And so when was the collapse of these great populations of bison? Because we know that the last bison disappeared relatively recently, I mean, in living memory, in the wild at least.

So the collapse of the European bison in its different forms is something that has occurred over many thousands of years.

So the original world range takes them right over into the fertile crescent.

So you've got these lovely little bronze bison from Syria.

And I was saying to Charlie last night, there's this magnificent carving of a European bison head.

which again i'm pretty sure is syria it's in the met and you can see this wonderful top knot on it it's lost its horns it's got a lovely big like a hairy curve in its front face it's the only thing it could be but interestingly now modern studies of bison remains from that part of the world suggests that european bison went so far so it's into iran iraq and everything else And then there's a large area that was just really not traversable by them.

And they reckon that the last bison, Priscus, survived beyond that.

But the bison we have left in Europe went down to a relict number of individuals, a tiny number that were left in zoos, is that right?

Derek, any thoughts on that one?

Uh, yeah.

I mean, it's quite simply, of course, we need to manage deer.

We're not managing deer very well.

So I mean, if you look at, you know, the, the, the landscapes he, he portrays where deer are, red deer in particular, are commonly kept in, in very high numbers to ensure that stalking as a sport, um, is, is, is practiced because it's so economically valuable for the estates, then they've g- in their own right, commonly these environments retain very many more deer than the land can sustain.

And, and you can't get woodland re-regeneration because things like red deer are there in such high numbers that at the end of it all the trees can't grow.

So that's part of the story too.

Why, if at all, would rewilding be important to those people? Thanks very much.

... and trapping water, but in a way that surely at that scale, at the scale which would be most beneficial for nature and water systems, food production industry would be taking a notable hit.

Yeah, it depends where you're producing food.

At the end of it all, what you do is you look at, you know, the landscape as we're perfectly capable technically of doing and saying, "Right, the areas where we want to store water are here, here, and here.

These are the critical flow points above our towns and cities.

This is a more efficient way of using the land for the benefit of wider society.

This is what we should do." And it makes more sense to, to do that than to ensure Flossy the worthless sheep and its two pointless lambs have their feet dry.

And if you think this is absurd, again, just go to the Netherlands.

Now, what are some of the challenges, changes, tensions that you've had to deal with personally as you went along that journey?

Yeah.

He had an old yellow JCB that he went round with, and so anything that came up, he just sorted it.

So now if there's a wet patch in the fields, I just found another one yesterday, we're just digging down, smashing those drains and put ponds in.

Because at the end of the day, if you put ponds in, water is the genesis of life.

If you bring water to the surface, then the frogs, the, the dragonflies, the damselflies, the water beetle, all the things that feed everything else start to reform around water.

So, and of course, when you look at the landscapes where, that we live in, you know, we never th- if you go to Eastern Europe and you cross a, a ridge in the land and come down the other side, the first thing you will see are the wetlands and the valley bottoms.

And Britain has something in the region of about 1% of the, of, of, of its wetlands left and, and, and the water is still there, but the water's all running underground.

Derek G, what, what do you reckon? What, what's, what's the future?

What's going on and, and why are you doing it?

it?Okay.

Well, the project in the South Downs National Park is one of, of one or two we've been working on to, to basically see if we can restore populations of this species.

At one point in time, they were a very common animal in the countryside, and there were some lovely little poems, um, you know, about them twinkling in the dark.

They were commonly, you know, b- b- basically repeated by, by adults to children right the way through, you know, the southern range of, of the species.

But because of tidying the countryside, because of mowing hedges, pesticides, light pollution, trimming verges, this once common little creature which used to really delight people is fading from the, the, the landscape.

So what we're trying to do is look at whether we can capture breed these insects in some numbers and then restore them back into landscapes where they're either highly fragmented or no longer exist at all.

And why do we need them in biodiversity terms?

But the wolf seems to captivate the public just that little bit more.

I think wolves are something that have always fascinated us, because if you read...

There's an excellent book, um, um, you know, by Barry Lopez.

I'm trying to think what the name of the book is.

Um, about, uh, wolves and men.

And it basically looks at the psychology of why we feel the way we feel about them.

And we feel...

Yeah.

Are wild boar not, um, quite destructive for your nature plans?

No, they're not destructive from, from, from kind of point of view what I want to do.

Because what they've done is we had them for a number of years, now there's only two, and they are very tame ones that come, you know, when you rattle a bucket.

So they're, they're not the sort of things that are gonna be jumping fences.

But what they do is in pastures that are flat, that have been flattened by plows, flattened by people, de-rockedYou put the wild boar in, and the boar basically are plows.

They go back in.

They, they dig the land up.

Are they kind of not taking as much of a responsibility as maybe farming does for these issues that we've got?