Hey Blog! Last Friday I was on scout camp, so this is a two-for-one week. Sunday two weeks ago was a Watch Group day, and we were in a local park learning about Rewilding!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do you think rewilding is? An engaging activity making a landscape better? Leaving an area alone for a while? A concept? Apparently, it\u2019s the latter! And the actual hands-on part is a bit of both of the former. If there were no humans, and we left the landscape completely alone, then anything that wanted to would recolonise, but being humans, we don\u2019t like being preyed upon. Therefore, we need to step in and help do what animals, which we haven\u2019t let recolonise, did. Exactly what<\/em> help you give the landscape is dependent on where it is, and as a result of that, what lives there. For example, on moorland you might reintroduce deer and birds of prey like Hen Harriers. However, in a lowland river and floodplain, you might want to encourage otters and waterbirds; different again is a woodland, where the animals you want would be similar to red squirrels and tits. Also, how to do get them back to the landscape? That\u2019s determined by the wanted species\u2019 proximity to your rewilded area. Sometimes you can tempt them if they occasionally pass through, but if they never visit, you might have to deliberately move them. Rewilding in the real sense is not eliminating our presence from the world, but getting the balance of nature to a point where we can be incorporated harmlessly into the game of Survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watch group was held in Allestree Park, near Derby. The entire grounds of the park are subject to a massive rewilding project, making the park the largest urban rewilding\/rewilded green space in the UK. There\u2019s a way to go before the world has cities looking like we all live in Singapore, but this is a start. This project provided the backdrop to the session, and the reason for what we did in it. We started off on a walk finding all the things that have been always or have moved in here since the project started. I found some trees that had obviously been planted, funghi, a squirrel, and a few insects. We soon arrived at a \u201cbunker\u201d. Not<\/em> what it sounds like. Though Derby was targeted in WWII because of its Rolls Royce factory, I don\u2019t think there would be many air raid shelters this far out. No, this is a relic of the golf course: a bunker is basically a mound of sand and earth for golfers to try and whack small white balls off. This is a perfect home for rabbits \u2013 not to be confused with hares, which have also been seen in the park. Hares do not burrow, the make a little hollow in the ground called a form, where they rest. There were a lot of faecal remains of the former lagomorph, evidence of use by this animal in the recent past (do I sound like a biologist?). We continued in this way to a second bunker, and there stopped to play a game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The name of the game was \u2018Predator and prey\u2019. The aim of the game was if you were a predator, you hunt and tag your prey, but if you were a prey animal, you had to get away. Half the group were the former, and the other half the latter. Prey had ten seconds to get away and hide, then predators would chase them. Prey worked a lot better when there was cover to hide in! We then sorted into groups and looked at a booklet about other rewilding projects in the UK. One of these is the Knepp estate, a farm where wild pigs have been working the land, scrub and open woodland have naturally seeded, and White Stork<\/em> have bred in the UK for the first time in over a hundred years. The other mentioned in the booklet was in southern Scotland, and has been going for much longer \u2013 the first picture was in the 90s! Both sites have changed massively over the years, the Scottish one having nearly full-grown trees in it in the last picture, bearing fruit. Just think what Allestree might be in the next few decades\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which turned out to be the last part of the session. We were each allocated paper and pencils and chose what time in the future our drawings would be. I drew about seven years away. Will our dreams come true?!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey Blog! Last Friday I was on scout camp, so this is a two-for-one week. Sunday two weeks ago was a Watch Group day, and we were in a local park learning about Rewilding! What do you think rewilding is? An engaging activity making a landscape better? Leaving an area alone for a while? 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