Rewilding and habitat restoration

[Bird on a Fire]

I read about this Russian "rewilding" project a while ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park I wondered what you thought about it. Is it bonkers? If it's not bonkers, is it being unfortunately limited by being underfunded? Or what?

To me, 16 sq km seems like a very small area given the vast land areas up there, and the typical large range needs, and often migratory habits, of large animals in such habitats. I was entertained to learn that some of the released creatures escaped from the reserve pretty quickly and are presumably populating the wider area, if they were able to survive.

This is interesting, thanks.

It's a bit outside my area of (relative) expertise, but I think it's not totally bonkers. It's certainly plausible that large herbivores would have quite pronounced effects on habitat, and it's nice to see an experimental approach being taken in ecology. Trying to recreate ancient ecosystems is pretty tricky.

It is a small area. I'd expect there are issues with permissions to "release" herbivores, and adequate fencing is expensive. As you note, ungulates in North America, say, typically migrate over vast distances, so this early project won't be able to fully recreate that behaviour. But it'll certainly be interesting to see what happens

I think the idea of recreating mammoths is probably a bit bonkers, though. I'm no developmental biologist but mammoths don't have any particularly close living relatives, and I understand that things like in-utero environment are important for development (and learning in early life is very important for developing behaviours). Maybe it's a serious aspiration, maybe it was tacked on to get a bit more attention and/or funding.

For me, the idea of using domestic breeds (or breeds with specific conservation purposes) is pretty intriguing. Anthropogenic influence on the environment has been sufficiently huge that even areas that are largely depopulated now are not close to a "pristine wilderness" (i.e., what they'd look like under a counterfactual history where humans never existed). The herbivores and predators that create habitats are missing, the climate is changing rapidly, etc. So the choice is really between active management versus accepting the consequences of ancestral actions.

If we decide we'd like the tundra to look more like it did in the Pleistocene, using a mix of ancient and modern species with roughly the right phenotypes seems sensible enough. Given that the Arctic is experiencing the fastest rates of climate change, and will continue to do so, if there's something about these Pleistocene-style ecosystems that helps with ecological adaptation to change - for instance, by promoting nutrient cycling or habitat diversity - than crack on, I say.

[Bird on a Fire]

A less bonkers, but still quite exciting, rewilding (for real this time) project coming to Norfolk, on the Somerleyton Estate. https://www.inkcapjournal.co.uk/the-gra ... -the-lynx/

Note how unhelpful Natural England have been, preventing a landowner from making his own bit of England more natural. Bonkers. Luckily they seem to be catching up with evidence these days, even if they don't have a budget any more.

[IvanV]

Maybe I'm bonkers, but I sometimes wonder if we ought to "help Iberian lynx to spread" to Britain. Iberian lynx are rabbit specialists. And half the size of European lynx. The very name "Hispa" that the Phoenicians gave to Spain, means "Land of rabbits", as they were very common back then, but I don't recall ever seeing a rabbit in Spain these days. Though not having a word for a rabbit, the Phoenicians used their word for rock hyrax instead.

But today myxamatosis and rabbit haemorrhagic disease have greatly reduced the rabbit population of Spain. So one of the main reasons, I understand, for the shortage of Iberian lynx is the shortage of rabbits. We have the same rabbit diseases here, but we still have lots of rabbits, as for some reason they aren't as devastating here. And they are relatively recently introduced. So why not help the Iberian lynxes by "letting them spread" to places where the rabbits are?

Of course, cane toads were introduced to eat some cane pest that they eat in their natural habitat, and got to Australia and went "there's so much else we like to eat here". So one has to be careful to ensure that they would remain a specific predator of rabbits, and not of Dartford warblers, watervoles and corncrakes. Our cat eats lots of rabbits in the spring, but not at other times of year, so seasonality might be an issue.

European lynx are deer specialists, but not beyond taking a few sheep when they can't get deer. That mainly seems to apply to younger lynx before they perfect their deer hunting.

[Bird on a Fire]

Reducing deer numbers, and altering their behaviour, is a pretty big priority in UK conservation. There are loads of woodlands with basically no understory because it all gets eaten by deer, and I'd expect the introduced Muntjac would be particularly popular with lynx.

Rabbits do at least have some natural predators in the UK, like Buzzards and Foxes, whereas deer are limited only by people (and not everywhere is conducive to hunting). So I can understand the focus on reintroducing the native species first.

There's some work being done to reintroduce lynx here in Portugal, focused on restoring and connecting vast areas of habitat. As with wolves, I think lynx have to be the "cherry on the cake" once you have large areas of interconnected, high-quality habitat. The UK is a very long way off that at the moment, but maybe having a coal of introducing some cool cats will help to focus minds.

[IvanV]

... I'd expect the introduced Muntjac would be particularly popular with lynx.
... whereas deer are limited only by people (and not everywhere is conducive to hunting)...

The frequency we see them these days, they are certainly common, both roe and muntjac. Unfortunately you aren't allowed to shoot them in our back garden, as you can't get sufficiently far from neigbouring properties to shoot guns in a 25m by 10m area. A friend of ours (Czech odd-job man) likes to shoot deer. He achieves it under the guise of a free pest control service for large estates, where he provides maintenance and tree cutting services during the day. When he has a surplus we often get given some. So I can say both muntjac and roe deer are popular with us too. He typically shoots about 5 per winter, but was unable to get any last winter. Perhaps they have learned where not to lurk.

Our friend is dismissive of British gun licensing laws. In Czech, he had to pass exams demonstrating skill in use of the weapon, safety knowledge, and also in butchering carcases, to get a licence. In Czech they hunt wild boar as well as deer.

[bmforre]

New publication documenting huge ranges of lynx in far-north environment:
Extreme ranges among Eurasian lynx

Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) have a wide distribution across Eurasia. The northern edge of this distribution is in Norway, where they reach up to 72 degrees north. We conducted a study of lynx space use in this region from 2007 to 2013 using GPS telemetry. The home range sizes averaged 2,606 (± 438 SE) km2 for males (n = 9 ranges) and 1,456 (± 179 SE) km2 for females (n = 24 ranges). These are the largest home ranges reported for any large felid, and indeed are only matched by polar bears, arctic living wolves, and grizzly bears among all the Carnivora.

Consequences for rewilding:

These data have clear implications for the spatial planning of lynx management in the far north as the current management zones are located in unsuitable habitats and are not large enough to encompass individual lynx movements.

[Martin_B]

... I'd expect the introduced Muntjac would be particularly popular with lynx.
... whereas deer are limited only by people (and not everywhere is conducive to hunting)...

The frequency we see them these days, they are certainly common, both roe and muntjac. Unfortunately you aren't allowed to shoot them in our back garden, as you can't get sufficiently far from neigbouring properties to shoot guns in a 25m by 10m area. A friend of ours (Czech odd-job man) likes to shoot deer. He achieves it under the guise of a free pest control service for large estates, where he provides maintenance and tree cutting services during the day. When he has a surplus we often get given some. So I can say both muntjac and roe deer are popular with us too. He typically shoots about 5 per winter, but was unable to get any last winter. Perhaps they have learned where not to lurk.

Our friend is dismissive of British gun licensing laws. In Czech, he had to pass exams demonstrating skill in use of the weapon, safety knowledge, and also in butchering carcases, to get a licence. In Czech they hunt wild boar as well as deer.

My parents lived in a semi-rural area and had deer occasionally in the back-garden. Our cat used to stalk them. I'm not sure what the cat would have done if she ever caught one, or what we could have done if the deer died either though the attack (unlikely) or getting caught in a fence (much more likely).

[Bird on a Fire]

Worst misuse of the word "rewilding" I've seen so far: releasing some UK captive-bred elephants into the wild in Kenya is not "rewilding elephants" ffs. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... ding-plan/

It's also f.cking stupid. And what kind of conservation organisation (I've never heard of them) plans to release elephants abroad without checking with the country in question? Paternalistic b.llsh.t.

[Grumble]

Worst misuse of the word "rewilding" I've seen so far: releasing some UK captive-bred elephants into the wild in Kenya is not "rewilding elephants" ffs. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... ding-plan/

It's also f.cking stupid. And what kind of conservation organisation (I've never heard of them) plans to release elephants abroad without checking with the country in question? Paternalistic b.llsh.t.

Carrie Johnson as an undiplomatic entitled Englishwoman? Surely not!

[Woodchopper]

Here’s something on the opposite. Global warming will mean that food production shifts north into Siberia, Northern Canada and the Nordic region.

However this will mean massive dewilding as what are currently wilderness areas are converted to agriculture, and carbon currently stored in soil, peat and forests is released.

https://www.ft.com/content/977fac14-49e ... 81e5792201

Draws from these 2020 articles: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0228305

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-00148-x

[bagpuss]

Worst misuse of the word "rewilding" I've seen so far: releasing some UK captive-bred elephants into the wild in Kenya is not "rewilding elephants" ffs. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... ding-plan/

It's also f.cking stupid. And what kind of conservation organisation (I've never heard of them) plans to release elephants abroad without checking with the country in question? Paternalistic b.llsh.t.

I've heard of them - set up by the late John Aspinall, who set up Port Lympne and Howlett's zoos as well. I seem to recall various controversial events over the years - among other things he encouraged rather closer encounters between keepers and animals than anyone with any common sense would have done and several* were killed as a result.

It seems the foundation is keeping the tradition of controversy alive, then.


*Keepers that is, although I assume the animals were also killed thereafter.

[Fishnut]

This thread covers various areas of conservation and is well worth reading, but it discusses a couple of things that make it pertinent to this thread. The first is habitat restoration which it notes will require significant human intervention to create and maintain in places like the UK where the ecosystems are so degraded. The second is about the "rewilding elephants" story, which it says is an abuse of the term conservation and a misunderstanding of what conservation is and does. It's backed up with reference to the literature and there's some interesting further reading there for anyone interested in the subject.

[Woodchopper]

This thread covers various areas of conservation and is well worth reading, but it discusses a couple of things that make it pertinent to this thread. The first is habitat restoration which it notes will require significant human intervention to create and maintain in places like the UK where the ecosystems are so degraded. The second is about the "rewilding elephants" story, which it says is an abuse of the term conservation and a misunderstanding of what conservation is and does. It's backed up with reference to the literature and there's some interesting further reading there for anyone interested in the subject.

Thanks for that, a good thread.

[Fishnut]

Welsh farms are being bought up by investment firms and turned into tree plantations. Locals aren't very happy, and I don't blame them.

Susan Price, who lives on a farm near Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys, said there were three farms in the area which had been recently sold to companies from outside Wales to plant trees.

She said taking fertile land out of food production into forestry was harmful for the local agricultural industry and damaged the local culture and language.

"I feel quite bitter because it's part of our heritage," added Ms Price.

"When our livelihoods are taken away from us, then our heritage and our communities and our language disappear and I think it's very sad.

She said large companies bought land as investment, "outpricing local families", and the Welsh government was "making it so easy for them" through its grant system.

[Bird on a Fire]

Another rewilding case study, from an estate in Ireland.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... his-estate

Note that native trees are growing without having been planted, in contrast with the non-native Sitka spruce plantations being planted and greenwashed.

[Bird on a Fire]

Meanwhile:

National parks supposedly at the heart of efforts to tackle the climate crisis and boost nature are dominated by intensively managed grouse moors, according to new research.

Driven grouse moors, which are associated with the controversial burning of vegetation and the illegal persecution of birds of prey, make up 44% of the Cairngorms national park, 28% of the North York Moors and a fifth of the Peak District, a study by the charity Rewilding Britain has found.

A total of 852,000 acres – an area more than twice the size of Greater London – inside Britain’s national parks is devoted to driven grouse shooting, with grouse moors covering a quarter of the Yorkshire Dales, 15% of Northumberland national park and 2% of the Lake District.

“With over three-quarters of a million acres of our national parks devoted to driven grouse moors, the parks are being held back from tackling Britain’s collapsing biodiversity and the climate emergency,” said Guy Shrubsole, policy and campaigns coordinator for Rewilding Britain.

“The prime minister’s pledge to protect 30% of Britain’s land for nature – and count national parks towards this total – rings hollow when you realise that vast areas of our national parks are dominated by these nature-impoverished and heavily managed areas.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... says-study

[Fishnut]

I never really gave much thought to gamebird shooting. We've got a few pheasant shoots around here but none are particularly big and the ones I knew of seemed to be fairly egalitarian in the way they were run, but it seems they were very much the exception rather than the rule. The more I learn about them the more ecologically disastrous they seem and the more I think the RSPB's calls for regulation don't go far enough. Though it's pretty obvious that even their very reasonable calls won't be heeded.

[discovolante]

Yeah it's a bit of a mixed bag of emotions looking at Scotland's landscape sometimes. I'm off to the Cairngorms next week all being well so I will be able to take that in in all its glory. There is also an issue with birds of prey being killed in those areas (as mentioned in the RSPB report you link to Fishnut). They just, you know, 'disappear'. Of course they get away with it...

[Fishnut]

I really wish we'd get out of this mindset of rewilding being transplanting charismatic fauna into heavily modified environments and job done. I can't see any reasonable argument for reintroducing lynx to the UK in the short-term or even medium-term. The article points out they have a range of 100 sq km so you'd need a vast area for them to be able to have a self-sustaining population. It says that Kielder forest could support about 50 lynxes which is a very small population and one I'm dubious about being self-sustaining. Apparently the Highlands could support 400 which sounds more feasible but I'm still at a loss as to why we'd want to reintroduce a species that's been extinct since before the Norman Conquest.

I am not against habitat restoration or reintroductions where appropriate but this just feels like a vanity project that, if it came to fruition, would just divert limited funds away from more useful projects.

[IvanV]

I really wish we'd get out of this mindset of rewilding being transplanting charismatic fauna into heavily modified environments and job done. I can't see any reasonable argument for reintroducing lynx to the UK in the short-term or even medium-term. The article points out they have a range of 100 sq km so you'd need a vast area for them to be able to have a self-sustaining population. It says that Kielder forest could support about 50 lynxes which is a very small population and one I'm dubious about being self-sustaining. Apparently the Highlands could support 400 which sounds more feasible but I'm still at a loss as to why we'd want to reintroduce a species that's been extinct since before the Norman Conquest.

I feel somewhat worried about responding, because I suspect your complaint might be at a higher level of sophistication than my response.

Reintroducing charismatic fauna into heavily modified environments is often one of the best ways to help heal the modification of those environments. I don't think it is putting the cart before the horse at all. Clearly where land is now actively and intensively cultivated or grazed for economic purpose, that isn't relevant. Such land it isn't going to be restored unless we first retreat from such intensive exploitation of that land. But there are very extensive parts of Scotland that are not intensively exploited in that way. The sadness of Scotland is that only about 3% of it remains as the ancient Caledonian Forest, and it has all this extensive wilderness of minimal exploitation that could be restored to Caledonian Forest, with very little intervention.

And what is preventing the forest from growing back, and in some cases threatening the bits that survive, is deer and sheep, which eat all the saplings and shoots. That's where the lynx come in. The lynx aren't very interested in sheep unless they are very hungry, but there are plenty of remoter areas where the main issue is deer rather than sheep. (And the sheep are very marginal economically these days anyway.) We don't even need the lynx to eat all the deer. We just need to make the deer wary of what they do to save themselves from being eaten. That will protect certain areas of land from being grazed and trodden by the deer. That is where the flora can, often of its own accord, come back.

That was what happened in Yellowstone when wolves were reintroduced. It had a major impact on restoration of flora, by making deer wary, and thus not extensively trashing certain places where the flora was thus trashed.

That's why predators indirectly protect trees, flowers, and so through to a whole ecosystem that depends on those. Lynx, as you correctly identify, have large territories, so aren't going to have as strong an impact on deer behaviour as wolves. But in principle it seems possible that it can help. If there are lynx today even in places like Czech Rep - which is even more "modified" than Scotland (I once went to one of the very few tiny little bits of remaining ancient woodland remaining there - by comparison Scotland has lots), why not Scotland?

[Bird on a Fire]

I also reckon it's a lot easier to get funding for a "Lynx Reintroduction Project" than a "Connect up lots of bits of woodland" project. Lynx are cool and exciting, whereas talking about habitat connectivity generally sends people to sleep. Rather than taking money from an existing conservation pot, it's the kind of interesting, aspirational idea that attracts public attention and could pull in extra funding.

Of course, Lynx (and other) reintroduction projects would in fact spend a large amount of their budget on ensuring habitat connectivity (as the current one in Portugal does, for example), so it's partly a marketing exercise / "umbrella species" concept (delete according to levels of cynicism), but one that usefully secures extra money for habitat restoration. I don't think anybody expects to just "transplant [Lynx] into heavily modified environments and job done" - Derek Gow's been working on Beaver reintroductions for ages, and that's certainly not how they've proceeded.

The UK's deer-shooting estates alone amount to a larger area than Yellowstone National Park. While not all that area is contiguous, there is definitely space for free-ranging wolves and lynx in the UK, just within areas that currently do nothing at all for 99.9% of the population.

Lynx tourism would also bring in a lot of rural jobs, which is what the people currently using the countryside for sheep and shooting always bring up as an objection to block progress (though their numbers don't really stack up - shooting barely employs anyone, and sheep farming is just a benefits scheme with extra steps).

The other cool thing with reintroductions is that they force people to think at much larger scales than managers in the UK are used to, which is very important. Often British conservation can't see the landscape for the SSSIs. If they suddenly had to manage landscape at 100 km scales it'd be a powerful incentive to reverse a lot of damaging fragmentation, which would benefit all sorts of wildlife.

So I'd probably say that while lack of Lynx isn't the most pressing issue in UK conservation, it would deal directly with one of them (deer overpopulation, especially introduced species), and force the sector into thinking forwards, ambitiously and at large-scale, rather than the current depressing spectacle of the UK's conservation sector - probably the country with the highest public interest in "nature" if NGO membership is anything to go by - merely trying (and failing) to defend a bunch of tiny nature reserves which would be inadequate even if they could all be maintained in perfect condition, rather than the generally poor condition many of them are actually in.

[Fishnut]

I also reckon it's a lot easier to get funding for a "Lynx Reintroduction Project" than a "Connect up lots of bits of woodland" project.

That's a very fair point and if that's what's happening I'll happily retract my criticisms.

The other cool thing with reintroductions is that they force people to think at much larger scales than managers in the UK are used to, which is very important. Often British conservation can't see the landscape for the SSSIs.

Another fair point and one I know I slip into myself. We are so used to seeing the UK as a patchwork of privately owned land rather than a mosaic of habitats it's hard to change that mindset.

[Bird on a Fire]

I think you'll enjoy this piece, Fishnut - it touches on a lot of socio-economic concerns around UK conservation in general and rewilding specifically (with scathing criticism of the plastic straws debacle as a bonus). The need to "think big and upend the system" rather than focusing on micro-consumerist b.llsh.t:

The need for rewilding is no longer a matter of debate. The UN’s leading scientists have done the maths and the task is vast and urgent.

An area the size of China needs to be returned to nature by 2030 to avoid the collapse of our life support systems. If we want to live, we need to rewild.

The UK is one of the ‘most nature depleted’ nations on the planet and we the public have shown overwhelming support for the restoration of this missing nature. So surely a rewilding revolution is all but inevitable?

Super rich

If only. For as much as we, the general public, may long to step up to the challenge and get on with the job of restoring our lost wildlife, there is a brutal reality we must face up to first: the astonishing inequality of our nation’s land ownership.

The ownership of land in the UK is stunningly unbalanced. A total of 50 percent of England is owned by less than one percent of its population.

In Scotland, just 450 individuals own half the land. The billionaire James Dyson alone owns 33,000 acres - that’s more land than the entire metropolitan area of Manchester, home to half a million people.

Because even if you did devote your life to persuading the UK’s population to rip up their patios and go wild, you’d have restored just 1.85 percent of the UK - the best estimate we have for urban green space in the UK, a figure that also includes urban parks.

Meanwhile, what about the 2,000 aristocrats who own a mindblowing 30 percent of England? They’d have been let totally off the hook. Talk about missing the point.

But this absurd foregrounding of people’s gardens as the UK’s primary arena for ecological salvation reveals a deeper dimension of land injustice.

One in eight households don’t have access to a garden at all, with ethnic minorities the worst affected. In England, Black people are four times less likely to have a garden than White people - a shocking 37 percent don’t have one compared with 10 percent.

The author is a founder of Wild Card https://www.wildcard.land/ who kicked off the "Rewild the Royals" campaign amongst other initiatives.

[Bird on a Fire]

I also reckon it's a lot easier to get funding for a "Lynx Reintroduction Project" than a "Connect up lots of bits of woodland" project.

That's a very fair point and if that's what's happening I'll happily retract my criticisms.

To be fair, I don't know much about the Lynx UK Trust specifically or how they operate. It's not encouraging that they "declined to comment" for the article.

But even if they're a massive grift I think I'd stand by the idea in principle.

The other cool thing with reintroductions is that they force people to think at much larger scales than managers in the UK are used to, which is very important. Often British conservation can't see the landscape for the SSSIs.

Another fair point and one I know I slip into myself. We are so used to seeing the UK as a patchwork of privately owned land rather than a mosaic of habitats it's hard to change that mindset.
[/quote]

Heh, we cross-posted but the article I just linked addresses this a bit

[Fishnut]

The UK is one of the ‘most nature depleted’ nations on the planet

While I'd like to see a source for this statistic I have no trouble believing it, and it makes me marvel that the country that in many ways pioneered modern ecology and species recording has allowed its flora and fauna to be sacrificed on such a large scale.

Wild Card sound like a very interesting organisation. I've signed up for their newsletter. I definitely did enjoy the article and really like that it calls out the unending focus on individuals whose impact will be, at best, marginal, while letting those with power continually off the hook.