REWILDING THE WEST COUNTRY

[Music] welcome to cornwall a county with no shortage of native species all manner of creatures jostle for space on miles of sunken's coastline and in the higher moorland areas kestrels pippits and starlings rule the skies but many years ago numerous more creatures called cornwall home and with biodiversity an all-time low now may be the perfect time to reintroduce cornwall's lost species now reintroduction of lost or threatened animals is nothing new in fact it's happening across the country in growing numbers but what creatures may we start to see on our doorstep and what effect will this have on the already native species i set out to investigate [Music] to find out i first headed to derek gao's farm in rural devon a haven for rare species the staff at coombs head are raising and caring for many of britain's lost creatures and distributing them through wilding projects across the county as project manager tay explains he brought in um various species as proxies for the sort of things that would have been here after the ice age so they're all bred here in the hopes that they will be released in the not too distant future we have the beavers which um we've got some in enclosures some which are a bit more wild and they've done a fantastic job in the woodlands up at coombs head we have the wild boar which turf things up they expose bare ground for seeds to germinate at the moment there's a big project looking into where to release wildcats in england and wales and once that's going then we've got the the stock in so we can start to release them hopefully not to it not too far in the future and then the water voles that's been the longest running of the the reintroduction part of the job so the waterfalls are trapped in areas that are going to be developed and they come here just to sort of stay and sometimes we breed them here and then we release them in areas where they maybe have gone missing or they need bolstering in their population numbers with this in mind i dive deeper into the heart of cornwall's moorland to catch up with conservationist merlin and discover what species he believes should be sharing our beautiful county of all the many species that we've lost in the uk and there's a long list of things that usually humans have killed the beaver is it's the keystone it's one of the most important creatures that we can have in these islands there is no such thing as a healthy river anywhere in europe if it doesn't have beavers on it down here in cornwall we have beavers wild on the tamar the seton the fowl the camel so um it won't be long before there are beavers wild on every river in cornwall i would love to release our beavers and have them outside of an enclosure and hopefully this year natural england will grow the courage to allow landowners and farmers to do that riverine valleys like this all the water tends to flow quite quickly so you get very few areas of still water when beavers are introduced they've built numerous dams up and down this river and when they do that you get areas of still water in still water you get algal growth and when you get algal growth you get insect life feeding off that algae and that insect life creates the bedrock for every other species to have a food type so fish reptiles amphibians bird life and small mammals all of them can feed off all the animals that come to uh to feed on those insects so you get this huge explosion of biodiversity you not only get animals returning that we haven't seen before things like species of newt species of frog but you also get more of the species that are already there and they become healthier the reintroduction of beavers has really improved things for amphibians and for wetland bird species aquatic invertebrates everything really it's unprecedented the the benefits that they bring to wetland areas without too many conflicts and easily remedied conflicts i think the beavers have definitely paved the way for further reintroduction projects i absolutely believe that anything that was here 5000 years ago that isn't here now because of human interaction should be here and it has a place within the ecosystem any reintroduction of a currently absent native species to the united kingdom needs to be done very carefully because within any ecosystem every species will have predators that apply uh pressure to those species numbers um a prey or a food species that will also create pressures when there's absence of that food and competitors that sit either side of that species so when anything's being reintroduced you always have to think have we got the predators the competitors and the prey in place and if we haven't we have to have a management plan it's hoped that the reintroduction of things like the wildcat will provide some top-down sort of predator interactions so uh we'll start to see things improving in areas where we reintroduce things like that and with the main the sort of end goal would be to bring back the links these sites are suitable for links and they could do a really good job and keep the sort of deer moving around the landscape and allow the trees to sort of start to recover so hopefully in the next 20 years we'll see links back somewhere in the uk of course large predators know our towns and cities may not be to everyone's liking but in the short term there's hope for many other reintroduction projects as of the spring of 2022 combo council is considering propositions to legally reintroduce the beaver the pine martin the waterfall the wild boar and the wild cat are woods and waterways these animals were driven out by human greed and interference and although care will be needed to balance the reintroduction they all belong here in the west country [Music] you

Channel: Ben Garrick Media

Views: 5,016

Keywords: rewilding, reintroduction, cornwall, West Country, beavers, watervole, lynx

Id: DL9aiTGZXZc

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022