'It fully changed my life!' How young rewilders transformed a farm - and began a movement

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/25/it-fully-changed-my-life-how-young-rewilders-transformed-a-farm-and-began-a-movement

‘It fully changed my life!’ How young rewilders transformed a farm – and began a movement

At Maple Farm, nature is returning in droves: nightingales, grass snakes, slowworms, bats and insects. All due to the vision of a group determined to accelerate its recovery

Steve Rose
Tue 25 Nov 2025 00.00 EST

The manically melodic song of the nightingale is a rare sound in Britain these days, but not at Maple Farm. Four years ago, a single bird could be heard at this secluded spot in rural Surrey; this summer, they were everywhere. “We were hearing them calling all night, from five different territories,” says Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the Youngwilders, pointing to the woodland around us. A group of Youngwilders were camping out at the site, but the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” says Layla Mapemba, the group’s engagement lead. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An expert from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them net and ring one of the nightingales the next morning, Cookson recalls: “He’d never held a nightingale in his hands before. He was crying.”

Rewilding is by definition a slow business, but here at Maple Farm, after just four years, the results are already visible, and audible. The farm used to be a retirement home for horses. Now it’s a showpiece for the Youngwilders’ mission: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and to connect young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a climate crisis they are often powerless to prevent. Global heating continues, deforestation destroys natural habitats, and another Cop summit draws to a disappointing conclusion in Brazil – so who could blame young people for wanting to take matters into their own hands?

“The younger generation is the most informed ecologically that there’s ever been,” says the Youngwilders’ co-director, Jack Durant. They are also “the most emotionally involved in the problems, and have contributed the least to their causing, and, then, are also going to suffer most as a result.”

…
It’s not just the nightingales – wildlife is returning in droves. This year they’ve seen grass snakes, slowworms, bats and insects, says Noah Bennett, another of the co-directors, as he lifts up one of their reptile mats (like a doormat over a small hollow in the ground). “You get snakes and things hiding under there, but it’s probably a bit cold for them now.” Natural beehives, made from hollowed-out sections of tree trunk and buzzing with wild bees, are strapped to some of the trees. The absence of grazing horses has given invertebrates space to thrive in the long grass. When they visited this summer, says Bennett, “I’d never seen so many butterflies. There were just clouds of them. We were like, ‘What is happening?’”

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[democrank]

1. What a beautiful, worthwhile concept.

Thanks so much for posting this.

[gay texan]

2. The young generation gets it n/t