As his book is released in paperback, a pioneer of the UK’s rewilding movement encourages us to imagine a transformed landscape filled with our lost native birds and wildlife
Derek Gow has dedicated his life to animals and biodiversity. After a Shetland ewe captured his heart as a boy, Gow grew up to become a farmer with a passion for ancient breeds. Realising how many of our species were close to extinction – even on his own land – he tore down fences literally and metaphorically, transforming his traditional Devon farm into a 300-acre rewilding haven for beavers, water voles, lynx, wildcats, harvest mice, wild boar and more. A project that is still ongoing today.
Gow’s work has recently been featured in the Wilding film for his contributions to bringing the beaver back to the pioneering Knepp estate, as well as many other locations. His work and books offer an insight into what it’s like to be on the ground restoring wildlife across Britain.
His tales include how he raised a sofa-loving wild boar piglet, transported a raging bison bull across the UK, got bitten by a Scottish wildcat and, together with Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell, restored the ancient white stork to Knepp.
Gow is involved with a range of projects today, such as working with the lynx, white stork, beaver, turtle dove, glow worm and more.
Below is an extract from his book, which is newly out in paperback: Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Arc for Lost Species.
A heartfelt plea for a wilder, more inspiring Britain
“In my time, I have tried hard to save some things from slipping away.
Rotund furry water voles with their black, beady eyes, cinnamon-yellow dormice, ball-nesting harvest mice with curling prehensile tails and rust-red squirrels. All of these are now lost from much of their former range and are continuing to fade fast. Over time, I have kept and bred in captivity most of the mammal species that belong on our islands and a random spectrum of others that got here and otherwise do not.
It’s been an absorbing experience and, although some of the knowledge I have acquired is of dubious relevance (did you know that tame roebucks can’t gore you if you cut off their bone-hardened antlers once their rich velvet has shed and fix short sections of garden hose to their stumps with jubilee clips or that hand-reared brown hares can jump as high as waist height to bite you firmly in the groin?)
I have nevertheless learned a lot. I have bred many creatures that were once considered common and realise full well that their existence in abundance is no longer the case. Long years after his death, the ebullient zookeeper Gerald Durrell’s vision of using captive breeding to save endangered species has become a mantra for zoos worldwide.
It does not have to be this way. We know and can accomplish so much
That the route he espoused is not easy or straightforward does not mean it’s wrong, it’s just not as simple as he understood in his time. While for some creatures the circumstances that diminish their being are easy to fix – just stop killing them as a whole society and they will bounce right back when you put them in suitable environments or make new space using natural architects such as cattle and bison, beaver and ponies or boar and water buffalo – others are not so simple.
The grey-breasted corncrakes with their short pink bills and barred brown backs, whose repetitive rasping calls were once so ubiquitous that they stopped country dwellers from sleeping on warm summer nights, are silent because the vast hay meadows grown to feed the working horses are gone. The insects that filled the hay crop full have gone. The untidy countryside that left random rough edges in plenty has gone. Untidy corners are few and, even where these exist on a scale that seems large like the Nene Washes in Cambridgeshire, every predator that can consume them is hunting there for food.
The corncrakes’ own short lives are complicated by long annual migrations, which ensure that they are exposed to a multiplicity of further hazards. Although projects to sustain them, such as that developed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the western isles of Scotland, show that you can collaborate with sympathetic farmers, they will require detailed cultivation if they are to survive.”
Birds, Beasts and Bedlam by Derek Gow is available now in paperback
“Thirty years on, I am working with some of Durrell’s disciples in an effort to restore species such as red-backed shrikes, white storks, glow-worms, beavers and wildcats. Together with the fine folk who work with me, I have helped to advance a case for the restoration of others like the eelpout or brown marbled burbot – a torpedo of a fish with a single chin whisker – or the dapper dalmatian pelican with its bright yellow beak and bouffant head curls.
Other individuals of great worth have fought their own battles to ensure that coal-black choughs with curving red beaks birl in the skies over Jersey or to enable a growing flock of barrel-bodied bustards to strut in a military manner across the grasslands of Salisbury Plain.
The champions of curlews and cranes, of kites and godwits, or for the last of the sad pearl mussels confined as a population to a single Welsh fridge, are all truly remarkable people.
The champions of curlews and cranes, of kites and godwits, are all truly remarkable people
I have reformed my farm of 300 acres on the wet, windy Cornish border with west Devon into an independent wildlife centre where wild creatures of any sort required can be bred in captivity for further study and released back into areas of suitable habitat in time.
The land itself is being rewilded to enable any life that has survived to recover from farming, if it can. While many other individuals and organisations are attempting the same, it is nevertheless sobering that, in this time of near miracles, when reintroduced white-tailed eagles and ospreys soar with growing confidence above southern seas, every graph there otherwise is of natural life resembles the trajectory of a Thunderbirds’ rocket that has run out of fuel. Plummeting in an accelerating arc of downwards destruction.
It does not have to be this way. We know and can accomplish so much. In my book I tell the story, in large part, of my own life journey (which is, I earnestly hope, not quite over yet), from breeding endangered breeds of domestic farm livestock at its beginning to restoring a broad array of the most marvellous native creatures back into habitats they have lost at its end.”
Main image: Jonny Weeks
Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Arc for Lost Species, by Derek Gow, is out now in paperback, published by Chelsea Green