![]() ![]() We’re now a hotspot for nightingales and turtle doves. In just 17 years, we’ve seen populations of species rocketing, including some of the rarest in the UK. This is exactly what we’ve seen at Knepp. By allowing these animals - or proxies of them, like old breeds of cattle, horses and pigs - free rein in our landscape once again, we can recover some of those habitats and restore biodiversity. Bison, aurochs, tarpan, wild boar – along with millions of beavers - would have created a complex mosaic of habitats in the distant past, and this would have been hugely important for our ecology. Vera argues that we have forgotten about the huge herds that would once have roamed our landscape. Then we met the visionary Dutch ecologist, Frans Vera, and suddenly saw a way to turn our 3,500 acres over to nature. We could no longer compete with bigger farms on better soil. We knew for sure that intensive farming on our heavy Sussex clay was pulling us under in the late 1990s. ![]()
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