing tree nursery in Staffordshire about eight years ago, all around the farm. So there's loads of places where you just come across an apple tree or a plum tree or a cherry tree. And so we go around and we collect enormous amounts of fruit this time of year, and she will spend from the beginning of the day to the end of the day pickling and preserving and creating jams and wines and all kinds of stuff.

Arthur Cole 28:24

We've just come across now an open clearing and there is water. The water level looks low. Um, it's about two feet below the sort of tide line, and what looks like a little island in the centre of it. What have we got here, Ben?

SPEAKER_00 28:40

So along this valley runs a stream. In fact, it's a tributary of the river Froome, the Somerset Froome, that then becomes the Somerset Avon. So this river, if you'd call it that, flows all the way through Whittam Friary, Froome, up towards Bradford, Bath and onto Bristol. And occasionally we come across a river pilgrim and people who like to walk the mouth to the source of a river, and you'll find someone sitting opening some Kling Film sandwiches at the very top of the catchment, which I'll show you in a moment, about one kilometre to our east. Uh, but this is a pond that was built by humans along this stream. I don't know when, it was here when I got here, and this is where the beavers have chosen to live. So, in the middle of the island, obscured by dogwood, is a huge dome-shaped beaver lodge. You can see two entrances, as which are tunnels on the side of the island, through which they enter from the bottom of the lodge, and then there's a smaller, what we think is a bachelor lodge over there on the edge of the pond, uh, where the male lives and some of the older male offspring. So we think they split and live between two lodges, and then they march up and down their territory, which is as dry as they or we have ever known it right now. And in the winter they transform uh this little stream with two ponds along it all the way along into a string of what I describe as Japanese rice terraces. And in fact, you can see their engineering works quite well now that the water's receded. So I'll take you to a spot where we can see that.

Arthur Cole 30:11

So then, why are you rewilding?

SPEAKER_00 30:16

I think I was in love with the idea of rewilding from before I knew the term. I have a letter somewhere uh written back to me by a very patient manager of Richmond Park in West London, where I grew up, explaining to an 11-year-old me why we couldn't have wild boar in Richmond Park. Now, I always wanted to have more wildlife around, and my great dream as a growing up as a child, as a teenager, was to have a piece of land on which I could encourage as much wildlife as possible. And um, my father died when I was young, I was 15, turning 16, he was 63, and um I inherited some money when I grew a little bit older, got married very young. I was married at 21 with my ex-wife Kate, who lives nearby and is rewilding a piece of land in the Somerset levels within sight of Glastonbury Tour. We're very, very close. In fact, um she's named her piece of land alongside the Wildlife Trust, the Somerset Wildlife Trust, as Iris Fenn, uh, which is very meaningful. And we arrived here with young children here in South Somerset and bought this farm, you know, very young. And I it was it was it's been a life dream for me.

Arthur Cole 31:27

So we've just jumped out of the vehicle and we are on the other side of what was the pond, and now we're walking along what looks like a dry stream bed, cracked earth, and the signs of where water once was, and now we're stepping over what I think the surely beaver activity.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

So these here are dams. You can see there's a beaver dam being built on either side of this uh willow. Um, and there's a string of these. There's a much larger one behind us. You can feel the ground is still wet and squishy underneath. Uh it's only just dried out in the last uh uh couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Is that badger shit or is that or is that beaver shit?

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Uh it doesn't look like beaver shit, it looks like a carnivore, could be pine martin, pole cat, wildcat, fox, badger. Um, it's unlikely to be badger because badgers have their latrines in which they do all their shits in one place. Um, so this is what they call a beaver lawn. So what you you can't quite see under all this thistle is a mound, and it does a right angle turn there, and you can see it runs all the way to the other side of the wood. So this is like a levee built by the beavers to hold the water back. So this is a large shallow beaver lake in the winter months, and there are several of them in a line, six in that direction, and then in the summer months, because they're so shallow, they tend to dry out, and they become these grazing lawns that are wonderful for deer and other uh wild grazers, but we know them as beaver lawns, and they're full of wildflowers in in the early part of summer.

Arthur Cole 33:04

There are these perfect uh gnawed stumps around it. And I'm looking at one now, it's got some fungus that looks a bit like turkey tail growing out the side of it. It's only about a foot up, and it just looks so perfect, almost like um a cartoon stump of what a beaver does to the tree. You can see the gnaw marks from the from the teeth all around the top.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

I'd always um been led to believe that nature is a kind of chaos and that humans bring order. And what beavers have taught me is in fact we're the ones that bring the chaos. By straightening all these little streams and all the rivers into which they flow, by placing field drains under all of the landscape, creating lovely clean straight ditches, by draining the wetlands and the ponds, we've created hydrological volatility that is real chaos. Because people forget, this year, 2026, it rained constantly from Christmas till Easter. Constantly. Everyone was deluged, flooding all over the news, people cleaning out their living rooms three times in a winter, and then of course, come May June, we've got hose pipe bans and drought. Well, why is that? It's because we've introduced chaos to the hydrological system. Landscapes are supposed to be sponges. They're supposed to store up all this precious water, purify it, and release it through the system slowly throughout the year. Well, beavers know exactly what they're doing. According to Bristol Water, that does a beaver seminar for their staff every year here at Camwood, this single beaver wetland, one pair of beavers and their offspring, are holding back somewhere around 1.2 million litres of water following heavy rainfall. And that's creating this wonderful mosaic wetland habitat that is magnetic for all wildlife, for an enormous abundance of frogs and ducks and wading birds, and you've got deer and all kinds of animals coming in to drink in here and so on. So it's incredible for life. We have glow worms in here on dark July nights, you see the flickering of glow worms above the beaver wetland, which is a magic that is difficult to describe in words. But it's also, in practical terms, incredibly important for us humans because that's 1.2 million litres of water that is not flooding Whittam Friary and the towns beyond, and which is maintaining the flow of the river downstream during the driest periods. You're standing on squelchy wet ground now in the driest summer we've ever had. Um so beavers have taught me something, and I think beavers have been psychologically and culturally incredibly important in this country because they forced us to grant autonomy to another species over small sections of our landscape at the valley bottoms. We've just had to back off and say, You get on with this. And we've had to place our trust that they they broadly know what they're doing, and that we've allowed the magic to unfold in a way that would have been inconceivable previously in this country. And we're such control freaks, such tidy freaks. So I think beavers have have rewilded us in the way that the stalks have ignited people's imagination. Beavers have given us a greater understanding of how nature works and how we can step back and share the burden of management with other species.

Arthur Cole 36:02

My youngest is really into reptiles, and I remember when I was here some years ago, we saw some turtles slipping off the side into the water. Are your turtles still here?

SPEAKER_00 36:16

We have here a thriving and occasionally breeding population of northern European pond turtles. Species that we know was in Britain in the past. There are shells from the broads and from the levels that have been slit by humans in order to eat the delicious meat within. They're still commonplace across northern France, northern Germany, southern Sweden. They hibernate for five-ish months every winter. They're basically scavengers. They keep the water quality clean because they eat any dead fish or dead bugs or dead frogs floating around in the water. They're not the kind of huge carnivorous freshwater turtles that you sometimes see in city parks that have been released by pet owners. Uh, those are American sliders. Um these are uh our own native turtles, and um, yeah, they're they're to be found in these upper reaches of the River Froom, and it's likely that they will be officially reintroduced in Norfolk at some point as well in the coming years. And that's a feeling of tremendous wonder. If you slip in to swim in my pond, for example, and suddenly you see two little pond turtles dashing into the water, you really don't feel like you're in England anymore. Yeah, down in the woods we've got two large captive breeding pens for Eurasian wildcats. And uh if we're quiet, we might just get a chance to glimpse one or other of the pairs, both of which have three kittens at this time of year.

Arthur Cole 37:46

So here we are, it looks a little bit like the Velociraptor pens in Jurassic Park. Let's quietly go and see if anybody's at home.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

There's the mother with her kitten standing on top of the box. Can you see three little kittens? Yes. And there's the mother standing stock still, looking to see what we're doing.

Arthur Cole 38:02

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

So we're particularly lucky to see them because they really are very, very elusive. Uh, because we've arrived in this vehicle, I think they assume they're being fed.

Arthur Cole 38:12

They are playing like kittens do. Very exciting. So we're just approaching the wildcat enclosure now. Ben's stalking on a few uh feet ahead, and we're what we can see through the mesh are uh little kittens playing on top of a box together. Actually, a scene that anyone that's got a domestic cat or ever had domestic kittens will be familiar with. But these are not domestic kittens.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

And strangely, uh the domestic cats in the world are not descended from Eurasian wildcats. They are a North African thing. The Egyptians, of course, uh had a special relationship with cats, um, and it's a North African wildcat uh that gave rise to the domestic kit the cats that we know today. The Eurasian wildcat was almost extinguished from Britain. It staged a lovely recovery across the countries of continental Europe. We hated it in Britain because it competed with us for game and for rabbits. So the Tudors introduced a bounty which persisted until the mid-Victorian era. And so wildcats disappeared completely from Wales and Scotland by, let's say, the mid-19th century. Uh, but they persisted in the Western Highlands of Scotland and in the Kangorms in very low numbers. So now there is a concerted effort to bring this magical, extraordinary species back to all corners of Britain. And Scotland uh received money from the European Union just prior to Brexit to initiate a conservation breeding and release program. It's very expensive. I think it's cost somewhere around £200,000 per cat released so far, but it nevertheless is working, and numbers are being beefed up uh through conservation breeding and releases in the Kengorms and other places, and they're doing great, great work. Well, I have established with Derek Gao and others, the Vincent Wildlife Trust, uh, the Durrell uh people from Guernsey and others, um an England and Wales conservation breeding program for these wildcats. And we have 35 pairs now uh drawn from the Netherlands, uh, Austria, and Scottish stock, so lovely diversity, and we're producing 60 to 70 kittens a year that will supply reintroduction projects across England and Wales. And the first such project is going to be somewhere between uh Dartmoor and Exmore, led by the Devon Wildlife Trust, and that's likely where these kittens will end up. Uh, but there are projects brewing in Thetford, in the New Forest, in the Lake District, here in Selwood Forest. And you need to release, according to experiences on the mainland, in Austria and Switzerland, for example, in the region of 50 cats within a five-mile radius in order to establish a functional breeding population.

Arthur Cole 41:03

So a lot of people, people I know personally, who are wildlife enthusiasts and often dog enthusiasts, but not domestic cat enthusiasts. The reason being is that they believe the domestic cat kills off all of uh the songbirds in the area, the small mammals. Is there a risk to the local songbird population through the reintroduction of wild cats?

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Amazingly, it's in fact the reverse. Whittam Friary, the local village here we think, has somewhere around 80 domestic cats and unknown numbers of farm and feral cats. Every dawn and dusk, those cats are spreading out into the landscape and consuming large numbers of songbirds. Somewhere around 100 million songbirds are eaten by domestic and feral cats in Britain each year. In North America, it's between one and two billion songbirds. So it's a disaster the number of the proliferation of domestic and feral cats. Well, these wild cats are highly territorial. So when they are out in the landscape, they establish a lattice work of territories, the female territories being typically smaller than a male territory, which might overlap with three or four females. And they will not allow other cats into their territory, which means that domestic and feral cats become excluded from swathes of the landscape, thereby protecting the songbirds from that kind of predation. Now, of course, the wild cats do eat songbirds as well as all the small mammals and amphibians and other things they eat. But their numbers are so low in the landscape as compared with the number of domestic and feral cats that the effect is hugely positive for the birds. Also, they love to eat rats, they eat grey squirrels, they eat corvids, uh, wood pigeons, and lots of the things that are perhaps in too high a number in our landscape. But I think the main joy for me about restoring this species is it revolves around putting right, in a moral sense, a wrong that was committed by our predecessors in wiping them out in the first place. If you go for a walk in Italy or in France, you stand a chance of glimpsing one of these extraordinary creatures in the boughs of an oak, looking down at you with its big amber eyes, the huge club tail with the hoops around it. And they're kind of like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. They've got that big wide face, and they look at you with a sense of amusement rather than fear. And they can sort of teleport. You know, I've seen them, you know, you're watching it one minute in one tree and suddenly it just appears in another tree. This is an experience that stays with you forever, and it's a birthright. You know, why should a child growing up in Britain, or anyone in Britain, not have that chance when they go out for a walk of spotting a wild cat up in an oak tree? No, it it it it's it's for me, it's a question of of decency. You know, we've got to put these things right and put these species back into our landscape, especially when the costs of doing so are so minimal. This animal doesn't hurt people, it doesn't hurt livestock, it might take the odd chicken or the odd dog. We'll beef up our security as you would in Spain or Portugal or Italy where they have a lot of these carnivores still present.

Arthur Cole 44:06

You say the cost of it is so low, and you talk about the cost there, I guess, being more than just the money, because you did say that the cost of reintroducing them to Scotland was, what was it, 200,000 per cat?

SPEAKER_00 44:19

Well, of course, a lot of uh it's perhaps a slightly unfair figure because um they they are now producing wildcats that can be released every year all over Scotland. So a lot of that cost was the capital cost of establishing the conservation breeding. We've done it in a more diffuse way. We found enthusiastic landowners from Norfolk to Cornwall, you know, the the the Marks of Chumley at Houghton or Harry Hetka Amory in Devon, and we've encouraged them to build their own enclosures according to a zoological specification. And and and we've then provided the cats, we've got the stud book and so on. So the costs have been shared among many. Um but for sure it's been way, way less expensive than the official programme in Scotland. And I'm sure they're spending a lot of money on radio collars and tracking and community engagement, all that kind of stuff. And I think the conservation movement generally can overdo it when it comes to caution.

Arthur Cole 45:09

Perhaps it's an indication of our perception of these wildcats that the collective noun for wildcats is a destruction of wildcats.

SPEAKER_00 45:26

People sometimes ask me what you know what are the biggest changes that I've personally experienced here in this landscape, which is quite a big one, if you take in take into account the neighbours as well. It's several thousand acres now, uh uh that that starting to feel, as you put it, more like Africa than England. I think the two biggest changes for me have been on the one hand the sound, especially the sound at night. You think of the night as a time of silence. You sit here at night, we hear the catawalling of these wildcats down at the bottom of the valley, admittedly in their enclosures for now. Uh, we hear the booming of night herons, we hear the clattering of those storks uh at last light and first light. And there's just the constant noise of bats and crickets and frogs and ra-r-ra all around. It just feels like a landscape that is alive when I sit around my little fire uh in front of my house at night here, especially in the summer. The second big change has been the um the abundance of birds in winter. Again, I always thought of winter as a time when you don't really see many birds. But because we don't cut and tidy away the brambles and the docks and the thistles and all these things, they're full of seeds. So you get these huge mixed flocks of finches, especially gold finches, you get murmurations of starlings. We have a roost of pied wagtails. I didn't even know that they come together in communes in the winter, but five, six hundred pied wagtails nesting in the bulrushes of our new wetland. There's just a lot of birds here in winter that I just it's just a phenomenon I never experienced in my life beforehand. And and in terms of sounds, accompany that abundance, for me, the most magical has been the return of turtle doves, because we've been releasing them at the rate of about 200 a year, and the whole landscape between May and July is bathed in the soft purring of turtle doves. It seems like a sound that was designed to soothe the human soul. And I I feel so overjoyed, overwhelmed with pleasure hearing that sound everywhere, all hours of daylight in the spring and summer. But I also feel angry that that has been deprived us for so many years. How did we possibly just remove this essential sound from the English landscape and no one kicked up a fuss? You know, why is it down to a few of us to do something about this? Surely this should be a government priority to bring that sound back because it's part of our birthright. This has been, for me, the most transformational thing we've done at Canwood in aesthetic terms since I got here. The edge of the woods have always been extremely dense and impenetrable, and by coffeeing the lower stories and removing the non-native species, the sitka spruce, the southern beach, and so on, we've created much more of a savanna woodland that you can actually see through. Whereas previously, as recently as six weeks ago, this was a wall of woodland to our left. Um, so this has been quite a transformation, and I've asked them to leave lots of wood deadwood around. Um, ecologists will tell you that in a wild wood, say the Via Viaza wild wood of eastern Poland, uh, of the total biomass in the landscape, 40% of my volume should be dead wood. So deadwood is extremely important. It's funny when you think of it, the three things that are seemingly most valuable for wildlife are the three things that we've been most keen to expunge from our landscapes and tidy away the dead wood, the thorny scrub, and the water. Um, and so in a way we're trying to put those three things back.

Arthur Cole 48:58

So we're standing out in this large open area. There are trees and oaks surrounding us, and we're looking at, I guess, what would in the winter be a s what looks like a series of ponds, but right now it looks like something out of Kenya in the dry season, apart from one wet, muddy area in the distance.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

Yeah, so this is this is infrastructure. I used the term critical infrastructure to describe nature earlier on. Uh, this is a Somerset County Council natural flood alleviation scheme, and they've done about 20 of them in the surrounding area. And what they did was identify areas of the landscape that are well suited to holding back water in order to prevent flash flooding downstream, and of course, the flip side being to prevent droughts and hose pipe bands during the drier season. So they came to me and said, could we please create a wetland on about eight acres down the bottom of this particular valley at the southern end of your farm? And of course, I was absolutely delighted and overjoyed, and I hadn't thought of it myself, and probably would have taken the idea and done it myself if they hadn't just made it happen. So they paid for it, they created five buns, which have created five terraced ponds up the middle of this valley, a valley that previously uh just was just um uh threaded by one dead straight ditch along the bottom. And of course, with the field drains underneath the fields on either side, that ditch was like a fire hose that used to periodically blow away the land on my neighbour's farm and and barrel on downstream. So now we've got this lovely wetland. It's a huge pied wagtail roost in winter. The red deer come down here and bask in the water during the hotter days. It's just absolutely full of life. We've got lapwing back here and all kinds of wading birds and oyster catchers and interesting things happening that we never saw before. But most importantly, from a human perspective, this wetland holds back five million litres of water following heavy rainfall. And as a result, the town of Whittam Frurry hasn't flooded even once in the last three years since this and the other ones were built.

Arthur Cole 51:01

Well, what a great ecological service and human service. A simple thing as a series of five buns does. Is it as simple as this across the rest of the country then? Or is it or is it more complex?

SPEAKER_00 51:18

I mean nothing simple, but I think natural flood management is a really important part of the answer when it comes to protecting communities and assets from the repeated flooding that's happening every year with greater frequency and intensity. We've simply robbed our landscapes of the ability to hold back water. And so we need to re-wiggle the streams and the rivers so that the water moves down much more slowly through our catchments. We need to reconnect them with their floodplains so that water can flood sideways. They're far better to flood a pasture up in the hills than to flood a town further downstream. We need to recreate the great blanket bogs that really are water towers for our nation that have been drained for no good reason at all. Just to create some pretty low-quality sheep pasture. We need to recreate ponds. We lost a million ponds in this country, roughly half the total since 1950. Even the tiniest ponds hold water in the landscape. So, yes, we need to make Britain wet again was going to be the slogan for a new campaign. But the laughing uh in the room made us shift it to great make Britain wetter again. Um, and we need to restore um uh all of these wetlands to the maximum of our ability. It's by far the cheapest and most effective way, uh simultaneously to protect us from the uh the increasing volatility of hydrology that we're experiencing and to breathe new life back into our landscapes. It's an absolute no-brainer.

Arthur Cole 52:41

In a year of unprecedented heat, drought, but also heavy rainfall, wildfires, food insecurity, political insecurity, unknown technological implications coming in with AI. Is there anything to be optimistic about going forward?

SPEAKER_00 53:04

I think rewilding is one of the most optimistic things around. It's really ignited the public imagination. People want to have wilder landscapes, they want to have nature, they want to have wildlife, and they're beginning to understand in greater depth how much nature does for us and how much more it could do for us if we simply allow it. Now, there's lots of articles in the right wing press and the left wing press about how beavers are creating lovely marshy, wet ribbons through the landscape, natural fire breaks, refuge for wildlife from wildfire, and so on. So I think that this idea that we can restore nature very easily, it comes back with enormous vigour. Now, look where we're standing right now. This was an industrial and by the way, extremely unproductive dairy farm uh just five years ago. We're now standing in a place that looks like an African savannah with a wetland and red deer and wildlife everywhere, which is a natural flood scheme. This is the perfect place in which to prioritize nature. This is low productivity farmland on heavy clay. There are places where we must prioritize food production. There are other places where we can go on producing food and continue having farm livelihoods while simultaneously restoring vibrant nature, which does so much for us. And people are starting to understand this. So I think that rewilding is a cause for tremendous optimism, and I think it's got to be a central component of the better world in which we have a chance of surviving.

Arthur Cole 54:24

Ben Goldsmith at Canwood, thank you for showing us this amazing environment.

SPEAKER_00 54:32

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast again. I love the Newt. I'm a member, I go there all the time, and um I've derived some lovely ideas around leaving fallen trees in place and emptying out, clearing out mile pits to create new wetlands from the newt. And I hope you will uh engage in a bit of rewilding in due course.

Arthur Cole 54:52

Let's see. Subscribe and tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.