Revisiting Godney Marshes - Rewilding one year later

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this morning i'm here at godney which is a place where if you remember my documentary godney marshes back at the start of last year it was like january february sometime like that anyway we came down here on occasion me and colleagues and friends and we filmed uh some fields one of them is just down that track and the fields are a rewilding project set up by alistair cameron where he's just basically leaving the fields to grow in the way that nature wants to there's no very very little input whatsoever and it's more about letting nature take its course which i think is a very nice and natural model for rewilding there are some cool animals that come here it's noticeable even in in winter when we filmed it last year that um the animals were definitely more in this field than the neighboring fields there was way more vegetation in this field than the neighboring fields and it was just a really cool little project it's not going to be any kind of particular kind of vlog this is just revisiting this filming location which i think will be quite fun particularly as we filmed it in winter and trying to show rewilding and and a beautiful wildness in winter is quite difficult you get a different type of wildness a more stark bleak wildness and if you're really interested then you can go back and watch the documentary at the end or now and then observe because that was made over a year ago a year and a half ago now i'll stop wittering on and i will go down the track i'll finish my chocolate spread sandwiches uh have my coffee and then go down the track so see you all in a moment [Music] i'm just here and i've i've literally just walked down the path from the car and by the the hawthorne right at the entrance to the field and in winter we we sat in the hide and waited and there were a few stone chats that came a couple of wrens in the edge it's just gold gold finches all over the place it's amazing this this place really has come to life okay so so this is this is just bonkers uh this was the the way in before i mean the gate doesn't really open but the uh the amount that this has grown if you can see it's just thistles and and and tall grasses and it's just wildlife it's just it's just absolutely full birds flying over down the end there i think they're cows in the field behind you can hear you can hear the birds though sorry i failed with the camera a bit there but this was all flat you know we were able to easily walk across this and and access things and now we can't that's a good thing i'm gonna see if i can if i can squeeze through here but it's gonna be tricky um it's gonna be worth it [Music] so here i am just just kind of surrounded by a mixture of plants i can't name thistles uh various different types of thistles it looks like nettles i'm gonna have to get my seek on my phone my um like google lens kind of thing and start seeing what all of these plants are because there are so many there's so many insects seeing any larger animals in here is gonna be very difficult i don't think i will but i'm just gonna actually put this different lens on this one and use this camera to film some close-ups well i've got the uh the other one there and um i'll see you when i kind of get out of this thicket and maybe go to the pond but first i'm just going to take a few nice shots and show you this area [Music] [Applause] [Music] would you say [Music] too close [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] i'm just taking a moment to sit down in the grass because the insect diversity the invert diversity here is utterly phenomenal compared to anywhere around this is on another level everything in between the grass this is strung with spiders webs see spider web there spider web there there's tons of species i could see bumblebees loving loving all of these different plants thistles the word abundance has really come into my mind several times and there's these two birds flitting between this red stuff which i'll id later funny i did this in the winter and it made it much easier for filming in terms of access but now i can see how much life there is here it's it's it's one field it's one field and it just makes me think you know when i think about agriculture and i think about the farms i can see over there where it's just grass and it's just nothing that is a devoid ecosystem it's ecological devastation this field has taken a few years to get to the point it is now and with barely any leg up it's just been left and it is thriving and you know we do not need to eat the amount of meat that we do which uses so much land we do not need to have the amount of dairy that we do which uses so much land and is so bad for the environment yes urbanization is an issue but when you look at a map on google when you look top down there's so much that is just fields and fields and fields and agriculture and you come here and you just sit here and for five minutes and you can see what the world what the countryside could look like we just literally took a step back just a moment in ecological history of five years and it bounces to this and then i've been at nap the other month and and that's that's 20 years and and there's there's trees and there's bushes and there's all sorts all sorts and there's stalks there you know it's so clear when you come to a place like this i'm gonna do a little uh shot where i show you the field next to it and i show you this field and it is just stark the difference but actually there's like hundreds of species here they all do different things they all play different ecological roles and they're all entirely necessary in in the ecosystem so yeah i i digress again but i'll get back to pretty pictures god look at this [Music] so i've just come from just a hundred meters that way i've just been chatting to alistair on the phone and he told me that in 2022 um somerset wildlands bought another field to rewild and it's this one and it's it's just 100 meters away from that one it's like dock leaf ah that's what a dog leaf is okay six years half a year we've got this these docks in here and grasses a few different types but nothing like the biodiversity in that field which is six years on you start to build up these patches of very very wild area and now mammals can move quite freely in between these wild patches and as we saw when we were making the film last year there was a lot more uh activity in the fields and around the fields than there were in the sparse areas of countryside elsewhere hopefully they act as what they call stepping stones across the somerset levels to to bring back more corridors and passageways for wildlife to move across because at the moment all you've got are these um rivers in between the fields these little channels and that's all they have that has any kind of distinct level of biodiversity in it people go oh when i'm around farmland i see way more animals i see way more animals and like yes there's some element of truth to animals liking grassland and hedgerows and stuff but at the same time you're only seeing them because that habitat is open and that habitat is not like this and when i was in that field if there had been a deer sitting down in the grass i wouldn't have known if there had been hairs in the grass i wouldn't have known if there had been shrews and mice and things i wouldn't have been able to see them but you can see them in fields like this when they're going across the field so food for thought on that front i get a head to the other fields now because i'm interested to see how they're doing let's go and have a look this is a field that we shot a lot of the godly marshes film at and it's the last one i'm only going to look quickly because it's hot the horse flies are out i am tired but quite different a little bit more um uh less diverse in terms of uh plants initially from what i can see but more than obviously the new site um but there's a nice bit of woodland in the middle that's what i really want to look at is the woodland see whether some of those birches that were growing there have uh birches i think they might have been have come up maybe it's ash have grown up and started moving into the field and see what that rivery area in the middle looks like so uh without further ado let's venture into there and try not to get bitten [Music] hi [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] panasonic's auto focus uh face recognition is non-existent it's useless and as much as i love the gh5 set up here which is lightweight and i've got two of them and i can carry them around and whatever it just the autofocus is so bad besides the point here i am in the woodland um i took quite a bit of difficulty getting in um which is a good sign because it means all of this has grown and it's spread a little bit out i could see since uh since i made the documentary that these obviously they've all greened up because it's summer and another year has gone by and they're a lot bigger than they were before it's also very difficult getting in here you've got hogweed you've got nettles you've got ivs on the floor uh you've got these are all aspen's got a big oak here so it's really really really nice strip of woodland these are very valuable to have we've got a river here it is dry because it's been very hot but um in you know uh when it rains again that'll fill up and there'll be lots of animals using this space i mean there probably still are riparian corridors which is when you have trees down the edge of a river is so important they they provide animals with a corridor to move from place to place habitat to habitat they also give support to the stream or the river that they're running through so the bank is stronger and it stops erosion and sediment going into the river and when that sediment goes into the river it um covers the bottom it covers places where fish can spawn and breed damages the whole ecosystem basically so having these strips of woodland are really really important and it's nice that there's this one here and it's just being left to do what it wants when the dead wood and the trees die they fall down here and obviously in normal situations people would pull to carry them away potentially move them but they're like that's a carbon sink right there and it's decomposing and it's going to feed a load of in detritivores and saprobiotic organisms i believe they're called so very good healthy ecosystem right here the meadow out there is very different to the other one it's a little less biodiverse in terms of plant life but it's very very tall very nice um and completely different from the neighboring fields once again um all sorts of birds snipe and things and uh little meadow pipettes and whatnot i don't know what they're called but they'll be happy in there no problem i can't see them that's a good thing um they'll be nesting happily yeah i might sit down for a little bit see what wildlife wanders into the vicinity and then i'll head back cause i'm tired i've been out for five hours uh might be nice to have some food and maybe even a little nap so until then i will uh i'll see you next time in whatever i'm doing hopefully it doesn't have to be a a type of vlog i'm trying to just do more vlogs with anything and uh hopefully you enjoy it let me know you know if you've got any suggestions if you're like oh go here do that let me know whatever it is i just cut my hair anyway until next time [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Matt Jarvis

Views: 24,461

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Id: yFs1nyc19ho

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022